Many business people have years of experience in business development activities. They are aware of the role of cultural philosophy and a set of tools and practices to automate and integrate the processes between the IT and software development teams. They are willing to reap benefits from efficiently using the DevOps as per their requirements on the cross-team communication & collaboration, team empowerment, and technology automation.
Before Moving Ahead, Let’s Discuss What Actually DevOps Is?
DevOps is a set of engineering philosophies, cultural practices, and tools designed to promote the collaboration between the development and operation teams. This successful collaboration reduces friction between groups and accelerates the software development lifecycle. This collaboration also enables fast software delivery and ensures quick feedback.
DevOps breaks down silos usually found in the usual software development teams. Many businesses usually merge development and operations teams into one unit. They work together across the development process and include everyone involved in the development lifecycle, particularly security analysis and quality assurance specialists. Everyone in the development team works together according to the DevOps culture.
How GitOps Is Connected with DevOps?
GitOps borrows some ideas from DevOps and successfully combines the version control system Git and operations, especially the resource management aspect of the software development. It uses the available infrastructure process as code, code reviews, version control, and CI/CD pipelines.
GitOps amplifies the available DevOps practices.
Deploying the infrastructure through the code eliminates the point and click process teams involved in everything to set up the environments and reduce the time to market. This method uses proper merge requests for reducing the intimidation of deploying horrific infrastructure. Anyone can review the alterations before merging them into the main branch.
Role of GitOps in DevOps
DevOps successfully breaks down the silo mentality and also brings together all teams. This is the main reason why they efficiently work toward a common goal. GitOps is a DevOps best practice that shares principles, especially automation, continuous improvement, and collaboration. It is simple to incorporate a GitOps workflow into devotedly employed DevOps techniques.
Top DevOps techniques already make use of Git. It is a famous version management system used worldwide. GitOps progression revolves around such a thing. Git effectively lets quickly and frequently try out the latest infrastructure and infrastructure links by declarative wiring code and approaching it to a repo.
How APIOps Improve API Development?
During the past two decades, application programming interfaces have become an essential component of modern life. These pieces of code let data readily flow between various systems and interconnect applications and databases in other ways. APIs can be thought of as products similar to any other business offering. Efficient management of this lifecycle is essential to get the desired benefits.
The most excellent API lifecycle management involves a complete and step-by-step process of planning, implementing, developing, testing, and versioning. This process involves challenging things and manual processes in part in the past.
APIOps would be the best way to deploy API development as it applies the concepts of both GitOps and DevOps. The self-service and automated tools of APIOps make sure the API is developed with the desired quality and enhanced security.
API deployment with APIOps acts as a solution for enhanced audit capabilities, receiving feedback without any mess and compliant policy enforcement according to the regulations. APIOps increases the productivity of API development using DevOps by combining with GitOps, which plays a handy role in applying quick roll back changes.
However, things are improving in our time due to automation as a part of the process and an end-to-end solution for application programming interface lifecycle management by combining it with the modern software development methods’ agile nature like DevOps and GitOps.
Take a look at how API Development Improves by APIOps.
1. Quality vs. Speed
There is a battle between quality and speed when it comes to the application programming interface lifecycle management. A business immediately has to get a new or upgraded API into good service. You can research the manual and conventional methods of API lifecycle management that are not sustainable in the fast-paced business environment.
Though some technological advancement is accessible today, there is only so much human effort to keep pace with the complex technological ecosystem relying on constant innovation. Efficient API lifecycle management is vital when an organization expects to move forward. However, existing practices cannot support the maximum pace.
2. A New Method for Application Programming Interface Management
Many organizations worldwide adopt a new method of API management instead of having to trade off the overall quality for speed. They have found an excellent method to develop and manage the code in less time and human effort, devoid of compromising the quality. The new approach, dubbed APIOps, combines APIs, GitOps, and DevOps.
The best DevOps is designed for increasing deployment speeds while ensuring software quality. GitOps uses the version control system to provide a workflow that successfully directs changes via a pull request and code review process.
However, APIOps is the better of these two systems. Many businesses nowadays switch to APIOps, which makes the API lifecycle management process automated, reliable, and fast. It works on the principle of continuous development and includes the 5 steps.
3. Design
The API spec and trial suite creation in an API plan tool is the first phase in this process. The complete API design tool has to list specifications automatically and support the unit and governance test generation as per the spec. The API is pushed into a version control system, especially Git and triggers the first automated governance checkpoint.
4. Build
APIs can be built with the best tool in any programming environment. If the development is completed, the code is checked into the version control, and tests are triggered, especially unit tests built in the design section.
5. Deploy
If an API is ready for deployment, a declaration configuration file is generated from the design of the API as part of the pipeline. This file is stored in the version control, making it very easy to track all changes and roll back proper deployments in case of any issue.
The declarative configuration is used to deploy the API to an API gateway for supporting the APIOps by registering the new or updated endpoints and automatically applying the governance, security, and optional policies to manage it.
6. Publish
Once the API passes the comprehensive tests and behaves as planned, it is ready for publishing to consumers. Registering an API in the developer portal with APIOps lets self-serve access and adds specifications processes are automated.
These steps are essential to make an application programming interface discoverable and consumable. They need protracted or manual processes. They push it low down the list of favorite activities of engineers. Publishing process automation removes such a burden and makes certain each API deployed is published correctly and consistently.
7. Operate
Once an API has been published, it has to be managed ongoing. It may require scaling vertically or horizontally, retired, or updated as per the demand of customers and the organization’s goals.
The declarative composition and automated authority throughout the API process make certain that upcoming operations are seamlessly managed and scaling an application programming interface for handling peak periods of traffic.
Benefits of API deployments with APIOps
There are so many benefits of API deployments with the APIOps. You can focus on the following details and get enough assistance to use them as per your needs.
1. Scalability
APIOps has several benefits. However, API development management landscapes develop, and the overall complexity to manage them also increases. This solution is helpful to meet so many challenges like,
– Maintaining an overview of the complete environments and API management instances
– Tracking critical changes to application programming interfaces and policies
– Ensuring that every change that has been deployed also has an audit trail
2. Security
This solution successfully provides so many security-related benefits. You can focus on everything about the GitOps method, operators, and individual developers and make certain how such things do not directly access the application programming interface management instance to apply updates.
Users push changes to a Git repository and the extractor and publishing pipelines to read and apply them to the API Management instance. Users can grant elevated permissions based on cases one after another for a limited time.
3. Operations
APIOps can maximize DevOps productivity for API development and deployment. You can use the ability to use Git operations with this system and quickly roll back changes that behave in unexpected ways. The commit graph includes all commits and helps a lot with post-mortem analysis.
Application programming interface operators manage several environments for the same application programming interfaces. It is usual to have so many stages of an API adequately deployed in a shared API management instance or to various API management instances.
The Git repository is the single source of truth and is designed to show which version of applications is currently deployed to a cluster. The API operator knows that anyone has new code to review when such a person makes a PR in the Git repository.
Get Your Code Faster Time-to-market
Everyone with expectations for improving the complete API deployment can focus on and use every option to combine the DevOps and GitOps as guidelines. They can get the desired benefits and achieve their goal of an enhanced business process. Users of these systems are happy about an array of good things. They are confident to suggest such systems to others, as they can quickly get code to market faster, reuse services more often and be more productive.
