Incorporating the DevOps loop has risen to a C-suite priority. Across the country, organizations are putting in place policies and practices to organically integrate the design into their development workflows and processes to produce the highest-quality deliverables possible. However, poor and stilted communication and a deep divide between the two camps of professionals are slowing down their efforts.
“When we build a container, that build process tends to be very specifically an engineering process. Once that container is built and we move on to the release phase, that is a business process. It’s a whole bunch of different people that are involved in a lot of different business decisions,” explains Mark Freydl, CEO and co-founder of Codiac, a company that has built a platform to bring these two teams together.
The existence of siloed communication environments that are sacrosanct to relevant teams is not a new practice. Over the years, teams have devised their own languages and settled into their preferred styles of communication that while working great for them, have contributed to widening the gap with other work groups.
As the need for clear and effective communication rings loud across departments, this is a sticky situation to come out of.
“There is a lot of friction in the processes. We’ve people speaking different languages in different conversations. The impact of that is time, cost and risk,” reminds Freydl.
Elevating the conversation, he says, will require everyone to speak one common language across the board. That language is software development lifecycle (SDLC).
For many organizations, that is a moonshot. Polls show that factors like differentiated management strategies and heaps of tooling are making it harder to dilute the differences.
“We can’t take all that exists today and try to herd it all into something symphonic and harmonious. We really need to rethink it.”
And so Codiac did. With the vision to change how different teams engaged in SDLC interact with each other, Codiac has designed a universal platform upon which personas from different backgrounds and teams can work congruously and without conflict.
By focusing on letting disparate personas work comfortably on this common platform where they can manage the varied steps of the software development lifecycle (SDLC) with ease, Codiac eliminates the basic frictions between teams.
At a high level, Codiac is a software development platform where teams can manage containers and run applications on Kubernetes without facing the usual complications.
“Do more with less,” says Codiac.
Users can create repeatable infrastructure on demand and manage virtual clusters on its central orchestrator.
Central and intuitive coordination underlies everything that Codiac does, Freydl highlights. Kubernetes has great potential and has much to offer to developers, but according to him, it is a “steep hill to climb”.
The Codiac platform masks the signature complexities of Kubernetes, presenting a simple, low-effort path to app building. Codiac demoed this at the recent AppDev Field Day event in Salt Lake City.
Ephemeral clusters can be spun up at scale and killed off after use. For cost optimization, Codiac can be set to “Zombie Mode” to shut off environments when not in use. The platform will automatically turn them off over weekends or at night to streamline utilization.
Snapshotting is an important feature Freydl highlighted, that introduces reproducibility, a quality largely missing from Kubernetes.
An engineer can create a virtual cluster and capture the values in it by taking a snapshot. Codiac archives this snapshot immutably, allowing them to create new clusters from it, or roll back to a previous version, without the manual effort.
Codiac: Advancing the DevOps Loop
But the big differentiator that makes Codiac a vehicle for advancing the DevOps loop according to the company is a unified interface. The Codiac interface combines a command line interface (CLI) that operates based on commands, and a graphical user interface (GUI) that works through visual elements, giving teams different points to interact with it in the way they are comfortable.
It can be through a browser, the console, or the pipeline, said Freydl.
“We’re trying to make sure that everybody on the team can look at the same piece of information and understand it well.”
With a platform like Codiac that manages a lot of the manual work and improves the workflow, there is a way to do product development without having to get an overwhelming amount of work done.
For example, Codiac automates a bundle of infrastructure things that includes certificate management, a process often handled manually leading to vulnerabilities and security break-ins.
On Codiac, certificate renewals happen automatically with zero touch. A 100% ingress coverage ensures that all services meet the necessary security requirements. Whenever a certificate issue crops up, the right team is alerted, allowing timely identification and swift resolution.
Codiac is usable across all stages of the software development lifecycle, but specifically in design, implementation, testing, deployment and maintenance. One of its superpowers is “build once, configure on deploy”. Teams are in control of creating and configuring containers dynamically for various environments. There is no need to manually work in config changes for development, production or testing, a process that has elevated risks of error.
For more, watch the full presentation from Codiac’s appearance on AppDev Field Day on techfieldday.com.