Traditionally, DevOps can be cumbersome for the average, non-IT savvy individual to understand. Terms like “source control” or “source code” seem like ambiguous industry jargon, bereft of any real meaning. However, configuration management is a lot easier to understand than you’d think – especially when you take a look at the finished product.. In the following example, you’ll learn how systems administrators, coupled with the right management processes, allowed for huge improvements in enabling a major online property leasing network to digitize the payment process.

Both the software development team at CharterGlobal and the IT team at RentPath combined forces to upgrade several elements of the framework for rentals.com. One of the most important features to this upgrade involved incorporating a feature called RentPay. This innovative solution was to be implemented so as to allow renters and property managers to submit and collect payments online. One of the biggest challenges in completing this project involved merging both the population of landlords and renters onto a single platform.

Identifying the logistics regarding handling of payment information, payment reports to both landlord and renters, along with payment notifications. After careful consideration, our client selected YapStone as their payment provider for this product. In order to effectively integrate this new feature, CharterGlobal analyzed the YapStone’s API. A data model was then designed for the team, along with a UML flow diagram, which was implemented with the new RentPay feature after receiving approval from our client. Upon adding additional pages to the host site, landlords are able to list properties associated with the RentPay feature.

Also, property managers can notify renters to pay rent and/or view their reports through this online platform. The process for on-boarding renters to this application involved the development of sign-up and sign-in functionalities. A 3rd party access management service was also integrated for managing the authentication process of the renter. Logic was also used to verify email addresses and phone numbers for both landlords and renters in real time. The convenience of the payment feature also includes auto-draft functionality, so that every month, renters can automatically send funds via electronic funds transfer – saving precious time and sanity.

The developers at Charter Global helped a national online property rental network unleash an optimized platform for rentals which saw great momentum immediately after the release. In addition to RentPay, Charter Global also helped our client with the following upgrades to their framework.

Improved Search Features

In under 6 months, Charter Global helped Rentals.com update their framework to a single page application with a wealth of new features incorporated into a new design. These features included  new display properties with the integration of Google Maps. Filter and sort capabilities were enhanced as well, enabling users to search for properties based on fine-tuned search results. Moving forward, these results can be refined based on popular search filters like school district, radius, and/or total square property footage.

Enhanced User Experience

As a result of the improvements to the overall design and website architecture, statistics concerning user engagement showed immediate promise. For example, with a better framework, the bounce rate decreased significantly, seeing a 33% decrease as users felt more comfortable staying on the site longer. The overall user engagement time saw a 25% increase, as the new features and enhancements empowers users with a more sophisticated, intuitive search engine. The overall page views increased by 46% as a result of all of these factors combined.

The post Online Payment Features Make Life Easier for Businesses and Customers appeared first on Charter Global.

DevOps and Microservices are two very important technological trends gaining traction in the realm of software development. Both practices were designed to provide professional efficiency and better agility for enterprises. When deployed simultaneously, these two technologies form a perfect union in working to create harmony between your IT department and business units.

Monolithic App Conversion

The microservices architecture was formed using DevOps ideologies that are in use by major companies such as Facebook, Netflix, SoundCloud, and Amazon. Most of these companies, in fact, started out with monolithic applications and grew rapidly into decomposed services. Their communication via network-based messaging protocols such as RESTful APIs eventually evolved into the microservice architecture.

Microservices and DevOps went beyond converting monolithic apps into decomposed services. Basically, DevOps-centric companies changed the way they work: their approaches to software development, development cultures, organizational structures and a strong affinity to cloud-based automation and infrastructure. The same is true with companies with a success record using microservices; they both drive towards development, scalability and speed. These also became the values in agile development.

CI/CD

With the adoption and growth of agile methods, other innovative microservices-based concepts began to emerge. One good example is Continuous Integration (CI). The CI concept combines agile ideologies with microservices to expedite the production and release of software, leading to the development and practice of Continuous Delivery (CD). CD has a quality-centric ideology that aims to speed up production of shippable goods.

Changing the Game with DevOps and Microservices

The microservice architecture introduced changes that were well received by most modern application creators. The result of this is evident, as the productivity rate is now higher and more flexible. Scalable solutions are now delivered to clients requesting such applications.

Charter Global has a dedicated team of experts who deploy microservices in our DevOps fields to create automated tasks in sustainable and high-performing environments. We do this in both smaller and larger scales

Here are some benefits of the DevOps-microservices synergy:

1) Reability: Only minimal errors are experienced with microservices. This is because faults with a microservice function only affect that microservice and its consumers, unlike a monolithic application where a fault can cause the whole monolith to fail.

2) Availability: It takes little downtime to release a whole new version of a particular app using microservices.

3) Deployability: With microservices, expect increased agility, which makes it extremely easy to update and upgrade into newer versions of a service. Agility makes the build shorter and faster, as well as the testing and deploying cycles. This also enables flexibility, service specificity in the replication, security, persistence, and monitoring of configurations.

4) Scalability: You can scale a microservice independently using grids, pools and/or clusters. This characteristic is what makes microservices compatible to cloud’s elasticity.

5) Modifiability: Imagine the possibility of easy modification due to its flexibility to new frameworks, data sources, libraries, and other valuable resources.

6) Management: DevOps and Microservices leverage agile methodology, which divides the application development effort across smaller and more independent teams.

7) Productivity: DevOps works best with Microservices to bring about additional productivity using a common tool set that functions perfectly with both development and operations.

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The ever-growing popularity of DevOps means an increased fine-tuning of the overall DevOps process. This customization of DevOps is already gaining traction, and we can expect to see more in the years ahead. The DevOps community is already finding some trending behavior, such as capitalizing on the ability to leave feedback or soliciting feedback directly on GitHub. Process models for projects are discussed at length on some user boards, with members of the projects exchanging best practices and user stories.

When integrated properly, DevOps has the potential help businesses attain hugly competitive advantages in the marketplace. With that said, take a look at 3 innovative ways units are customizing their DevOps to get the most out of their daily grind.

#1: Cloud and Containers

Making life easier for the end-user begins with the developers in software delivery. By focusing on cloud and container based solutions from ideation to execution – or in the case of software delivery, from the testing phase to production, developers can make room for increased self-service, which is very popular among end-users.

What’s more, developers used to spend hours creating painstaking, elaborate scripts detailing various tasks, tedious to-do lists – creating models to describe each and every one of their work processes. Now, with the introduction of self-service capabilities, these laborious, pre-emptive efforts may be curtailed or done away with entirely, simplifying the process.

An example of this simplicity exists in the execution of commands. When trying to build a Kubernetes pipeline for instance, commands such as “get entire data set” ensure faster, smoother operations for teams involved in the SDLC; whereas previously, these commands were faulty or did not exist at all.

#2: Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence

We can expect to see an increase in machine learning and artificial intelligence integration in tech trends for 2019. According to a DevOps strategist and expert, emerging DevOps operating systems merge concepts involving artificial intelligence and machine learning.

The focus predominately relies on next-level  predictive analytics, with efforts resulting in the production of authentic, valuable business deliverables.  Moreover, a focus on the best application of both Machine learning and artificial intelligence will become hot items in the near future – with 2020 being the year where they will likely shine.

Ultimately, machine learning and artificial intelligence will promote efficiency throughout every phase within the DevOps lifecycle. One may ask, could tasks be done faster? What are methods to reduce the cycle time in a pipeline, from inception to production? Now, assuming the pipeline lasts two days, if competitors offer same-day processing, you can see the difference in competitive advantage. Harnessing Machine Learning and AI will help curb the competition, by completing this process in just one single day or less, other than the typical two days.

#3: DevOps Security

Prioritizing security when it comes to DevOps is a trend we will definitely see gaining traction in 2019. The buzzword “DevSecOps” (Dev Security Ops) may become a household term in the coming years.

The time is nigh to stop the practice of adopting vulnerable frameworks susceptible to attack. Security integration will become part of the lifecycle upon inception, rather than an afterthought – as DevSecOps sees it’s way into the pipeline upon the beginning of development.

Prior to the production phase, security teams should reinforce efforts in checking and validating code to maximize safety and prevent problematic encounters.

The post 3 Areas to Drive DevOps Change appeared first on Charter Global.

The DevOps Perspective

Cross-functional teams can take ownership of the strategic goals, working together to accomplish them while maintaining accountability for the outcomes. This is opposed to passing requirements and product back and forth between IT and the rest of the business. Now, it’s possible to explore diverse approaches, test hypotheses, and invent new ways of doing tasks.

With DevOps, teams can experiment on ideas and receive feedback quickly, as well as put together their plans from the results they get. Instead of being given a set of requirements and a deadline, the team can be charged with an outcome.

These are the most common concerns a CIO faces when dealing with DevOps:

1. Enterprise Architecture:

Traditionally, enterprise architecture plays the role of standardizing and constraining. However, that is not the case in an agile world. Because architectures evolve through teamwork, enterprise architecture should play a hands-on role, simplifying and guiding the enterprise to a flexible and agile architecture.

2. Build Versus Buy:

Conventionally, buying off the shelf seems to be preferred when possible. However, the building allows for a more user-centric, incremental delivery process, which ensures quick feedback as well.

3. Risk:

Acknowledge and get accustomed to risky processes before eliminating or moderating them, as risk-based returns are often underestimated. When it comes to IT leadership, the consequences of agile and DevOps thinking are far-reaching. It is time for IT leaders to take personal responsibility for business outcomes, rather than being passive recipients of business requirements.

4. Governance:

Usually, companies make governance decisions at the granularity of projects or programs. Decision-making becomes tedious and time-consuming when it is made at a singular level,  aiming to fulfill one requirement at a time.

Governance has gone beyond the formal process of approving project proposals. Rather, by generating available resources, true business objectives are more readily visible. In a digital world, IT plays the role of providing requirements rather than accepting requirements from the business.

DevOps involves an approach where cross-functional teams engage in a process utilizing fast-feedback loops and constant adjustments to keep concurrent with business objectives. The IT team is a part of the business teams, working closely together, discovering better ways to meet enterprise needs.

The post How DevOps is Automating the Workplace appeared first on Charter Global.

Companies that incorporate DevOps practices get more done — plain and simple. With a team composed of cross-functional members all working in collaboration, DevOps organizations can deliver with maximum speed, functionality, and innovation.

DevOps enables continuous software delivery with less complex problems to fix and faster resolution of problems. DevOps tools are used to make a seamless platform for this continuous delivery. It has certainly helped organizations such as Etsy, Netflix, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, and Google by improving their performance levels significantly.

Top 15 DevOps Tools

There are many tools associated used by DevOps Engineers in the world of web application development, automation testing, and operating systems. Aside from nailing the right configuration management tool, quite often, engineers seek free and open source platforms, as source code is important when you’re on a budget or seeking ultimate customization. Going with an open source tool can provide the same benefits traditionally found in proprietary software development tools, like a sound monitoring system and proper ci cd. Regardless of the tools employed, processes are equally important.

Jenkins is a DevOps tool for monitoring execution of repeated jobs. This extensible automation engine enables DevOps teams to integrate project changes more easily and access outputs for quickly identifying problems.

Chef is a DevOps tool for achieving speed, scale, and consistency. Chef turns infrastructure into code so that users easily and quickly can adapt to changing business needs.

Puppet strives to build an environment where the software powering everything around us is always available, up-to-date, and accessible from anywhere.

SaltStack is software for data-driven orchestration and configuration management at scale. This DevOps tool is the solution for intelligent orchestration for the software-defined data center.

Docker is a tool that allows users to quickly assemble apps from components and work collaboratively. This open platform for distributed applications is appropriate for managing containers of an app as a single group and clustering an app’s containers to optimize resources and provide high availability.

Ansible is a DevOps tool for automating your entire application life cycle. Ansible is designed for collaboration and makes it much easier for DevOps teams to scale automation, manage complex deployments, and speed productivity.

Juju is a python based orchestration tool developed by canonical. It has a great UI for orchestrating your applications in your cloud environments. You can also use their command line interface to do all the orchestration tasks. You can configure, deploy and scale applications using Juju.

Vagrant is a great tool for configuring virtual machines for a development environment. Vagrant runs on top of VM solutions like VirtualBox, VMware, and Hyper-V etc. It uses a configuration file called Vagrantfile, which contains all the configurations needed for the VM.

Sensu is an open source monitoring framework written in Ruby. Sensu is a monitoring tool specifically built for cloud environments. It can be easily deployed using tools like chef and puppet. It also has an enterprise edition for monitoring.

PagerDuty is an incident management solution supporting continuous delivery strategy and enabling DevOps teams to deliver high-performing apps and superior customer experiences.

A DevOps tool providing cloud log management, Loggly assists in logging data intelligence for modern infrastructure. Simplify log management and solve operational issues more quickly with little time or effort, thanks to Loggly.

OverOps is the DevOps tool that tells teams why bugs happen and why servers crash. Quickly and easily identify when and why code breaks in production with OverOps.

A fully-featured integrated development environment (IDE) for Android, iOS, web, and cloud, Visual Studio IDE is a DevOps tool from Microsoft. DevOps teams use Visual Studio IDE to write code accurately and efficiently while retaining the current file context.

MySQL is a DevOps tool that saves teams time and money by making it faster and easier to deliver high performance, scalable database applications. MySQL offers several editions to meet users’ various business and technical requirements.

Apache Maven is a project management and comprehension tool for DevOps teams. With Maven, users get a reliable tool for managing a project’s build, reporting, and documentation.

Charter Global offers a full range of technology services and solutions, including DevOps, microservices, and Continuous Delivery. Our Open Source Center of Excellence provides a foundation for continuous innovation.

The post Top 15 DevOps Tools in Software Development Company appeared first on Charter Global.

In the DevOps and Agile world, there are four major areas of interest for CIO concerns. This includes governance, risk management, build versus buy decisions, and enterprise architecture. Contrary to the waterfall development, which was about IT control of project delivery, DevOps involves collaboration across the business organization. So, to achieve business goals, cross-functional teams need to be adopted with both business and technology skills.

The DevOps Perspective

These cross-functional teams can take ownership of the strategic goals and work together to accomplish them while being accountable to each other for the outcomes. This is opposed to passing requirements and product back and forth between IT and the rest of the business. Now, it’s possible to explore diverse approaches, test hypotheses, and invent new ways of doing tasks.

With DevOps, teams can experiment on ideas and receive feedback quickly, as well as put together their plans from the results they get. Instead of being given a set of requirements and a deadline, the team can be charged with an outcome.

Regularly, the four CIO concerns from a DevOps perspective usually appear upside down.

Enterprise Architecture:

Traditionally, enterprise architecture plays a role of standardizing and constraining. However, that is not the case in an agile world. Because architectures evolve through teamwork, enterprise architecture should play a hands-on role, simplifying reuse and guiding the enterprise to a flexible and agile architecture.

Build Versus Buy:

Conventionally, buying off the shelf seems to be preferred when possible. However, building allows for a more user-centric, quick-feedback, incremental delivery process.

Risk:

Instead of thinking of risk as something to get rid of or moderate, it just needs to be acknowledged, with a tendency of earning a risk-based return. When it comes to IT leadership, the consequences of agile and DevOps thinking are far-reaching. It is time for IT leaders to take responsibility for business outcomes, rather than being passive recipients of business requirements.

Governance:

Usually, companies make governance decisions at the granularity of projects or programs. What happens now that execution can be made at the level of single piece flow, fulfilling one requirement at a time?

Governance has gone beyond the formal process of approving project proposals, to generating resources so as to realize business objectives. In a digital world, IT plays the role of providing requirements rather than accepting requirements from the business.

DevOps involves an approach where cross-functional teams engage in a process that utilizes fast-feedback loops and constant adjustment to realize company objectives. The IT team is a part of the business teams, working closely together, discovering better ways to meet enterprise needs.

Charter Global

With industry-leading technology services offered by Charter Global, backed by extensive experience and results-oriented approach, your IT business needs and staffing solutions will be handled effectively.

The post DevOps Calls for New IT Leadership Concepts appeared first on Charter Global.

Here are the innovative ways that govern how DevOps will be fine-tuned:

#1: Cloud and Containers

It’s the right time to make things easier for developers aiming at software delivery to the end-user or into production. Also, this has the additional benefit of making room for increased self-service. Nothing stops users from having a sort of self-service catalog, making it possible to simply use a click of a button alongside voicing out what you want done. Always scripting out, modeling out, and just laboring from start to finish should be curtailed or gotten rid of.

There should be self-service capabilities. In essence, when trying to build a Kubernetes pipeline for instance, there should be a capability to achieve it by giving out commands such as “go get the entire data”. So, there is a faster operation for the team.

#2: Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence

Also, increased machine learning and artificial intelligence integration will happen this year. According to a DevOps strategist and experts, the DevOps operating system about to emerge is going to integrate artificial intelligence and machine learning. The aim is to transit predictive analytics to its next level — the resultant effect would be authentic business value delivery. Machine learning and artificial intelligence aren’t just buzzwords, but the future is in designing innovative ways to apply them. Now, they will be defined where they will apply when it comes to a real-life pipeline.

Ultimately, machine learning and artificial intelligence will promote efficiency through the entire DevOps phases. So, some of the questions in this regard should be: could tasks be done faster? What are the methods that can help cut down the cycle time in a pipeline? A pipeline is from the time of idea commencement to when it is ready or available in production. Now, assuming the pipeline lasts two days, but the competitor is getting it done in just one day, there is a major loss of competitive advantage. So, there has to be a way of getting it done in one day just like the competitor, or even less than one day.

DevOps Security

Prioritizing security when it comes to DevOps is a trend to pursue in 2019. This is why DevSecOps is not just a buzzword but a reality. It’s time to quit adopting vulnerable frameworks, and to commence integration of security into the pipeline. The security team should re-enforce efforts in checking as well as validating code prior to pushing it into production.

Charter Global

At Charter Global, we are known to deliver outstanding results in DevOps and other high tech tools, practices, and softwares to suit all classes of users.

The post Top 3 Innovative Ways to Fine-Tune DevOps appeared first on Charter Global.

Reliable statistics show that a lot of organizations are now using DevOps. The number of those who used it grew even higher, up to 17% in 2018 compared to 10% in 2017.

Here are the top exciting trends that would characterize DevOps adoption in 2019:

#1: The Primary Focus will be Automation

Automation has become the buzzword when it comes to DevOps. In essence, it is gearing towards the possibility of no-touch automation. DevOps operates at a 6 C’s cycle; it’s important to deploy automation between the stages. This is key and would become the main goal.

#2: Focus on DevOps Assembly Lines

Also, the future points to a shift in focus to DevOps Assembly Lines, instead of the CI (Continuous Integration) Pipelines. Users are able to experience a complete visualization of the app, starting from source control and extending to production. Everything will become visible in just one pane of glass. It goes beyond CI now, and extends to continuous delivery (CD). Organizations are moving towards gaining more insight into the automation of their software development process. The shift will take place from CI pipelines to Assembly lines (DevOps).

#3: Microservices Architecture Adoption on the Rise

DevOps and Microservices complement each other. These independent entities, microservices, do not create dependencies; and when something goes wrong, they don’t break other systems. Companies are taking advantage of microservices architecture to accomplish deployments as well as add new features in an easy manner.

It is expected that companies will turn to microservices architecture, which would boost efficient delivery and runtime.

#4: Testers will Acquire Coding Skill

In DevOps, testers who are skilled in coding and automating scripts for testing a wide range of cases are in demand. Gaining insight into the wide range of DevOps tools and the ability to automate scripts is key to software development.

Testers should bear in mind that manual testing will become obsolete in 2019. Therefore, it is important to acquire coding and automation skills. Adopting automation in testing accomplishes two major goals: it boosts efficiency and promotes faster delivery of features to the market.

At Charter Global, our team of developers is already working with these possibilities, as we deliver the best DevOps services to our customers.

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