What is a DevOps Assembly Line?

In easy words, “DevOps Assembly Line” could be a “pipeline of pipelines.”

DevOps assembly lines are targeted at automating and connecting activities performed by several groups part of software development phases like continuous integration for the developer, infrastructure and configuration management for an operator, automation script for the testing team, Security-related for SecOps and last and enabling. CI.

Assembly lines are using to organize day to day tasks from all teams that collaborate for the dignity of the project. In shortly DevOps assembly lines help us to automate and scale end-to-end workflows of application across all teams and tools, which enable continuous delivery. The Future is the DevOps Assembly line

Overview of Continuous Integration Pipelines

Before DevOps Assembly Line, we use CI pipelines which is a simple process of automating build and unit tests for each code change done by any team.

Types of CI Pipelines

The Classic CI -  The Classic CI all build and test instructions were included in a single job, and instructions were executed sequentially. If all instructions run successfully, then CI was successful. If not, then the CI was failed.

Continuous Integration with stages

The above diagram shows that before DevOps Assembly Line, how an application is deployed at different stages (dev / uat / prod). In the CI approach, we have to write three different jobs for a complete CI process (build, test, deploy) and all the jobs depend on successful completion of the previous job which means the test will run if build a job was successfully run the same as deploy.

Continuous Integration with Parallel Stages -

Pipelines gives us a lot of flexibility and control over our process by converting the jobs in stages. Now we don't need to create multiple jobs for different phases of CI / CD we need to create a single job with all the stages with flow control.

Continuous Integration with Forked Stages -

The major disadvantage of the CI pipeline is as application architecture to evolve rapidly, from N-tier to Service-Oriented Architecture to Microservices, and the current linear approach to software delivery is not able to handle the complexity of Microservices or Serverless architectures.

Why CI with forged stages, CI with parallel stages, and CI with forked stages?

• Defining the CI with stages, so you can get outcomes from a stage quicker without having to wait for the complete workflow to finish.
• Running stages in parallel so you can test your code on various environments, language versions, and get faster feedback.
• The next stage of your CI will be decided based on your previous stage results.

Critical Aspects of Assembly Lines

• DevOps Assembly lines enable toolchain collaboration
• Define your workflows as-code with a standard, declarative specification language that is easy to learn and versioned.
• Gaining powerful end-to-end visibility.
• Integrating with technical stacks and application architectures of today's what any organization uses so that the Future will be a simple plug-and-play interface.

Evolutions of DevOps Assembly Lines

Benefits of Assembly Lines

• Accurate Continuous Deployment with interoperability.
• Powerful nested visibility.
• Rapid onboarding and scale with "as-code" philosophy.
• Native Integrations.
• Team-based business intelligence and analytics.

Components of Assembly Lines

Various Automation Use-Cases

• Continuous Integration
• Test automation
• Infrastructure provisioning
• Release management
• Config management
• Deployments
• Security patching
• Network config

• DevOps Assembly Lines Supports

  • Capability to immediately establish workflows across multiple pipelines.
  • Integrations with all popular source control systems.
  • Enabling rapid changes and scaling for various applications or microservices.
  • Abstractions of all delicate information like passwords, tokens, keys, etc.
  • Roles and permissions restricting assembly line and pipeline action.
  • Metrics and Analytics across pipelines to help identify bottlenecks.
  • Visibility into each pipeline and stage, including logs, status, and versioned data.
  • It handles all DevOps infrastructure, including spinning VMs and containers up and down as required.
  • Roles and permissions restricting assembly line and pipeline actions.
  • Release automation features such as semantic versioning of packages.
  • Ability to pass state and other information while triggering dependent pipelines.