Software development, the evolution of DevOps has been nothing short of revolutionary. What began as a simple concept has transformed into a best practice that is reshaping the way organisations develop, deploy, and maintain their software. In this blog post, we will take a journey through the evolution of DevOps, from its humble beginnings to its current status as an indispensable part of modern software development.

The benefits of automating deployments for your Java Spring Boot application are undoubtable. Not only is it possible to set up images and run tests or compatibility checks before updating the production environment, but CI/CD providers like CircleCI take a step further by streamlining the entire delivery process from code changes to deployment. Many teams assume that the specifics of their development stack or deployment process will make automation difficult to achieve.

Continuous integration (CI) is the process of integrating changes from multiple contributors to create a single software project. A key component for a smooth CI pipeline is testing. Tests prove that the code does exactly what it says on the tin and that it’s safe to merge the code into the central repository. Tests also anticipate edge cases and ensure that the code handles such cases in a deterministic manner.

DevOps practices in software development have revolutionized the way updates are released. However, many companies entrenched in ITIL practices find it challenging to seamlessly integrate with the DevOps practice of Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery/Deployment (CI/CD). This is because ITIL focuses on stability, which suits older systems, while DevOps is ideal for modern setups with its agile, automated practices.

When a headhunter reached out to me about the CEO role at Cloudsmith (where I started in August!), one of the first things I did was sign up for a trial account. The product's depth and sophistication really impressed me, and contributed to my decision to go ahead with the interviews. (Glad I did.) They were right; our web interface is still largely a Django web app, tightly coupled to the back end, and you can see the Bootstrap showing everywhere.

Last year we launched the Codefresh delivery platform powered by Argo. After the initial launch we started collecting feedback from all companies that tried it (as well as existing customers) and cataloged all feature requests and implementation ideas. The main goal is always to iterate quickly and address the most common issues in the most efficient way possible.