Continuous Delivery and Deployment Challenge?

As the video industry experiences another phase of significant disruption and evolution can it adapt to the changes in technology, consumer behaviour and the competitive landscape by using software development practises such as Agile and DevOps to drive innovation and sustain growth?

We are serialising our whitepaper ‘Agile and DevOps within the Video Industry’ here over the next X weeks. If you cannot wait, then you can download the whole whitepaper now at http://www.fairmilewest.com/2015/11/agile-devops-within-video-industry-whitepaper/.

Last time we talked about how important automated testing and continuous builds are and this time we are looking at the challenges of continuous delivery and deployment.

From our interviews for this paper one of the biggest challenges remaining for organizations was implementing continuous delivery and deployment in complex environments. Rolling out a software change to millions of connected STBs where a new build is delivered over a period of time is much harder and more risky than deploying a new version of a web app which can be rolled back in a number of minutes.

But even in web based deployments there are still complexities to overcome. As David Sayed of Brightcove says – “Deployments can still be very complex, especially in environments where you do not have end-to-end control, for example where you must rely on third parties.”

For organizations that move to an automated approach for their infrastructure there are some significant benefits. Using tools such as Puppet, Chef and others to define the infrastructure needed to deliver a product means the infrastructure definitions, effectively code, can be tested in the same way as any other piece of code. Making infrastructure testable in this way can significantly improve time to market and make it far easier to scale applications across cloud and private data centres.

Vendors and operators are now deploying to cloud based infrastructure. Cisco are deploying their new Infinite Video platform to OpenStack infrastructure within their own data centres. There are still some challenges for organizations deploying to cloud infrastructure; security and data protection issues still arise alongside a lack of indemnities provided by big cloud operators that are incompatible with many organisations procurement and legal teams viewpoints. For many though, the advantages far outweigh these drawbacks, as Gareth Capon, CEO of Grabyo says – “I’d much rather Google and Amazon are worrying about how rapidly their infrastructure scales to meet our demands, rather than managing everything ourselves.”

However, deployment into one cloud hosting provider could leave your product open to service outages if that provider has a significant failure. Smart deployment of services across multiple cloud providers is recommended if you are aiming for the highest level of resiliency, although given the lack of open standards being adopted by cloud providers the reality of implementing this is still very challenging.

Next time we will deliver our conclusions or you can skip straight to getting them by downloading the full whitepaper at http://www.fairmilewest.com/2015/11/agile-devops-within-video-industry-whitepaper/.

To find out how Fairmile West can help you adopt and embrace the right approaches for your organization and projects please contact info@fairmilewest.com.