It’s projected crunch time and all teams are working to meet the deadline. Multiple applications, interfaces, and business functionalities need to be tested, bugs fixed, and last-minute changes implemented.
The same problems come up every time. The number of environments is limited, and teams must either wait for their turn to access one of the environments or perform their fixes and tests in an environment shared with other teams, running the risk of affecting each other. The project timeline is extended, and effort is wasted on failed tests, data corruption, and clashes between teams.
Simultaneously, DevOps are struggling to overcome glitches in tests, fix bugs, and establish processes for business as usual. Due to such a high workload, environments are not regularly updated with software versions offering the latest fixes, which leads to even longer deployment cycles and more lost effort.
After the endless iterations of Unit, Integration, End-to-End, User Acceptance (UAT) and Operational Readiness Testing, the day of the roll-out finally arrives, with runbooks, quality gates, and control centers used for overseeing the go-live. The software and its environment will have been tested a couple of times, but many steps require manual intervention and need thorough coordination between teams. Stress levels are high because the uncertainty is high, and the project stakeholders must now evaluate if they incurred risks due to this last-minute frenzy…
Sounds familiar? Many IT projects encounter these or similar bottlenecks. In such scenarios, Environment as Code (EaC) together with cloud services can greatly improve the situation by eliminating some constraints – for projects, end users (often within business units), project sponsors, and project team members. In this blog, we look at how this works and what will be different in future projects.
