Software as a Service (SaaS) companies are constantly striving to ensure customers have an exceptional user experience when utilizing their service. The fierce competition in the modern business puts more pressure on companies to meet their customers’ expectations or risk losing them to a market rival. The success or failure of a solution and the underlying organization can rest on the ability to create an engaging and innovative user experience.
A methodology adopted by many companies involved in application development is the continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) model. CI/CD pipelines enable teams to deliver code more efficiently and securely. A viable CI/CD pipeline allows engineers and teams to concentrate on business objectives without worrying about risks, quality or the speed of code deployment.
A CI/CD pipeline is intended to optimize the performance of a delivery team’s people, tools and processes. The benefits of CI/CD include faster version iteration, quality assurance and streamlined deployment. The goal is to decrease time-to-market and ensure customers continuously enjoy a superior user experience.
Efficiency Challenges in Implementing CI/CD
Companies implementing the CI/CD model can face difficulties in obtaining the efficiency they desire. The following are some of the main challenges encountered with CI/CD.
Addressing the velocity of change
The velocity with which new features need to be rolled out to meet customer demand and address market trends puts pressure on a CI/CD team. Over-committing and deploying inferior products are recipes for lost business and should be avoided. Teams need to adopt the proper level of automation and the right tools to streamline their efforts while simultaneously managing costs.
Choosing the right code repository
Care should be taken when selecting the code repository for a CI/CD pipeline. Cloud-based repositories may prove problematic if an organization changes providers in favor of a different platform. Storing code in a platform like GitHub provides flexibility and reduces the complexity if the repository must be moved.
Pipeline complexity
The complexity of a CI/CD pipeline can hinder efficiency and become difficult to manage. It can be very beneficial for multiple pipelines to be utilized for multiple source control repositories. Individual codebases and applications allow for more effective testing and quality assurance as development proceeds. Companies need to balance the benefits of having multiple pipelines with the challenges of managing them.
Ensuring availability, performance and quality
The objective of CI/CD is to deliver and deploy software without any degradation in performance or quality. All code deployments involve some degree of risk that the organization must minimize to successfully meet customer expectations. Some specific risks that need to be addressed are:
- Inadequate or poorly executed testing
- Ineffective configuration management
- Environments that lack definition or are poorly controlled and maintained
Infrastructure management
Managing infrastructure efficiently is essential for a successful CI/CD approach. Resources are required to support product development and growth as well as an organization’s internal teams. The infrastructure needs to grow to address the demands of new offerings that process large volumes of data.
Managing infrastructure effectively can be extremely difficult when scaling too quickly. Companies may have to choose between allocating resources for product development or supporting the internal infrastructure. Before scaling CD initiatives, teams should analyze the effects it will have on the infrastructure and processes currently in place.
Communication breakdown
Communication is a key component in the success of modern SaaS companies. Departments operating in data silos cannot function efficiently and it often results in unnecessary modifications and deployment delays. A hallmark of successful data-driven companies is the elimination of silos and the development of a single source of truth accessible to everyone in the organization.
Choosing the right CI/CD tools
Implementing the right tools to facilitate the CI/CD process is essential to an organization’s success. Innovations in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have led to the development of solutions that automate the monitoring and analysis necessary to maintain a productive CI/CD environment.
AIOps can help companies transform from taking a reactive approach to issues affecting their CI/CD initiatives to a more proactive and preventative mindset. These tools can resolve issues that previously would have taken productive time away from CI/CD teams and help maintain a high level of customer satisfaction with each new deployment. For more information, watch our recent episode on YouTube where Girish Muckai, advisory board member at HEAL Software Inc., discusses the benefits AIOps can have on SaaS platforms.