VCS: the essential tool for DevOps
Version control systems like Git, Subversion, and Mercurial provide a logical means to organize files and coordinate their creation, controlled access, updating, and deletion across teams and organizations. Version control is closely related to automation. In fact, automation and continuous integration rely on these files for the source code of the automation itself, as well as the configuration to be automated and the data to be distributed.
In order to improve software delivery, teams need to use version control for source code, test and deployment scripts, infrastructure and application configuration information, and the many libraries and packages they depend upon. In the VCS, teams must be able to query the current (and historical) state of their environments. Version control also offers direct benefits such as disaster recovery and auditability.
This is why at SouthLights believe that there are many reasons which VCS is important, but these are the top 3 that we highlight.
3 Reasons Why VCS is Critical for DevOps
1. Avoiding dependency issues in modern containerized applications
Microservices have essentially become the default for the development of new applications, and more and more teams are containerizing monolithic applications as well. With this trend, dependency issues have entered center stage as something that can make or break a project.
In any kind of project, whether containerized or not, dependency has always been a big concern. Dependency hell, affectionately called JAR hell in Java, is common in applications across multiple languages and has been since early programming days. Eventually, the linear path of building new features and fixing bugs is bound to clash with the parallel development of another feature by another team or hotfixes or a number of other things.
For DevOps, finding the balance between moving quickly and maintaining application reliability is crucial. Part of that means cultivating traceability, gaining visibility into the changes made to the code and understanding how those changes affected application performance. Access to the different code iterations can reveal where new changes exposed dependencies that clash with other parts of the code.
2. Version control is tied to higher DevOps performance
The annual State of DevOps study found, in 2014, that “version control was consistently one of the highest predictors of performance.” Top performing engineering teams were able to achieve higher throughput – 8x deployment frequency and 8000x faster deployment lead times.
Since these original findings in 2014, version control hasn’t lost its significance relative to performance. From this year on, VCS was tied to success in Continuous Delivery workflows, which in turn contribute to higher IT performance.
What’s causing the high correlation between version control and high performance? Well, it’s partially related to the ability to more easily view and understand how changes to one part of the code caused problem across the application. But, it has more to do with how the VCS enables coding practices like Continuous Integration and, as a result, Continuous Delivery/Deployment.
3. Supports building more reliable applications
The same study found that applications built with comprehensive version control systems were more reliable. They experienced 50% lower change failure rates and 12x faster MTTR (issue resolution time).
It’s not hard to draw the connections between high performing DevOps teams and reliable applications. DevOps role in any organization is to enable successful advancements, and because change is often the source of failures, there’s a big focus on mitigating the risk of change.
Although it may seem counterintuitive at first, the first step is usually making smaller changes more frequently (hence the popularity of CI). Just as important, and even more so in an accelerated workflow, is tracking those changes so that everyone is looking at the same thing and so that troubleshooting is easier in the case of failures.
Git
One of the most popular version control system that DevOps teams use at SouthLights is Git. It’s what is called a distributed VCS which means that there is no single, centralized code base. Rather, different branches are responsible for hosting different pieces of code. This helps developers and engineers work with the code in local and/or offline environments.
In this space, we recomend tools like:
Version control is such a basic concept that many people do it naturally with their own personal files. But it’s importance, especially for DevOps, can’t be overlooked. It’s directly correlated to IT performance, which has a clear impact on company revenue and success.
At SouthLights, we implement VCS to allow us to maintain and create a more reliable code in organizations around the world. If you want to improve the way you deploy and trace your applications, you can contact us here.
