Reduce software development lifecycle with DevOps, Containers - Virtualization Next

Virtualisation Next, is a service offered by Cadence Data Soft as a part of our DevOps offerings. This paper focuses on the container technology and how software companies can benefit from it.

Technology

Container technology is a natural evolution of virtual machines, while virtualization technology is built on top of hypervisor, this containerization technology is built on top of operating system kernel. The abstraction features of kernel such as cgroups and namespaces forms the foundation for this abstraction.

Container technology brings in its own advantages, such as

1. It does not require a hypervisor layer

2. It can run on top of Virtual or Physical machines

3. They spin extremely fast, when compared to virtual machines

4. You can spin large number of containers when compared to virtual machines

5. It has lesser number of resource overheads

The potential of Container technology can be put to use for simplifying day to day work profile involved in a development lifecycle such as application development, building self-service model.

Use Case

A typical application development lifecycle for adding a module involves, architect, design, develop, unit test, integration test, merge with main stream, upgrading dependencies, QA, defect fixing, holistic testing, general announcement, product release, product deployment at customer and finally pushing upgrades.

If you are a project manager, you understand that most of the valuable time spent on each task involved in the lifecycle of a module development is to a great extent not spent on directly impacting contribution, that leads to completion of that module.

Why? Because there are several dependencies that a task owner has to perform before he starts making directly impacting contribution. From a software developer’s perspective, these dependencies include administrative tasks such as emailing and information sharing, designing and writing code, collaboration such as meeting, presentation and discussions and finally housekeeping operations such as waiting on build to complete, waiting on test to complete and environment management.

According to a survey published in InfoStor by Paul Krill, 9.9 hours of the total time spent in a week of 40 hours, i.e. close to one-quarter of total time is spent on housekeeping operations. This is exactly where we bring in value with Virtualization Next.

Imagine this with multiple modules that you are planning for your next GA.

To schedule a discussion on how we can help you, send us an email to banand@cadencedatasoft.com with your company name, contact details and optionally mark your subject with “LinkedIn Article”.