For e-commerce businesses, especially big e-commerce platforms with millions of daily visitors, huge computational resources must work efficiently to give pleasing online customer service. Also, to carry out a number of mission-critical functions while saving a big time and money, proficient resource allocation, IT infrastructure optimization, and up-gradation of operational workflows play a vital role for e-commerce business. All these needs can be accomplished by implementing DevOps in e-commerce platforms.
DevOps is the perfect methodology that presents a flawless coding and development platform where the flow of updates and changes can be maintained easily and smoothly (shown in the following diagram). This way, website owners can continually enhance the website (to make it incredibly responsive) based on the user inputs obtained from various engagement mediums.
Following is the DevOps software delivery lifecycle which is absolutely different from a standard Waterfall software delivery pipeline.
Implementation of DevOps for e-commerce website development has far-reaching benefits if leveraged in the correct way. For the same, make sure that you hire a service from a reliable and highest-rated DevOps development company.
The better perspective of DevOps can be explained with its two most significant categories of automation namely continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD). By using the CI/CD model, e-commerce businesses can perk up their conversion rates and performance.
Let’s take a brief look at CI and CD:
1. Continuous Integration (CI):
In this coding philosophy, development teams employ a set of practices with a mechanism to integrate and validate the changes in code. To put it simply, Continuous Integration (CI) makes it possible for DevOps developers to push code with automated testing so that once the code is merged with the main website code, no conflict occurs.
CI sets up an automated and steady way to create, package, and test software applications. This enables developers to change the code more frequently which results in enhanced collaboration and better software quality. It keeps away integration-related bugs that might appear from external tools that are acquired.
2. Continuous Delivery (CD):
Once the CI ends, continuous delivery (CD) comes into play. It automatically delivers the applications to selected infrastructure environments. Even if the work is taking place in multiple environments such as development and testing in addition to production, the CD provides an automated way to push code changes to them. Hence, the state of the product doesn’t matter here as you can release your code at any point in time.
For a systematic implementation of the CI/CD pipeline, you should take into account a few resources such as writing and running automated deployment tests, investing in CI/CD tools, and access to the CI server. CI/CD model together automates the maximum part of the testing and QA in the delivery pipeline. It marks a highly competent and coherent system suitable for modern-day development requirements.
What are the benefits of the CI/CD model to new E-Commerce site owners?
1. Smaller Code Modifications and Rapid Review
With CI/CD, small pieces of code can be integrated quickly and managed easily which is the plus point from the technical side. Moreover, it reduces the risk of sudden consequences and also contains fewer issues that can be fixed later. After the integration is done, code modifications can be tested rapidly using CI/CD model which helps to increase the release rate.
Once the code is pushed into the code repository, continuous testing is started which allows developers to recognize the problem beforehand. With this method, the communication between the teams is enhanced, especially for larger development teams who work remotely and those who work in-house.
2. Fault Isolations
During an error, if the range of issues or negative results is limited, the possibility for damage is minimized which makes systems more secure to maintain. Fault isolation monitors the system, finds out the time of fault occurrence, and prompts its location. Such fault isolations are made faster with CI/CD to ensure early detection and easier implementation. All these lead to reduced bugs in the application.
3. Rapid Development Response Time
The CI/CD model enables testing of as many types of codes as required and also integrates it within your existing product without having any important performance issues. This way, e-commerce websites can impeccably take actions on user demands including updates, new feature introductions, and that too in a quicker manner.
CI/CD model can also be used to test various tools on the website and the versions of the user interface (UI). This enables aligning your website with varying market trends and leads to better optimization of the website’s conversion funnel.
4. More Test Reliability
As bite-size and specific changes are implemented to the system by using CI/CD, test reliability is improved. Meantime to resolution (MTTR) is also minimized due to small code changes and easy fault isolations. More accurate positive and negative tests are performed by the team.
Also Read: Smart Software Testing- A Complete Guide!
5. Reduced Time To Reach Market-Ready State
For a winning e-commerce business, it is vital to connect with customers before your competitors. Setback in delivering features and tools could be a turnaround issue in the e-commerce field. However, if the CI/CD model is leveraged successfully, the amount of time between estimating demand and responding to it can be reduced. It augments your market success rate as you will capture the space before competitors.
As CI/CD speeds up the whole development process, you can launch applications faster. According to McKinsey, it is possible to move code to live production in 15 days with CI/CD instead of 89 days on average.
6. Increased Productivity
The development team can be more productive when implementing CI/CD as rework and wait time is eliminated. The automation of routine processes allows software developers to look after other vital tasks, such as verifying code quality and security. Thus, the software development cycle and time to market is abridged while improving productivity. Following dictation shows the importance of adopting DevOps and CI/CD models.
7. Reduced Number of Backlog
The number of critical and non-critical defects in your backlog gets reduced after implementing CI/CD into the development process. These small or non-critical defects are recognized before production and are fixed prior to the release. Hence, developers and testers get sufficient time to focus on critical or huge issues before the release so that the system is enhanced.
8. Customer Satisfaction
To make your clients happy and gain new customers, it’s essential to easily add new features (preferred by customers) and fix bugs at the earliest. CI/CD methodology helps to maintain products up-to-date by increasing speed with modern technology and makes it easy to attain new customers with positive reviews. This way, e-commerce companies can be flexible and responsive which ultimately results in more satisfied customers.
9. Improves Team Transparency and Accountability
To get incessant feedback from the clients and your team, CI/CD is the best way. It leads to enhanced transparency about any issues in the team and promotes responsibility. CI focuses more on the development team and deals with impacts about build failures, design issues, or merging problems, etc. Whereas CD takes into account the faster release of the product to the end-users.
10. Better Code Quality And Reduced Costs
By using the CI/CD model, the development team can complete multiple builds in a very short period of time employing automated testing which gives a robust, efficient, and glitch-free e-commerce website. This can only be achieved with the best coding facilitated by CI/CD.
Development cost is also reduced because releasing new code with the same process demands fewer hours and efforts by a developer. Besides, reduced errors and faster deployment significantly lowers the overall expense budget.
If incorporating CI/CD is providing these many benefits to your e-commerce website then why not go for it on a priority basis!
Also Read: CI/CD Roundup- Exploring the differences between the leaders in CI/CD
