DevOps with Appian

Overview

This page introduces the concept of DevOps and how Appian allows you to easily adopt its practices in your application life cycle.

What is DevOps?

DevOps is a set of practices that helps foster a culture of collaboration between development and operations teams. DevOps practices allow your team to build, test, monitor, and deploy software faster and more reliably.

DevOps Stages

There are two concepts related to DevOps that we will introduce: Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery.

  • Continuous Integration is the practice of publishing incremental changes so the entire team is working off a central place. In Appian, continuous integration means updating your application objects frequently and incrementally. The goal of this approach is to reduce the risk of making conflicting changes or a large number of changes all at the same time.
  • Continuous Delivery is the practice of frequently releasing application updates. In Appian, continuous delivery means deploying your application patches to production on a regular basis. The goal is to deliver value to your users quickly and efficiently.

Ultimately, DevOps empowers you to continuously deliver high quality applications, to identify and prevent bottlenecks throughout your process, and to foster better collaboration in your team. In general, DevOps benefits are additive - the more DevOps practices you invest in, the more efficient your application building life cycle will be. When you’re beginning your DevOps journey, it’s a best practice to start small and add practices incrementally. However you approach it, remember that the goal is to improve your team’s processes so that they can work faster and smarter.

DevOps Monitor

What is DevSecOps?

DevSecOps puts security as a primary concern in DevOps practices. In DevSecOps, security is at the forefront of every part of the application life cycle, including planning and development.

With Appian, security is built in to the platform every step of the way, so your team can concentrate on the security specific to your business. Appian's low-code experience and SAIL technology prevent developers from making common security mistakes, such as exposing cross site scripting (XSS) attack points.

In addition, running on the Appian platform means you don't have to worry about the security of your underlying technology stack. Appian keeps related software libraries up to date and regularly conducts third-party security scans, among other security measures.

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If you are on Appian Cloud, operational security is handled for you. If you are on-premise, work with your security team to put an operational security plan in place.

For more information on application security, see Object Security

The Benefits of DevOps

Build Applications Faster

Your business requirements can change quickly and implementing changes at a fast pace can be challenging. DevOps practices complement agile practices to enable you to adapt your application building process for continuous updates.

Deploy Changes Confidently

Delivering application updates to your users is an important task, and can sometimes hold up your team’s ability to start on a new iteration of updates. DevOps practices streamline this task so that your deployments are fast and reliable, and your team can concentrate on the next update.

Discover Problems Earlier

The feedback loop and troubleshooting process can be hard to manage, especially when you are trying to fix a problem and figure out when you can deploy the fixes at the same time. When you consistently deploy updates to your application, you reduce the risk of introducing mistakes into your application, and you can detect and resolve problems at a faster rate.

Where Do I Start?

The Appian DevOps pipeline consists of four stages: developing with Appian, testing your application, deploying your application changes, and monitoring and gathering feedback about your application. Many of these stages involve automation, but you can start out with manual steps first and convert them to automated processes later on.

Appian enables you to easily integrate DevOps practices and tools at every stage of the application life cycle. To learn how to accomplish this on your team, view these pages in order or skip to a specific topic that interests you.

Continuous Improvement to Applications

Understand how to continuously build and enhance your applications while taking into account how your updates can affect users. Learn how to work more efficiently in a development team by analyzing the impact of your planned changes. Also learn about tools to help peer review one another’s changes for adherence to best practices.

Testing Appian Applications in Appian

Testing is key to making changes more quickly and safely. Learn how to unit test specific objects in your application and how to leverage testing tools for automatic user interface (UI) testing in support of business-driven development. This page also covers tools for load and performance testing, based on predicted usage and load.

Deploy Appian Applications

Learn the different ways Appian allows you to deploy changes to your applications. We specifically walk you through the export and import process, and how to use the Appian Deployment Manager to make your deployments more efficient. The Appian Deployment Manager allows you to automatically deploy changes to your applications.

Monitor Your Applications

Learn how you can proactively monitor your applications performance and system resources. Also learn about what Appian Health Check is and how it can help you monitor a number of design and runtime aspects of your application.

Open in Github Built: Fri, Mar 11, 2022 (04:59:07 PM)

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