G-CLOUD - DEVOPS SUPPORT SERVICES

Background

The modern DevOps movement focuses on processes, techniques and tools that help bridge the gap between development and operations teams in ways that can be applied to any set of teams whether working on legacy applications or greenfield development.

Services

All IB Boost projects feature DevOps practices at their core and we pride ourselves in keeping pace with the latest developments and utilising best-of-breed tools. We can support organisations adopting DevOps practices and transform development lifecycles by moving them towards Continuous Integration (CI). The objective is reduced delivery times and cost, coupled with increased availability of the delivered services and applications.

IB Boost can advise on best industry practices and appropriate toolchains for your particular circumstances, whether it's part of a new cloud application development or deployment, cloud transition readiness or simply to optimise on-premise or private cloud applications.

Build and Release Management

Jenkins, Hudson, TeamCity, Bamboo and other CI servers help automate software build and testing phases, ensuring a continuous build of the latest code and that appropriate tests and analysis are conducted on it.

Orchestration and Configuration Management

Tools such as Ansible, Chef, Puppet, Consul, Vagrant, and Packer are used to help ensure that distributed services and hosts are correctly configured and provisioned, allowing architectures to scale dynamically at vast sizes. Updates and patching, particularly for security-sensitive systems and flaws in open source libraries and standards, mean there is a need for organisations to be able to push out changes rapidly, which is what these tools permit, and IB Boost can advise on how they can be integrated into your development practices.

Monitoring

Monitoring of applications and services, both in test environments and in production, is a crucial part of closing the loop between development and operations and IB Boost can advise on appropriate tools.

Both open source and commercial tools can be used for these purposes such as Splunk or Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana to give visibility into distributed application logs, AppDynamics or New Relic for Application Performance Management (APM) and external monitoring systems like SolarWinds, Nagios, Hyperic and many more.

Our Lucidity tool can help aggregate this information and display it on customisable dashboards, whatever your monitoring stack, to provide one operational command centre for all your environments.

Test Automation

Test automation is key in moving towards the continuous delivery ideal and IB Boost are experts in this realm, with our test automation platform ORQA offering unrivalled capabilities in automating testing tasks of all natures, from application UI and web recording and playback, to data reconciliation, test data management and reporting. We can advise on use of and implement tools such as ORQA, JMeter, Selenium, Cucumber, Watir, Jasmine, Protractor, LoadRunner and various others as may be appropriate to the project at hand.

The advent of the Behavioural Driven Development (BDD) and Test Driven Development (TDD) styles have had a strong emphasis on defining scenarios and tests upfront as a first-class part of the development cycle and not as an afterthought.

Virtualisation / Containerisation

VMWare, Hyper-V, VirtualBox and Xen are used for virtualisation both on-premise and in the cloud with IaaS providers. Containerisation, through the likes of Docker, LXC, and Solaris Zones, can be used to effectively manage service-oriented architectures, particularly those adhering to micro-services principles and provide another level of abstraction to maximise portability and reusability of components and software.