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Toolchain sprawl is pervasive – a surprising
number of companies use more than 15
toolchains and that of course means time
and human resources to maintain it all. An
integrated out of the box CI/CD solution
eliminates that problem and frees up
resources for things that matter.
Even in a DevOps shop it can still feel like
it’s Devs vs. Ops because the priorities of
the two groups are so wildly dissimilar. Devs
are incentivised to create new features
while Ops pros are rewarded by having a
stable environment with a lot of uptime. CI/
CD can help bring those opposing forces
together around a single toolchain and let
And while CI/CD is often hailed as a boon
to developers, it’s worth pointing out
some concrete benefits to age-old Ops
problems. An integrated CI/CD solution
will bring automatic monitoring so error
rates and infrastructure costs can suddenly
be measured easily. And automated
deployments free Ops pros to focus on valueadded
tasks rather than waiting around for
developer hand-offs.
Measure success
CI/CD can bring solid benefits but it’s
vital to understand how to measure
success or recognize under-performance.
“
VIRTUALLY
EVERY COMPANY
STRUGGLES WITH
THE SAME SET
OF PROBLEMS
THAT CI/CD CAN
POTENTIALLY
SOLVE.
Anthony McMahon
– Regional Director,
APAC, GitLab
each group do what they do best without
playing the blame game.
Code can also get stale while waiting
around to either be tested or for devs to get
energised about ‘context switching’. CI/CD
can tighten that loop to minutes rather than
days or weeks ensuring everyone is working
as efficiently as possible.
A good place to start is with cycle time.
We like to think of cycle time as the period
between starting work on an idea and
delivering it to production or into the hands
of the end-user.
Your definition may vary but what
matters is to compare cycle time without
CI/CD to cycle time with CI/CD. Some
companies report cycle times that took
months now take hours with an integrated
CI/CD solution.
Time to value is another factor to consider
because, done right, CI/CD should shorten
that timeframe dramatically. Companies
should also consider uptime, error rates and
infrastructure costs.
76 INTELLIGENTCIO www.intelligentcio.com