Workflows in Release and Deploy

Introduction

Organizations struggle to create repeatable, efficient processes to streamline communication and application development. For instance, 49.3% of companies are dealing with too many manual processes while 50% of DevOps teams have difficulties communicating and collaborating with other teams. This limits visibility, productivity, and consistency, causing delays and faulty applications to be released.

Challenges

1. Manual steps cause many errors and delays

Challenge: Release and deployment processes involve many manual tasks, ranging from managing workflows to deploying applications and testing them in production. Repetitive, manual tasks cause inefficiencies and delay application releases.

Solution: Streamlined release and deployment practices prevent inefficiencies and inconsistencies that arise from manual efforts. Automating manual tasks significantly reduces errors in the process.

2. Lack of project progress visibility

Challenge: The need for more visibility across release and management processes makes it difficult to account for delays and other potential issues in the SDLC. For example, users and developers struggle to find out the progress of in-house-built applications, which creates ambiguity about project completion and delivery time.

Solution: SDLC workflow solutions help developers and businesses create consistent processes for developing and reviewing projects’ progress in real time, ensuring that projects are effectively managed and more likely to be delivered on time.

Key Differences between Release and Workflows

Before understanding workflows, it is essential to understand the key differences between Releases and Workflows and where both are used.

Releases	Mainly focused on moving the software code through different stages to the production using CI/CD setup.	Multiple people are involved in the process and can view the actions performed by other individuals	The time taken to execute may vary based on the number of tasks. It is usually from hours to weeks.
Workflows	Mainly focused on performing the utility function for an individual user.	Individual handles and executes the process.	The time taken to execute workflows is usually in minutes to hours.

Defining Workflows

Workflows are a combination of tasks that can be executed in an interactive session with pre-built best practices. Once this is established, users select their preferred workflows and execute them with a step-by-step guide to set up applications and processes.

Workflows guide users through the step-by-step execution of tasks, reducing complexity in setting up environments. They leverage cloud benefits such as scalability and availability, and optimize applications for the cloud for improved performance and reliability. Workflows can also help ensure adherence to cloud security and compliance best practices and can be automated.

Benefits of Workflows

Workflows provide support for various functions across environments, applications, and security, streamlining:

1. How environments are created, modified, and torn down
2. The way in which applications are onboarded, managed, integrated
3. Processes for enforcing security and access controls

By developing automated, standardized practices, organizations effectively reduce the likelihood of outages and inefficiencies as they maintain stable applications and environments.

Tracking Automated Workflows

Platform engineering teams must understand the specific metrics and patterns associated with each workflow and its category to ensure proper workflow implementation. This allows them to assess their effectiveness and understand why they may be performing well or poorly.

For example, dashboards list metrics which allow users to answer several important questions, such as:

Questions that metrics answer	How many executions are successful and how frequently does this occur?	How are workflows progressing and how long do they take to execute?	The time taken to execute may vary based on the number of tasks. It is usually from hours to weeks.
Collected metrics	Total successful of executions and % of all executions that are successful.	The status of workflows being in progress, failed, completed, or aborted and their average time to completion.	Total number of licensed users and the workflow adoption rate (%) among them.

Reviewing Workflow Analytics

To effectively leverage workflow analytics, Digital.ai Release and Deploy users must understand how to access and review them across the platform. This demo provides a step-by-step guide on how to track the creation, execution frequency, success rates, and user adoption of automated workflows.