workflow

In response to a twitter thread about questions to identify whether a applicant would want to accept a job, one of the most brilliant responses was by Lars Albertsson (@lalleal) asking “How much does it cost your company to buy a thing for 1000 EUR? Spend a day chasing approvals, and you are at > 100% overhead.”

Legacy organizations with legacy products have designed complex and rigid processes for releasing software into a production environment. The production environment is special and has limited access and compliance and constraints and needs to always work so developers shouldn’t even try to look at it.

Except things change and stuff breaks. So now what? Continuous deployment to the rescue!?

In support of simplifying the Segregation of Duties pipeline definition, the Lab Assistant app will now create a dotenv formatted file and deliver it to the newly created branch. This perfectly meshes with what the Auto Deploy Image is expecting to allow Segregation of Auto DevOps Duties.

To help make it clear what the intermediate step is between the existing Deployment project example and real DevOps, I created a streamlined version.

The original recording was 40 minutes of chatting and pipelines and other nonsense. I sliced it up and we are left with about 9 minutes of the process and 4 minutes explaining a few pipeline jobs in greater detail.

When transitioning from classic methods to Agile and DevOps, the gatekeepers can feel stuck in limbo. The first step to easing the transition for security reviews, change management, and independent verification is to give them a place they control. As of GitLab 13-ish, the existing roles do not meet this need, despite the merge request approval with branch, tag, and environment protections.

This article lays out a 2 project workflow with an automated merge request handoff to support the access levels needed for segregation of duties with Auto DevOps.

When multi-project workflows are necessary, the hand-offs can lead to repetition. To alleviate that, Lab Assistant will automate the hand-off for a multi-project workflows.

As DevOps evolves, new technologies enable better processes. If your team has a process defined by tradition, take a fresh look. Use some of these examples and keep an eye out for other accelerators as time passes.

Branches for input, merges for admission, tags for output.

GitLab released a dozen page book about Git Branching Strategies to serve as a high-level overview of branching strategies and how they work.