Today, we’re excited to announce the release of the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) DevOps service! OCI DevOps enables developers to build, test, and deploy their software and applications on Oracle Cloud, automating each phase of the software development lifecycle. This release of the DevOps service includes deployment pipelines for developers to automate software deployments to OCI platforms: Compute instances, Kubernetes clusters, and functions. Deployment pipelines are free to use for OCI customers.
Simplifying deployments
Deploying your software can be a complex series of steps. Everyone has a horror story of a deployment gone wrong and “that time we took down production.” When an issue with a deployment arises, it’s an all-hands-on-deck situation. Your team gets paged and scrambles to get production working for customers. What we want as engineers is to release features to customers and have the deployment be a routine event, maybe even so routine that the deployment is boring (to borrow a phase from Camille Fournier and her essay Make Boring Plans.) In continuous deployment, we want to create a repeatable process to deploy new software and to discover any issues before the release hits production.
If you’re manually running steps in your deployment process, you juggle a complex workflow, and it’s easy to introduce errors that can lead to a failed deployment. Automating deployments with tools and processes simplifies your deployment workflow and gives you a repeatable and testable process to safely release your latest change to customers.
As engineers, we win when customers use the features that we’ve built. In a competitive environment, we want to both increase the velocity of our feature delivery and deploy safely, without introducing errors or bugs. Automation driven by continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) gives engineering teams structure to build, test, and deploy features more quickly. The highest performing teams (from the most recent 2019 DevOps Research Assessment survey) are gaining an edge by adopting automated deployments to drive more frequent feature releases to their customers.
With DevOps, developers now have all the resources needed to automate the last mile of their development lifecycle to release features more frequently with less manual intervention and with fewer errors.
Automated deployments
Developers can implement continuous deployment with the DevOps service. In the future, we can add continuous integration for a full CI/CD platform. Today, you can set up your deployment workflow with a deployment pipeline to configure the steps your software takes to production. To start your deployment, you can either automatically run a deployment from your existing continuous integration platform with a step to trigger the start of your deployment pipeline, or you can run your deployment on demand.
In your deployment pipeline, you can fully automate your deployment to include testing and delivery to each of your environment’s target, such as development, staging, and production across regions, and automatically promote the release all the way up to production. You can also set up deployments that include manual approval stages for automation with manual checks.
We’ve taken more best practices from our internal OCI software development life cycle and included them in our deployment pipelines. If a delivery stage fails, you can automatically roll back the deployment to the last successful version or take manual action to roll back the failed stage. Deployment pipelines can automate your global rollout across OCI platforms. Targets of a deployment can be in any of the regions in your tenancy. You can create a deployment pipeline that includes both container native and VM workloads.
Manage your software artifacts
We’re launching the DevOps service alongside a new OCI repository type: Artifact Registry. The Artifact Registry service is a single location for storing, sharing, and managing software packages used for application development and deployment. This fully managed service eliminates the need to set up and operate the infrastructure required for repositories. Deployment pipelines work with the artifact registry and container image registry repositories to deliver artifacts for repeatable deployments of your software.
Get started today!
Teams want to focus on developing features and not the process of deploying software. Creating a repeatable process to deploy software enables your team to release features more frequently to your customers. Automating the steps in a deployment means that your team spends less time performing a deployment. Using a deployment pipeline to deliver, then test, in environments before production enables you to find errors before they hit production and gives you the tools to make your deployments routine.
DevOps is included with all OCI tenancies and is free to use to automate deployments. Get started with the OCI DevOps service using our reference architecture examples to deploy a Hello World service to Compute hosts, Kubernetes clusters, or functions.
Learn more to get started today and sign up for the Oracle Cloud free tier to try out Oracle Cloud Infrastructure DevOps. We’re looking forward to hearing your feedback on DevOps. May all your deployments be successful!