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Recommendations for designing a workload development supply chain

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Applies to this Azure Well-Architected Framework Operational Excellence checklist recommendation:

OE:06 Build a workload supply chain that drives proposed changes through predictable, automated pipelines. The pipelines test and promote those changes across environments. Optimize a supply chain to make your workload reliable, secure, cost effective, and performant.

This guide describes the recommendations for designing a workload development supply chain that's based on continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines. Develop a supply chain to ensure that you have a predictable, standardized method of maintaining your workload. CI/CD pipelines are the manifestation of the supply chain, but you should have a single supply chain. And you might have several pipelines that follow the same processes and use the same tools.

Incorporate a supply chain to protect your workload from damage that can occur when you don't properly manage workload changes. Always be aware of the state of your workload, so you're not at risk of experiencing unpredictable behavior. This risk compounds if you need to spend critical time retracing unaccounted for changes when issues arise. To minimize these risks, standardize the processes and tools that define your supply chain, and ensure that your workload team fully commits to their use.

Definition

Term Definition
Supply chain In cloud workloads, a supply chain is a standardized suite of tools and processes that you use to affect infrastructure and application change across environments.

Key design strategies

Note

The recommendations in this guide refer to workload environments in a code promotion chain. Sandbox or other exploratory and proof-of-concept environments require less rigor and structure.

The following recommendations can help you define the core tenets of your supply chain.

Enforce a strict policy of automated template-based deployments

Make proposed workload changes through supply chain processes and tools. Enforce a strict policy of automated template-based deployments. This method helps ensure that your workload's configuration across all environments is standardized, well-defined, and tightly controlled. For environments in a code promotion chain, don't perform updates by using manual processes or human interaction with the cloud platform's control plane, for example the portal or an API. Incorporate all changes to the environment through a pipeline by following deployment practices that you define. To help enforce this policy, consider limiting access to read-only as a default and using an access authorization gate to allow write access.

An important aspect of this tenet is that all changes are proposed changes until they're deployed into production. Through automated testing, like integration and smoke testing, you enable your supply chain to automatically reject changes.

Deploy repeatable and immutable infrastructure as code

Deploy repeatable and immutable infrastructure as code (IaC). IaC is the management of infrastructure in a descriptive model that uses a versioning system that mirrors source code. When you create an application, the same source code should generate the same binary every time it's compiled. In a similar manner, an IaC model generates the same environment every time it's applied.

Incorporate IaC to ensure that your team follows a standard, well-established process. Some organizations designate a single individual or small group of individuals to deploy and configure infrastructure. When you implement a fully automated process, infrastructure deployments require less management from individuals. The responsibility is transferred to the automation process and tooling. Team members can initiate infrastructure deployments to maintain consistency and quality.

Design your workload as a logical group of components that you can bundle into one template to make deployments easy and repeatable. You can think of these bundles as stamps or units of scale. For more information, see Deployment Stamps pattern. When you need to deploy your workload to scale out into another region or zone within the same region, deploy a stamp by using a pipeline. Depending on how you design your stamps, you might deploy a subset of your workload instead of the entire workload. Include networking components in your IaC pipelines to ensure that your deployment stamps automatically connect to existing resources.

To optimize your IaC pipeline for consistency and efficiency, design an immutable infrastructure rather than a mutable infrastructure. Implement an immutable infrastructure to ensure that all systems in scope are replaced with the updated configuration simultaneously and identically with each deployment.

Use the same set of deployment artifacts across all environments

Use one set of code assets and artifacts across all environments and pipelines. A common pain point for organizations is when nonproduction environments are different from production environments. Building production and nonproduction environments manually can result in mismatched configurations between the environments. This mismatch slows down testing and makes it more likely that changes might harm a production system. An IaC approach minimizes these problems. When you use IaC automation, you can use the same infrastructure configuration files for all environments to produce almost identical environments. You can add parameters to the infrastructure configuration files and adjust them to meet the requirements for each environment.

To control costs, there's typically a variance between production and nonproduction environments. You often don't need the same degree of redundancy and performance in nonproduction environments as you do in production. The number and SKU of your resources might differ between environments. Ensure that you control and understand the variance by using standardized parameters to help you maintain predictability as you make changes.

Reflect the organizational structure in the supply chain

Reflect your organizational structure in your supply chain and pipeline designs. Your organization might be siloed among teams. Each team might manage a part of the supply chain. For example, many organizations have teams that manage infrastructure domains, like networking, data, and compute resources. These teams are separate from development teams that manage application development, testing, and deployments. In some organizations, development and infrastructure teams are incorporated into DevOps teams that collectively manage all infrastructure and application deployments. There are many ways to organize the teams that are involved in a supply chain. Your supply chain relies on all the teams seamlessly working together. Ensure that all teams follow standard processes and use standard tools to make the supply chain as efficient as possible.

Your supply chain might rely on third-party vendors if you outsource parts of the workload lifecycle. These vendors are just as critical to the success of your supply chain as internal resources. Ensure that there's a mutual agreement across all teams about the processes and tools that you use.

Choose the right deployment method

Standardize your deployment method. Talk to the product owner about the acceptable amount of production downtime for your workload. Depending on how much, if any, downtime is acceptable, you can choose the deployment method that's right for your requirements. Ideally, you should perform deployments during a maintenance window to reduce complexity and risk. If no downtime is acceptable, employ a blue-green deployment method.

Use a progressive-exposure approach to reduce the risk of introducing undetected bugs to your customers at large. Also known as canary deployments, this method deploys to controlled groups of users in a gradual sequence. It catches issues before they affect more users. The initial rollout group might be a subsection of your customers that are aware of the rollout strategy. This subsection of customers can tolerate some amount of unexpected behavior and provide feedback. Or it might be a group of internal users, which helps contain the blast radius of bugs during the rollout.

When you define your deployment method, adopt a standard policy of only deploying the smallest viable change in each deployment. Depending on factors like the criticality of the workload and complexity of the components, determine the smallest viable change. If you use an immutable infrastructure, the smallest viable change is typically the deployment of resources with the latest configuration to replace resources that run the previous version. If you use a mutable infrastructure, you might decide that the smallest viable change is only a single update on the group of resources in scope.

Follow a layered approach

Follow a layered approach to reflect different lifecycles. Foundational layers should remain static throughout most of the workload lifecycle, and application layers change frequently. To account for these differences, you should have different pipelines to effect changes at each layer.

A landing zone is at the lowest layer. A landing zone is a logical grouping of foundational elements, like subscriptions, management groups, resource groups, governance functions, and networking topology. A landing zone enables you to easily deploy and manage your workload, and provides central operations teams, or platform teams, with a repeatable approach to an environmental configuration. To deliver consistent environments, all Azure landing zones provide a set of common design areas, a reference architecture, a reference implementation, and a process to modify a deployment to fit your design requirements. The Azure landing zone design principles provide recommended practices based on policy-driven governance alongside subscription democratization. A landing zone should require minimal changes over the course of your workload lifecycle. To see an example of a landing zone, see What is an Azure landing zone. This conceptual architecture provides a set of opinions recommended for Azure.

Your core infrastructure and functions, like ingress and egress network controllers, load balancing, network routing solutions, DNS management, and core servers, should also require infrequent major changes. But they might require frequent configuration updates.

Your application and data layer requires frequent configuration updates and frequent infrastructure changes. These components should have the most dynamic pipelines.

Incorporate comprehensive types of testing

Plan for a holistic testing strategy. A core tenet of system reliability is the shift left principle. Developing and deploying an application is a process that's depicted as a series of steps going from left to right. You shouldn't limit testing to the end of the process. As much as possible, shift testing to the beginning, or to the left. Errors are cheaper to repair when you catch them early. They can be expensive or impossible to fix later in the application lifecycle.

Test all code, including application code, infrastructure templates, and configuration scripts. The environment that runs applications should be version-controlled and deployed through the same mechanisms as application code. You can test and validate the environment by using the same testing paradigms that your teams already use for application code.

When possible, use automated testing to ensure consistency. Include the following types of testing in your supply chain design.

  • Unit testing: Unit tests are typically run as part of a continuous integration routine. Unit tests should be extensive and quick. They should ideally cover 100 percent of the code and run in under 30 seconds.

    Implement unit testing to verify that the syntax and functionality of individual modules of code work the way that they should, for example producing a defined output for a known input. You can also use unit tests to verify that IaC assets are valid.

    Apply unit tests to all code assets, including templates and scripts.

  • Smoke testing: Smoke tests verify that a workload can be stood up in a test environment and performs as expected. Smoke tests don't verify the interoperability of components.

    Smoke tests verify that the deployment methodology for the infrastructure and the application works, and that the system responds as intended after the process finishes.

  • Integration testing: Integration tests ensure that the application components operate individually, and then determine whether components can interact with each other as they should.

    It can take a considerable amount of time to run a large integration test suite. That's why it's best to incorporate the shift left principle and perform testing early in the software development lifecycle. Reserve integration tests for scenarios that you can't test with a smoke test or unit test.

    You can run long-running test processes on a regular interval if needed. A regular interval offers a good compromise and detects interoperability issues between application components no later than one day after they're introduced.

    Some testing scenarios benefit from manual runs. Use manual testing when you need to introduce human interactivity elements into tests.

  • Acceptance testing: Depending on the context, you can manually perform acceptance testing. It can be partially or fully automated. Acceptance testing determines whether the software system meets the requirement specifications.

    The main purpose of this test is to evaluate the system's compliance with the business requirements and determine whether the system meets the required criteria for delivery to end users.

Implement quality gates in code promotion processes

Implement quality gates throughout your code promotion process via testing. Deploy your code into lower environments, like development and testing, and up through higher environments, like staging and production. As your deployment passes through quality gates, ensure that it meets your quality targets before changes go to production. Your business requirements determine what the focus of your quality gates are. Also consider the fundamental Well-Architected Framework principles: Security, Reliability, and Performance Efficiency.

Also integrate approval workflows into your quality gates. Clearly define and automate approval workflows when appropriate. Define quality acceptance criteria into your automation, so you can move through your gates efficiently and safely.

Azure facilitation

Azure DevOps is a collection of services that help you build a collaborative, efficient, and consistent development practice.

Azure Pipelines provides build and release services to support CI/CD in your applications.

GitHub Actions for Azure integrates with Azure to simplify deployments. Use GitHub Actions to automate CI/CD processes. You can create workflows that build and test every pull request to your repository, or deploy merged pull requests to production.

You can use Terraform, Bicep, and Azure Resource Manager for IaC deployments. Depending on your requirements and your team's familiarity with the tools, you might use one or more of these tools for your deployments and management of the resources.

Example

For an example that shows how to use Azure Pipelines to build a CI/CD pipeline, see Azure Pipelines baseline architecture.

Operation Excellence checklist

Refer to the complete set of recommendations.

Operational Excellence checklist