Continuous Delivery CI/CD

The ActiveState Platform is a universal package management solution for Python, Perl and Tcl. For DevOps, it provides pre-built runtime environments that help create CI/CD pipelines which are:

• Highly Reproducible – provides a single, central “source of truth” for all runtimes for developers and DevOps, eliminating “works on my machine” issues.
• Simple & Fast – all runtime components are pre-built and pulled directly into each CI/CD environment, eliminating complex custom runtime setup and speeding runs.
• Secure & Compliant – all runtime components are built from source, delivering transparency for all Python, Perl & Tcl artifacts in production workloads.  

All of which means a reduction in CI/CD pipeline maintenance time, which can enable more deliveries of your codebase with greater confidence. The ActiveState Platform can fit into your existing workflow by providing runtimes that can either be pulled directly into your CI/CD environments or else pulled into your container build system:

Continuous Integration: Delivery vs Deployment

Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery or Deployment (CI/CD) is a software development best practice that allows for better synchronization between development teams and operations teams in order to deliver updates of your codebase to production with confidence, more frequently.

CI/CD is typically implemented in one of two ways:

• Continuous Delivery – updates are delivered to staging environments for further testing or assessment
• Continuous Deployment – updates are delivered directly to the production environment, improving timeliness

The preference for a continuous deployment process over continuous delivery is really one of risk tolerance, since not every organization is willing to automate production deployments of any code that successfully passes the CI/CD pipeline. 

No matter where in your development process you choose to deliver or deploy your code changes, CI/CD automation provides for:

• Automated tests, which significantly decreases the need for manual testing of code changes
• Greater confidence that code changes won’t break the application
• Increased frequency of delivery/deployment 

But there are three key issues that can throw a monkey wrench into any CI/CD pipeline:

• Reproducibility – if systems are inconsistent throughout the dev and CI/CD chain, time is wasted reproducing environments in order to verify bugs/bug fixes
• Transparency – understanding the original source for all artifacts throughout the chain can improve both security and compliance of production workloads.
• Speed – the time to build a container can exceed the time to run the process it was built for.

The ActiveState Platform for DevOps

For most organizations, a fully automated CI/CD implementation as part of their software development process remains aspirational. ActiveState’s State of CI/CD survey shows that less than 40% of the more than one thousand respondents surveyed have implemented a majority of CI/CD best practices to date. 

Prime reasons for this shortfall include:

• Runtime Inconsistencies – despite the use of containers, inconsistencies occur between dev and CI/CD systems due to unpinned dependencies, differing OS-level dependencies, poorly named vendored dependencies, and so on
• Synchronizing Dev & CI/CD Systems – local dev and CI/CD systems tend to diverge over time because developers rarely rebuild/reinstall their development environment from scratch if they need to update a single package or OS-level dependency.
• Toolchain Maintenance – maintaining multiple toolchains, one for each OS and/or language supported, increases overhead, meaning teams are spending more time on tool maintenance and less time coding 

While the ActiveState Platform is not a silver bullet for solving all CI/CD challenges, it can help you optimize your existing implementation by providing:

• Reproducibility – eliminate “works on my machine” issues and simplify the troubleshooting of bugs. ActiveState’s single, central source of truth for your runtime ensures development environments and CI/CD environments are always in sync.
• Speed – pre-built runtime environments decrease the time to build containers. Caching can help cut down on runtime creation times for repeated runs, but not when you’re doing rapid development and changing your dependencies. 
• Simplicity – using non-standard runtimes with cloud-native CI/CD solutions can be complex. But by pre-building your custom runtime environment on the ActiveState Platform, you can simply pull it into your cloud-native CI/CD chain. 

And finally, the ActiveState Platform provides a universal, cloud-based build tool for Python, Perl and Tcl, so you can automate the building of runtime environments from source code, improving both the security and compliance of your production workloads.

Ready to see for yourself? You can try the ActiveState Platform by signing up for a free account using your email or GitHub credentials. Or sign up for a free demo and let us show you how can help optimize your existing CI/CD implementation.

Frequently Asked Questions