How to maximise control over your DevOps pipeline using Dynatrace AI and Keptn
Today, every organisation is fast becoming a tech company. This has placed greater demand on organisations to meet consumer needs, to drive effective growth and keep reputation intact. These demands create an increasing requirement for senior leaders to have end-to-end visibility of their entire environment pipeline, while ensuring efficiency and quality – with the least impact to end users.
At Avocado, we help organisations successfully become ‘fast, safe and secure’ by leveraging Dynatrace AI integrated with Keptn. Our solution provides end-to-end visibility for our clients with a focus on deployments, testing and rollback to ensure that when something goes wrong, all users across an organisation can see this defect quickly and easily. Notably, the ability to rollback deployments has been a gamechanger for senior leaders within Operations or DevOps team (and their team members) to deliver fast and safe.
In response to consumer and market demands, organisations are implementing a continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipeline (DevOps) within automated cloud environments. However, while there are many CI/CD tools that help organisations build and deploy, when utilised with the power of AI, organisations can respond and remediate development incidents more quickly and effectively.
At Avocado, we help organisations successfully become ‘fast, safe and secure’ – that is the ability to quickly find and fix errors, improve software quality and reduce validation time and new product through CICD powered by AI integrations. We do this by leveraging Dynatrace AI integrated with Keptn – a cloud-native application life-cycle orchestration that allows for faster deployments and automated rollbacks with AI. Keptn is an open-source enterprise-grade control plane for cloud-native continuous delivery and automated operations. Keptn not only orchestrates Continuous Deployment, but it also orchestrates Continuous or Automated Operations through its integrations with other technologies.
Avocado leverages Dynatrace to provide this end-to-end visibility for its clients with a focus on Deployments, Testing and Rollback to ensure that when defects occur, all users across organisation can see it quickly and easily. At the same time, we help clients add value by undertaking a technical and cultural process that merges automation and learning to increase the speed of product delivery.
How it works
Dynatrace AI uses the existing baseline from previous deployments to look at all the data combined and assesses all the current data against the previous baseline during deployment. As part of this assessment, it determines if the new deployment will cause an impact to the environment. If there is evidence that there is a significant impact between the pre and post environments that directly correlates to the new changes it will perform a rollback. The low touch rollback enables the end users to pinpoint these issues and remediate in a timely manner allowing customer experience to not be impacted.
The benefit of the rollback:
- Provides end users with the information to understand what will impact the environment
- Outlines a plan of what to focus on to remediate issues in your own time taking the pressure off production issues
Examples of why a rollback may take place are:
- Recognises that a particular command is causing an issue which is impacting services
- Determines that if the deployment is accepted it may impact storage of a container and therefore cause a spike/outage
- Identifies that a line of code is missing a critical key/password for downstream processes and may break part of the application.
Why should clients care?
- Using Dynatrace it is possible to have full visibility and control over your development pipeline.
- Lower the risk of any deployments, creating an opportunity to be able to do deployments more frequently
- With end-to-end visibility from an application layer Dynatrace can detect any potential issues that might occur because it knows the pattern behaviour before/after due to AI
- Ability to roll-back quickly if issues occur so that the impact to the business is minimised
- Provides the mechanism to reduce MTTR
- Analyse root cause afterwards/quickly
- Lessen the impact on your customers/end-users
- Provides certainty that their environments are functional.
Our Experience
Our solutions and experience within DevOps are extensive. Avocado Consulting has been building and monitoring CI/CD pipelines for years and has developed extensive industry specific frameworks for both. Notably, having the ability to rollback deployments quickly can be a game changer for organisations to go fast and safe.
Avocado has worked with several clients, especially in large government bodies incorporating Dynatrace into software pipelines to provide visibility and control.
