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10 Best Infrastructure-as-Code Tools for Automating Deployments in 2022

IT technologies continue to evolve at an unprecedented pace. From cloud computing to DevOps and artificial intelligence (AI) to internet of things (IoT), the technology landscape has unlocked potential opportunities for IT businesses to generate value.

The enterprise IT infrastructure has become crucial for modern-day digital business. It is because it facilitates the compute, network and data capabilities required to run business-critical software applications. The key role of infrastructure goes beyond production environs. It spreads across the complete development process. The infrastructure includes a host of components including servers, load balancers, firewalls, and databases. They also include DevOps tools, CI/CD platforms, staging environments, and testing tools. But there’s a catch here.

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Top Salesforce Deployment Challenges and Tips

As Salesforce organizations strive to improve IT delivery, making it faster, more quality-focused, and secure, they continue to face deployment challenges. Increased customer demands and high velocity releases every now and then are creating bottlenecks for Salesforce enterprises. This is where you need to recognize the Salesforce deployment challenges your team is facing and find ways to address them.

In this article, we will dive into Salesforce deployment challenges, how to orchestrate Salesforce DevOps tools, and techniques to enhance efficiency and speed while maintaining the quality and security of your applications.

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Why You Should Stop Relying on Jenkins Plug-ins

According to ActiveState's State of CI/CD 2020 survey results, Jenkins is the most-used CI/CD tool on the market. As one of the first job runners on the market, it's had plenty of time to gain popularity and has been a crucial component in advancing the DevOps approach of building and delivering software.

Thanks to more than 1800 plug-ins, Jenkins is very easy to extend — with the right set of plug-ins, you can do pretty much anything. The plug-in library is what allows every Jenkins user to end up with a personalized experience that's largely informed by the plug-ins they installed.

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Salesforce DevOps: Keys to Productivity and Compliance

Companies have had to accelerate their business and evolve their Salesforce DevOps strategies in response to the pandemic. Every industry is meeting increasingly complex workflows and customer needs.

What continues to be two major focus areas in Salesforce DevOps are - productivity and compliance. But many companies - whether early in their Salesforce DevOps journey or further along - are struggling to improve their efficiency and auditing capabilities.  

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Tips to Master Salesforce Release Management

Release management in Salesforce can be tricky. With the traditional approach of Salesforce release management using the Change Sets, it’s no surprise that development teams are constantly under pressure to traverse their functionalities through multiple sandboxes and deploy.

Moreover, the complex functionality, limited tools, and tight deadlines to perform deployments on production without missing a single component make Salesforce release management labor-intensive and error-prone. This often leads to frustrating issues, downtime for users, and even business impact (Agility and Velocity)

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DevSecOps: Best Practices for CI/CD Pipeline Security

CI/CD pipeline refers to a series of sequential practices comprising Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment and/or Continuous Deployment (CD). Commonly utilized by DevOps teams, the CI/CD pipeline is one of the most efficient methods to build, test and deploy code, largely via automation tools.

Leveraging CI/CD pipeline has been reliably provided to facilitate the construction and deployment of more updates (and better ones) to software. This is largely because successful CI/CD pipelines require consistent collaboration and honest implementation of Agile and DevOps principles.

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DevOps Maturity Model: Trends and Best Practices in Today’s World

Innovation is critical to driving an organization's growth. Once leaders in their industries, companies like Nokia, Kodak, and Blockbuster failed to innovate and soon lost most market share.

Consumers want quicker, better, and more affordable solutions to their problems. You should have systems in place to launch your products in the market as soon as possible — without compromising the quality.

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Ace Your DevOps Game With This Ultimate List of Plugins in Jenkins

In recent years, DevOps has established itself as a formidable force in the software world. By bridging the gap between development and IT operations teams, DevOps has brought speed, efficiency, and quality to software development. It enabled IT businesses to adopt agile software delivery methodologies like Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD).

However, despite gaining universal popularity, the road to successful DevOps adoption remained bumpy. Many organizations struggle to implement optimal automation across the software development lifecycle (SDLC), from build, integration, and testing to delivery and deployment. Consequently, harnessing the full potential of the CI/CD pipeline remained elusive. At this juncture, Jenkins has emerged as an indispensable tool to help DevOps teams achieve automation goals.

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How To Integrate Security Into the DevOps Toolchain

Traditional Security Conundrum in DevOps

DevOps tactics and tools are significantly transforming the way businesses innovate. However, amidst this transformation, IT decision-makers are cognizing that traditional ‘siloed’ security approaches are hampering organizations from realizing the full potential of DevOps. In fact, the conventional security methods and controls are perceived as inhibitors to speed, agility, and scalability offered by DevOps.

Baking Security into DevOps

In response, forward-thinking and fortune 500 companies have started integrating security practices and controls into each phase of the DevOps software development lifecycle, a methodology popularly known as DevSecOps. It integrates security practices and procedures into DevOps tools and underlying policies, making security an integral part of software development. As DevSecOps gathers steam, IT firms are more likely to blend vulnerability assessment, risk modeling, and security automation into DevOps processes and toolchains. As a result, it improves security and compliance maturity levels of the DevOps pipeline and toolchain, while enhancing product quality and delivery. How? DevSecOps enables seamless flow of application changes through DevOps pipelines, bestowing on the developers the authority and autonomy, without axing security or increasing risk.

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DevOps Toolchain for Beginners

In the digital world, business agility and speed are imperative for IT organizations, given the pace at which the business and technology landscape is evolving. They are obliged to respond and deliver at speeds greater than the pace of digital disruption. And, DevOps has emerged as the panacea to these challenges.

DevOps is the combination of cultural philosophies, processes, and tools that increase an organization's ability to deliver software faster while maintaining excellence in quality. This speed enables businesses to serve their customers better and gain a competitive edge in the market. DevOps automates and integrates the efforts of development and IT operations teams to help them build, test, deploy, and monitor applications with speed, quality, and control. It is all about automating manual tasks, reducing errors, eliminating bottlenecks, and cutting down rework across the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) phases.

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SRE vs. DevOps: Responsibilities, Differences, and Salaries

There is significant debate around the differences between Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and DevOps. Given that there are certain similarities between these two approaches to software development and deployment, it isn’t uncommon for people to use these terms interchangeably.

However, SRE and DevOps have distinct identities and processes in place to meet the requisite goals. This article will highlight the differences between the two with regard to fundamentals, associated responsibilities, and salary.

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DevSecOps: A Complete Guide

Why should you learn about the basics of DevSecOps even if you’re not a software developer? The short answer is to improve security at your business or company. Organizations have long had a heavy focus on speeding up application development to deploy new software as soon as possible, but this frequently came at the cost of security.

Unfortunately, if an application was discovered to have security issues at this stage, it meant rewriting large amounts of code which could easily become a very convoluted, difficult, and time-consuming task for developers.

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What Is an SRE? How To Land an SRE Role Today

What is SRE?

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is a relatively new term in the software industry. It is a software engineering approach designed for improved system management and problem-solving. Think of it as a new form of system administration.

In SRE, a software engineer is in charge of tasks that are usually performed by the operations team. Site reliability engineering involves ensuring the availability, latency, performance, capacity, scalability, and deployment of software systems by the engineers themselves.

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How to Enhance Your Deployment With Continuous Testing in CI/CD

Digital transformation has gripped us all! Most of the businesses are moving towards a cloud-centric environment and leaning towards ‘Shift-left’ DevOps practices. This rapid paradigm shift in Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) is creating a need to integrate continuous testing to build out resilient CI/CD pipelines. Balancing quality and speed is a major challenge and continuous testing in CI/CD can act as a catalyst in the whole process. 

To ace the competition, businesses are looking for better ways to perform CI/CD Pipeline Automation Testing.  One of the approaches adopted by many is an integration of continuous testing in the entire product development life cycle, right from the start until the end.