Unite the world with numbers and make life with wisdom
Digitization begins to move from abstraction and standardization to intelligence
2020 has popularized online, digital and intelligent technology for the whole people, and accelerated the digital transformation of enterprises. In the era of “full digitization”, it is not just simple and extensive data collection, mapping and abstraction. Digitalization has entered an advanced stage — data-driven intelligentization: a large number of new technology communities represented by cloud management + AIoT have emerged, and the core problem of digitalization enterprises has turned to how to improve customer experience in the whole life cycle through intelligent means with customer operation as the core.
As a leader in the Internet of Things big data industry, Shenzhen Sulianxia Intelligent Technology Co., LTD. (hereinafter referred to as Sulianxia) endeavors to build c-Life Comprehensive big data computing service platform, which is committed to providing full cycle, full chain, full dimension and all-round professional operation consulting services for individuals, industries and governments. Relying on the company’s strong investment in RESEARCH and development and technical strength, The company has created a batch of benchmark demonstration projects in many smart fields such as smart pension, smart health campus, smart beauty industry, smart family, smart hotel, smart agriculture, smart water ecology and so on.
DevOps digitizes the r&d process
An enterprise’s agility, adaptability and anti-vulnerability determine its success or failure in this digital disruption
In the process of delivering smart projects in various fields, the R&D department of DigitalInk world gradually found the problem that the R&D team was faced with a more uncertain, personalized and fragmented market demand. Although there is a certain commonality in industry projects, there is also a large number of customization requirements according to local conditions. How to make personalized and scale go hand in hand? Changing customer needs drive r&d organizations to adapt to the business. By digitizing the R&D process to improve the agility, adaptability and anti-vulnerability of the r&d process, Digitalworld has opened the road to r&d efficiency improvement.
The r&d team of DigitalWorld shared with us: “The client project cycle is tight and the demand changes frequently, so the development team needs to complete the software development and release it in a short time. In the previous RESEARCH and development process, the release process is long, there are many approval links, the release pace is slow, and there is no good cooperation between development operation and maintenance to improve the release efficiency. Therefore, it is urgent to break down barriers between different departments and reduce communication links and costs among development, testing, operation and maintenance. DevOps is our preferred method of developing high quality software in a short development cycle and we hope to drive customer satisfaction by using DevOps platform CODING.”
Different from the r&d process built by several tools before, the DigitalWorld team firstly gradually improved the delivery bandwidth based on continuous integration, product library and continuous deployment of CODING, and then unified the process of project management and R&D data management into CODING, gradually realizing the value delivery of r&d process from requirement proposal to application deployment. So that all roles in the r&d team can work together based on a unified platform to deliver projects on time and with high quality.
Continuous delivery drives business acceleration
In the process of using CODING, the digital World r&d team follows a step-by-step approach. Firstly, continuous delivery pipeline is established based on CODING continuous integration, artifact library and continuous deployment. Different from self-built Jenkins and Nexus, CODING continuous integration and artifact library are out-of-the-box. Docker images built by the R&D team through continuous integration can be directly pushed to the CODING artifact library, and then pulled out the image of the specified version for deployment through continuous deployment.
- Continuous integration out of the box
CODING continuous integration is syntactically compatible with Jenkins in build scripts, enabling seamless migration of Jenkins builds into CODING. In addition, it supports the construction of Docker images, which meets the migration requirements of the RESEARCH and development team for constructed products in terms of basic functions.
In terms of application, CODING is much more convenient than self-built Jenkins. It can be used by opening a browser without complicated machine configuration, construction environment and software plug-in installation. In addition, CODING provides multi-regional and domestic construction nodes, optimizes domestic access to overseas mainstream mirror links, and supports enabling caching in construction tasks, which greatly improves construction speed. In terms of the flexibility of building resources, it supports not only the use of CODING cloud host for building, but also the use of Tencent cloud machine as building resources.
- Enterprise level product warehouse
Before the use of CODING artifact library, the digital World team built its own artifact library based on open source projects. When using the self-built private server artifact library, it often encountered performance problems or usability problems. For example, when uploading a large-capacity Docker image, the self-built artifact library often became unavailable, resulting in a series of subsequent version releases being blocked. Such problems are solved with CODING. CODING Opb is an enterprise-class opB specially designed for the production environment. Both the volume and distribution efficiency of the OPB have been carefully optimized by the product team. The digital World team pushed all products to the CODING product library, and managed the products in a standardized manner by using the version policy, permission control, security scanning and other capabilities provided by the CODING product library.
In addition to Docker, CODING Artifact library provides more than a dozen mainstream artifact types, including Helm, Common File, NPM, Maven, PyPI, etc., supporting r&d teams with diverse artifact hosting needs. Products library provides fine permissions at the same time, support, within the team, each products library project public open range, parallel development for more than a group of several league world can easily set common component to open within the team, the project unique products in the Settings for the project, can not only accelerate the public products in the research and development of enterprise internal sharing and flow, It also ensures the security of permissions for items unique to the project.
Security is also a concern for business customers in r&d teams that make frequent commercial deliveries. In addition to solving the problem of hosting the products of The Digital World team, the CODING product library also standardizes the safety and quality of the products. Set quality red line standards through product scanning to prevent problematic components from being released to the production environment. The scanning solution also provides detailed scanning records and defect statistics for quick repair by the R&D team. This improves the security of the product to a certain extent and reduces the security loopholes in the production environment.
- Clear and easy to use continuous deployment
The next step in continuous delivery is continuous deployment. Continuous deployment enables r&d teams to automatically and frequently deploy software to various production environments, enabling rapid delivery of software products.
1. Clear and flexible process choreography
The operation and maintenance team of Suliantianxia firstly planned the deployment process of each application according to the testing process, online process and deployment environment. Create different process branches for development environment, test environment, class production environment, and production environment. Continuous deployment based on CODING can quickly arrange serial or parallel deployment processes. For example, for class production and production environment, integration test (automation + manual) of class production must be passed before it can be released into production environment. A production environment with multiple locations can be deployed in parallel, increasing efficiency.
Continuous deployment of clear and flexible process choreography based on CODING, application of all deployment branch flow at a sight.
2. Manual approval plus automatic notification mechanism
In view of the situation of multiple links, multiple approvals and multiple waiting in the past operation and maintenance release process, the DigitalWorld team added the roles of test and product manager into the approval process according to the level difference of the release process, and cooperated with the automatic deployment process and notification mechanism, which solved the problem that the deployment process needed manual confirmation repeatedly in the past. It also solves the problem that developers had to wait for operations to deploy versions on a regular basis, allowing developers and operations to deploy applications whenever and wherever they need them.
In addition to the common in-site notification, enterprise wechat, Dingpin, Bearychat and other methods, the notification of each link also supports the team to access other collaboration tools used by the enterprise through Webhook to meet the team’s personalized notification needs.
3. Specification of product version rules
During the intense development cycle of the project, the number of products built by Digital World is very frequent and the number of products is also increasing rapidly, including the self-tested snapshot version and the official re-tested version. How to ensure that the test environment, production environment, and so on can always choose the stable version of the trunk release, so as not to manually select the development self-test version? Rules for selected artifacts are established through the artifact branch strategy in continuous deployment to eliminate the error situation that resulted from manual selection of temporary branch versions.
4. Unified deployment console
CODING continuous deployment provides an application-oriented console in the daily application deployment management process of the Digital World team. O&m personnel can manage the configuration information, infrastructure, resource allocation, and deployment process of all applications without switching between project views. The unified deployment console panel greatly improves the efficiency of application deployment and management for the research and development team of Datlian World, which needs to face various projects.
After the application is deployed, you can easily check the deployed resources, including the workload of resources within the cluster, in the Kubernetes cluster panel. Unified deployment helps O&M or developers to prepare deployment resources, choreograph deployment processes, deploy applications, and check after deployment in a one-stop manner.
- End to end value delivery
Then the R&D team moved code management and project management to CODING hosting and project collaboration. Farewell to the past SVN Code management, based on CODING Code hosting for Gite-style development, based on Code scanning and Code Review to establish the baseline of research and development quality. After switching to project coordination for project management, the whole link from requirements -> code -> products -> application has been really opened. The DIGITalWorld RESEARCH and development team has truly realized end-to-end value delivery based on the unified cloud platform. Compared with the previous self-built R&D platform based on multiple tools, the unified R&D management platform brings the following benefits:
- Reduce the cost of building tools, maintaining tools and getting through all tools
- Enjoy the hyper-converged experience of unified UI, account management, and permission setting
- End-to-end traceability of requirements from proposal to release
- More standardized r & D quality management
- Comprehensive r&d data management
Based on the DevOps practice of CODING, the delivery bandwidth of Digital World has been greatly improved. DevOps practice brings not only changes in process and tools, but also further deepens the business consensus of the team. All the roles sat together: testing, operations, development, product, project management, etc., figuring out how to work together on a unified platform to deliver projects on time and with quality and serve customers well.
Let r&d data serve R&D
Data has become one of the factors of production
Research and development digitalization is not only the construction of automatic process, but more importantly, in the process of digital landing, how to give play to the effect of 1 + 1 > 2 of organic series of RESEARCH and development links? How to make R&D data serve R&D?
At present, the R&D team of Sulian Tianxia has switched the whole r&d process to CODING, and the slowly accumulated R&D data also brings new guidance to r&d management. Through performance metrics, member workloads can be clearly analyzed; Through the dashboard, you can clearly see the number of code submitted, item completed, build times, release times and so on. The data will also enable the r&d team to quickly adjust and review to a more volatile future.
Incremental transformation, change and delivery
“CODING was chosen at the beginning, because CODING continuous integration is fully compatible with Jenkins continuous integration service, supporting all mainstream languages such as Java, Python, Node.js, and the construction of Docker images. This is consistent with the company’s existing publishing approach and architectural system. After using it for some time, DevOps tools, including the CODING artifact library and /, have improved our development process, and we look forward to adding more surprises to our development tool chain.”
After a comprehensive understanding of the DevOps implementation path of Datliantiworld, we also found that the enterprise’s R&D reform is not accomplished overnight. It needs to be completed from the process. Choosing a one-stop R&D management tool with low migration cost, low threshold and flexible functions can make the reform get twice the result with half the effort.
We are pleased to see that Digitalworld has been on the road to improve internal efficiency. This enterprise, which aims to improve the level of digitalization in various industries, has fully embraced the digital research and development. We expect C-Life to gradually become a strong support platform for intelligent Life with its original intention of change and rapid delivery ability. In this digital disruption, CODING will firmly stand with the R&D team, relying on DevOps, cloud native, Agile and other R&D tools to help all industries improve, improve and innovate.