By: James Hunter
Introduction
The use of IBM DevOps Loop and IBM HashiCorp combines the best of DevOps and infrastructure automation, enabling teams to deliver high-quality software faster and more reliably. This blog explores the business and technical value of using these technologies together, the challenges they address, and provides practical examples and best practices for implementation.
Business Value
Problems Solved:
Delivery teams often face a myriad of challenges that hinder their efficiency and productivity. Toolchain sprawl and complexity can make it difficult to manage disparate tools and data, leading to inefficiencies and longer release cycles. Security breaches, compliance risks, and downtime are constant threats that can have significant business impacts. Manual steps and disjointed data tools can cause miscommunication, longer release cycles, and quality issues.
Business Benefits:
IBM DevOps Loop addresses day 1 software delivery challenges by providing a single, open platform that allows teams to get control of disparate tools and data from across multiple projects. It automates and governs the delivery of code, aligning business goals to delivery activities. By maximizing automation of testing and deployment and using intelligent decision gates to prevent bad code from going live, DevOps Loop accelerates time-to-market and reduces human error.
IBM HashiCorp complements DevOps Loop and addresses day 2 operational challenges by providing infrastructure automation and security products like Terraform and Vault. Terraform enables you to automate infrastructure provisioning and management through a systematic platform approach. Infrastructure and policies are codified, shared, versioned, and executed within a standardized, consistent workflow across all infrastructures, from cloud services to on-premises data centers. Vault provides machine identity management by encrypting sensitive data and gating access based on identity. With Vault, you can centrally define trusted identities, enforce policy, and secure secrets, certificates, keys, and data.
Together, these technologies improve productivity, enhance collaboration, and provide better decision-making capabilities. Project and program managers can manage their teams more efficiently, reducing rework and increasing delivery speed. Program leaders can get up-to-date information about the state of delivery, making it easier to make decisions that reduce risk and help teams deliver high-quality solutions. Test leaders can ensure everyone understands the state of quality of a project at any time, increasing test coverage and ensuring any issues are put into their delivery lifecycle with the information needed for them to be fixed as fast as possible. CI/CD leaders can minimize risk by ensuring all necessary software components at the correct versions are all in the right place at the right time.
Technical Value
Complementary Features:
IBM DevOps Loop and IBM HashiCorp offer a range of complementary features that work together to enhance the software delivery process. DevOps Loop provides a comprehensive suite of tools for planning and work item management, design, development, build automation, test automation, deployment automation, release orchestration, and value stream analysis and reporting. It integrates out of the box with IBM and RedHat tools and technologies, making it easy to get started.
HashiCorp Terraform is a powerful provisioning tool around the core idea of infrastructure as code. This enables version control, automation, and reusability of code. The nature of being a provisioning tool means Terraform is very good at laying down the foundations of infrastructure, tracking the current state, and determining what changes need to be made — making it an ideal control point for infrastructure management.
HashiCorp Vault provides machine identity management by encrypting sensitive data and gating access based on identity. With Vault, you can centrally define trusted identities, enforce policy, and secure secrets, certificates, keys, and data.
Technical Advantages:
The use of DevOps Loop and HashiCorp provides several advantages.
Day 1 and Day 2 Operations
Day 1 Activities with IBM DevOps Loop:
IBM DevOps Loop excels in handling Day 1 activities, which include the initial development and delivery of software. It provides a comprehensive suite of tools for planning, work item management, design, development, build automation, test automation, deployment automation, and release orchestration. By automating these processes, DevOps Loop ensures that software is delivered quickly and reliably, with minimal manual intervention.
Day 2 Operations with IBM HashiCorp:
Beyond the initial delivery, IBM HashiCorp focuses on Day 2 operations, which include ongoing management and maintenance of the infrastructure. HashiCorp Terraform offers features like drift detection, image management and patching, rightsizing, and configuration management. These capabilities ensure that the infrastructure remains secure, efficient, and up-to-date throughout its lifecycle.
- Drift Detection: Terraform can detect and alert teams to any unauthorized changes or "drift" in the infrastructure, ensuring that the environment remains consistent with the desired state.
- Image Management and Patching: Terraform helps manage and update container images, ensuring that the latest security patches and updates are applied.
- Rightsizing: By monitoring resource usage, Terraform can help optimize costs by rightsizing infrastructure components to match actual needs.
- Configuration Management: Terraform ensures that infrastructure configurations are consistent and compliant with defined policies, reducing the risk of misconfigurations and security vulnerabilities.
HashiCorp's infrastructure automation capabilities, combined with DevOps Loop's comprehensive insights and DoRA metrics, provide a holistic view of the application environment. This end-to-end visibility enables teams to identify and address issues more effectively, improving application performance and availability.
HashiCorp's AI-powered intelligent alerting notifies teams of potential problems before they impact end-users, complementing DevOps Loop's intelligent decision gates. This proactive approach to incident management helps teams resolve issues faster and reduce downtime.
HashiCorp also helps automate incident remediation, enabling teams to resolve issues faster and reduce downtime. This is particularly useful in complex environments where manual incident resolution can be time-consuming and inefficient.
Challenges Addressed
Pain Points:
Before using these technologies, teams often struggle with manual processes and disjointed tools, leading to miscommunication and longer release cycles. Without real-time performance monitoring, teams may miss critical issues that impact application availability and user experience. Traditional methods of incident resolution can be time-consuming and inefficient, leading to prolonged downtime.
Solutions:
IBM DevOps Loop addresses day 1 delivery challenges by automating and integrating various stages of the delivery lifecycle, reducing manual steps and improving efficiency. It provides a single, open platform that allows teams to get control of disparate tools and data from across multiple projects, automate and govern the delivery of code, and align business goals to delivery activities.
HashiCorp complements DevOps Loop by providing real-time insights into the health and performance of applications and infrastructure. This enables teams to quickly identify and resolve issues, improving application performance and availability. HashiCorp's AI-powered incident remediation helps teams resolve issues faster, reducing downtime and improving user experience.
Real-world Example
Scenario:
Imagine a scenario where a financial institution deploys an update to its online banking platform. Without solid DevOps practices and an observability solution, a two-week search for the root cause of a system outage ensues, leading to significant business impact. Customers expect the services they depend on to be available 100% of the time, and when a service is not available, customers have options and may explore alternative solutions. The result could be a reduction in revenue for the business and negative impact to brand loyalty.
Solution:
By using IBM DevOps Loop and IBM HashiCorp, the institution can create repeatable and reliable deployment processes from development to production. DevOps Loop ensures consistent deployments, while HashiCorp provides real-time insights into infrastructure performance, enabling teams to detect and resolve issues quickly.
Outcome:
The use of DevOps Loop and HashiCorp enhances collaboration between development and operations teams, accelerates insight on release impact, and decreases mean time to recovery. This helps the institution deliver high-quality software faster and more reliably, ultimately driving business success.
Best Practices
Define Clear Governance Rules:
Customize your workflow in DevOps Loop to meet your governance rules, ensuring compliance and security. This includes using AI to turn ideas into actions, generating reports on status and tasks, and automating repeatable delivery processes.
Leverage AI for Decision Making:
Use AI-powered insights from both DevOps Loop and HashiCorp to make informed decisions about deployment risks and issues. This includes AI guidance on deployment risks and issues, intelligent gates to stop bad code from going live, and predicting delivery risk with AI analytics.
Implement Quality Gates:
Develop quality gates in your pipelines to detect issues earlier in the software development lifecycle (shift-left). This includes automated API, UI, and performance testing, service virtualization of missing components and integration endpoints, and generating tests and test data.
Automate Infrastructure Provisioning:
Use HashiCorp Terraform to automate infrastructure provisioning and management. This includes codifying infrastructure and policies, sharing and versioning them, and executing them within a standardized, consistent workflow across all infrastructures.
Secure Sensitive Data:
Use HashiCorp Vault to provide machine identity management by encrypting sensitive data and gating access based on identity. This includes centrally defining trusted identities, enforcing policies, and securing secrets, certificates, keys, and data. By using Vault with DevOps Loop, you can ensure that sensitive information is protected throughout the entire software delivery lifecycle.
Monitor and Manage Infrastructure Lifecycle:
Leverage the Infrastructure Cloud, powered by the HashiCorp Cloud Platform (HCP), to manage the lifecycle of your hybrid cloud estate. This includes infrastructure lifecycle management (ILM) and security lifecycle management (SLM), helping teams accelerate delivery, strengthen security, and optimize cloud investments.
Optimize Costs:
According to a HashiCorp State of Cloud Strategy Survey, 94% of companies overspend on cloud. By using HashiCorp to enforce policies, boost productivity, sharpen visibility, and remove unneeded resources, combined with value stream management and deployment automation in IBM DevOps Loop, projects can optimize both cost and productivity.
Additional Information
Trends and Insights:
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC): The trend of using IaC is gaining traction, as it helps automate infrastructure provisioning and management, enabling teams to codify, share, version, and execute infrastructure and policies within a standardized workflow.
- AI in DevOps: The integration of AI in DevOps is transforming the way teams deliver software, enabling faster, more reliable, and more secure deployments.
- Observability: Observability is becoming a critical component of modern DevOps practices, providing the visibility needed to ensure application performance and availability.
Conclusion
The use of IBM DevOps Loop and IBM HashiCorp is a great step to combining DevOps and infrastructure automation practices. By using the strengths of these technologies, organizations can improve collaboration, accelerate insight on release impact, and decrease mean time to recovery. Whether you are a project manager, program leader, test leader, or CI/CD leader, the use of DevOps Loop and HashiCorp can help you deliver high-quality software faster and more reliably, ultimately driving business success.
By leveraging the automation and governance capabilities of DevOps Loop and the infrastructure automation and security features of HashiCorp, teams can overcome the challenges of toolchain sprawl, security risks, and manual processes. This can not only streamline the software delivery lifecycle but also ensure that applications are performing optimally and meeting the needs of end-users.
In summary, IBM DevOps Loop and IBM HashiCorp together provide powerful platforms for modern software development. They address the pain points faced by teams, offer significant business and technical value, and enable organizations to stay competitive in an ever-evolving digital landscape. By adopting these technologies and following best practices, you can transform your DevOps processes, improve application performance, and deliver exceptional user experiences.
Schedule a live demo to explore how IBM DevOps Loop and HashiCorp help unify software delivery and infrastructure operations.