Reference no: EM133105977

Assessment - DevOps concepts and principles

Learning Outcome 1: Analyse and integrate goals, terminologies, and the continuous development pipeline in a collaborative environment.

Learning Outcome 2: Evaluate and critique design practices using skillsets, knowledge, and established competencies in DevOps.

Task Summary

Critically analyse the case of an online retail business as provided below and write a 2000-words report that a) identifies the issues the business is facing in regards to software development and operations of the production system and b) explain how DevOps principles and practices can address those issues.

Context
In software development industries the development team wants to innovate and deliver new features faster while the operations personnel want to ensure stability of the production system. This assessment prepares the students to identify and reduce the divide between the development team and the operations personnel using the principles and practices of DevOps.

Case Study

PQS is an online retail shop in Sydney, Australia. Its website, where the users can explore different products and promotions and place orders, has more than 100,000 visitors per month. Any downtime experienced by the website can result in significant lost opportunities. Thus, any change made to website, which runs on co-located data centres, must be very carefully coordinated. After lots of paper works and lengthy process, only operation engineers are allowed to deploy changes into the production infrastructure. Hence, new releases may happen once in every month.

At PQS, 40 developers work in different teams. Each developer has her/his own laptop which runs Windows 10. The development environment, which includes various libraries and toolchains, in each laptop is setup individually. The developers make changes in hundreds of branches of multiple repositories. Clearly, before the release, all those branches need to be merged.

Any changes to the website need to pass through the QA before they are considered ready for deployment in the production system. However, QA build and test environments are much smaller in size than that of production. There are four servers for QA build and test. Since developers also have direct SSH access into these servers, many of them have been modified during releases to address hotfixes and other urgent needs.

The QA team is responsible for creating various tests and ensuring that website passes all those tests before being deployed into the production system. Developers can choose to run tests, but they often skip testing since testing takes a long time and tend to pass locally but fail in QA environment.

PQS realizes that this is inefficient. They want to ship new features faster and more reliably. How can DevOps fix this?

Task Instructions

Critically analyse the above case study and write a 2000-words report that must include the followings:

• Identifies the issues in the development and operations process of the business which prevent it from faster and reliable delivery of new features
• Present a schematic of CI/CD pipeline and explains how different stages in the pipeline address the issues identified above
• Make a recommendation with justification on whether to keep the production infrastructure on-premise or to move into the Cloud, such as, AWS or Azure

Referencing
It is essential that you use appropriate APA style.

Attachment:- Assessment - Brief Report.rar