Service Delivery: The Build Phase - The Practice of Cloud System Administration - page 207

A flow is one trip through the service delivery platform. Each step includes testing with
the aim of finding bugs as early as possible. Bugs found in the live environment are the
result of insufficient testing in earlier phases and environments.
When a service delivery platform is functioning at its best, the result is high confidence
in the service being delivered. As a result, the organization can be more aggressive with
making changes, and features can be released faster. In other words, innovation is acceler-
ated. Compare this to an organization that is unsure of its delivery system. In such a case,
releases take months to produce. Bugs are found long after code is written, making it more
difficulttocorrectproblems.Innovationishinderedbecausechangebecomesstifledasfear
and despair rule.
Thehandofffrombuildtodeployisapackage,afilethatcontainsmanyfiles.Apackage
is easier to transport, more secure, and less error prone than transporting many individual
files.
Exercises
1. Describe the steps of the service delivery platform's build phase.
2. Why are the build and deployment phases separate?
3. Why are the application and infrastructure flows separate?
4. What are the pros and cons of the waterfall methodology compared with the mod-
ern DevOps methodology?
5. How does “good flow” enable a business to reach its goals?
6. Describe continuous integration and its benefits.
7. Why do testing and production need separate environments?
8. Describe the service delivery platform used in your organization. Based on the be-
nefits described in this chapter, which changes would you recommend?
9. What are the benefits of using packages as the handoff mechanism?
10. Does your your organization use CI? Which parts of your current platform would
need to change to achieve CI?