Delivering software with agility and quality in a cloud environment

Abstract

Cloud computing and the DevOps movement are two pillars that facilitate software delivery with extreme agility. 'Born on the cloud' companies, such as Netflix®, have demonstrated rapid growth to their business and continuous improvement to the service they provide, by reportedly applying DevOps principles. In this paper, we claim that to fulfill the vision of fast software delivery, without compromising the quality of the provided services, we need a new approach to detecting problems, including problems that may have occurred during the continuous deployment cycle. A native DevOps-centric approach to problem resolution puts the focus on a wider range of possible error sources (including code commits), makes use of DevOps metadata to clearly define the source of the problem, and leads to a quick problem resolution. We propose such a continuous quality assurance approach, and we demonstrate it by preliminary experiments in our public Container Cloud environment and in a private OpenStack® cloud environment.