DevOps Automation

Secure and flexible cloud solutions for your application

We design flexible and secure cloud solutions that fit your business model to ensure that your software operates flawlessly and can quickly be adapted to the needs of your customers. To achieve this, we at Claranet pursue a holistic implementation of the DevOps philosophy by automating processes for greater agility, reusability as well as security and risk minimisation.

Benefit from our DevOps Automation strategy:

• Simple and fast provision of software by building a continuous delivery pipeline
• Risk minimisation during deployment through automation of the build steps
• Fast troubleshooting due to less complex updates (lots of small updates instead of a few large ones) as well as short release cycles
• High-performance secure environment through automated infrastructure deployment processes
• Individual adaptation to your needs through flexible cloud solutions (Infrastructure as Code)
• Trusted partner through many years of experience with complex projects and the application of best practices

DevOps framework for integrated automation

One of the central ideas of DevOps is the automation of processes between software development and operations. Automation not only saves time, but also achieves a higher quality. That’s why Claranet relies on established and cloud-agnostic tools to automate infrastructure, configuration management and deployment. This simplifies the provision and maintenance of the infrastructure environment and software. It also provides our customers with a secure and flexible cloud environment as well as a smooth deployment.

Infrastructure automation

“Programming infrastructure instead of configuring it” or “Infrastructure as Code” is key when it comes to automating infrastructure. When setting up and adapting infrastructure components like virtual machines, operating systems and network services, we do without manual configuration and store it as code instead. Tools such as AWS CloudFormation or cloud-agnostic tools like Terraform can thus be used to build secure and flexible cloud environments based on templates. A process known as cloud orchestration therefore makes it possible to provide infrastructure quickly and easily on the basis of these pre-configured templates.

Another advantage is that system configurations can be tested, versioned and automatically replicated with the help of autoscaling. This way you can rest assured that the infrastructure is optimally configured and adapts to the resource requirements of your application or incoming traffic.

Configuration management

In addition to provisioning infrastructure components, the configuration of these servers and the services running on them also plays a decisive role. Here, too, manual configuration processes can be automated with the help of tools such as Chef, Puppet or Ansible. Particularly when using Docker and Kubernetes, a good deal of experience is needed to get low-configuration containers.

Claranet relies on automation and reusability not only for configuration management, but also for monitoring and log management, among other things.

Deployment automation

Deployment at the push of a button with the continuous delivery pipeline

By automating the deployment, a new version of the software can be rolled out as often as desired, even fully automatically. This enables manual processes and errors to be reduced and new features to be tested and optimised faster and more frequently. By using a fully automated deployment pipeline, a Spryker e-commerce shop, for example, can be rolled out in less than 10 minutes. The design, implementation and operation of this kind of continuous delivery pipeline can be based on Jenkins, Gitlab CI, Travis CI or Circle CI. And if the deployment should fail, rollbacks can be carried out according to previously defined criteria.

Blue/green deployment

This approach can be optimised by implementing blue/green deployment. The idea behind blue/green deployment is to build and operate two environments that are identical in terms of quality and quantity, with only one actively serving as a productive environment and the other as a test or staging environment. The traffic can be switched to the desired environment by using a load balancer or router.

If, for example, a new version of an application is available, it can first be provided on the non-active environment (see graphic: green) and undergo final testing. The data traffic can then be redirected to the green environment, making the new version productive and thus accessible to the user. The previously active environment with the old version (blue) becomes inactive and can easily be reactivated if there are any problems with the new version of the app.

Container-based continuous delivery pipeline

In addition to the classic pipeline, further optimisations of the software supply chain can be achieved by using container technology. Despite a high degree of automation in the classic continuous delivery pipeline, deployment and testing are tricky due to the different typologies, parameters and software versions of the environments (development, testing, production). While the feature works perfectly for the developer locally, it causes problems on the test environment. This inconsistency can be resolved by packaging software within isolated containers, which not only reduces risks and additional work due to subsequent corrections, but also improves cooperation between the developers and operations. Claranet relies on Docker and Kubernetes to manage and scale the containers.

More information about continuous delivery