Release engineering, frequently abbreviated as RE or as the clipped compound Releng, is a sub-discipline in software engineering concerned with the compilation, assembly, and delivery of source code into finished products or other software components. Associated with the software release life cycle, it was said by Boris Debic of Google Inc. that release engineering is to software engineering as manufacturing is to an industrial process:
Release engineering is the difference between manufacturing software in small teams or startups and manufacturing software in an industrial way that is repeatable, gives predictable results, and scales well. These industrial style practices not only contribute to the growth of a company but also are key factors in enabling growth.
A change-advisory board (CAB) delivers support to a change-management team by advising on requested changes, assisting in the assessment and prioritization of changes. This body is generally made up of IT and Business representatives that include: a change manager, user managers and groups, product owners, technical experts, and possible third parties and customers.
Progress Chef is a configuration management tool written in Ruby and Erlang. It uses a pure-Ruby, domain-specific language (DSL) for writing system configuration "recipes". Chef is used to streamline the task of configuring and maintaining a company's servers, and can integrate with cloud-based platforms such as Amazon EC2, Google Cloud Platform, Oracle Cloud, OpenStack, IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Rackspace to automatically provision and configure new machines. Chef contains solutions for both small and large scale systems.
Release management is the process of managing, planning, scheduling and controlling a software build through different stages and environments; it includes testing and deploying software releases.
DevOps is a methodology in the software development and IT industry. Used as a set of practices and tools, DevOps integrates and automates the work of software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops) as a means for improving and shortening the systems development life cycle. DevOps is complementary to agile software development; several DevOps aspects came from the agile way of working.
Continuous testing is the process of executing automated tests as part of the software delivery pipeline to obtain immediate feedback on the business risks associated with a software release candidate. Continuous testing was originally proposed as a way of reducing waiting time for feedback to developers by introducing development environment-triggered tests as well as more traditional developer/tester-triggered tests.
New Relic, Inc. is an American web tracking and analytics company based in San Francisco. The company's cloud-based software allows websites and mobile apps to track user interactions and service operators' software and hardware performance.
Continuous delivery (CD) is a software engineering approach in which teams produce software in short cycles, ensuring that the software can be reliably released at any time and following a pipeline through a "production-like environment", without doing so manually. It aims at building, testing, and releasing software with greater speed and frequency. The approach helps reduce the cost, time, and risk of delivering changes by allowing for more incremental updates to applications in production. A straightforward and repeatable deployment process is important for continuous delivery.
Jesse Robbins is an American technology entrepreneur, investor, and firefighter notable for his pioneering work in Cloud computing, role in creating DevOps/Chaos Engineering, and efforts to improve emergency management.
Application-release automation (ARA) refers to the process of packaging and deploying an application or update of an application from development, across various environments, and ultimately to production. ARA solutions must combine the capabilities of deployment automation, environment management and modeling, and release coordination.
Dynatrace, Inc. is a global technology company that provides a software observability platform based on artificial intelligence (AI) and automation. Dynatrace technologies are used to monitor, analyze, and optimize application performance, software development and security practices, IT infrastructure, and user experience for businesses and government agencies throughout the world.
Infrastructure as code (IaC) is the process of managing and provisioning computer data center resources through machine-readable definition files, rather than physical hardware configuration or interactive configuration tools. The IT infrastructure managed by this process comprises both physical equipment, such as bare-metal servers, as well as virtual machines, and associated configuration resources. The definitions may be in a version control system, rather than maintaining the code through manual processes. The code in the definition files may use either scripts or declarative definitions, but IaC more often employs declarative approaches.
A DevOps toolchain is a set or combination of tools that aid in the delivery, development, and management of software applications throughout the systems development life cycle, as coordinated by an organisation that uses DevOps practices.
Site reliability engineering (SRE) is a set of principles and practices that applies aspects of software engineering to IT infrastructure and operations. SRE claims to create highly reliable and scalable software systems. Although they are closely related, SRE is slightly different from DevOps.
Continuous configuration automation (CCA) is the methodology or process of automating the deployment and configuration of settings and software for both physical and virtual data center equipment.
Grafana is a multi-platform open source analytics and interactive visualization web application. It can produce charts, graphs, and alerts for the web when connected to supported data sources.
Nicole Forsgren is an American technology executive, IT impact expert, and author. In 2020 she was named vice-president of Research & Strategy at Microsoft's GitHub and more recently Partner at Microsoft Research. She is coauthor of Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps which won the Shingo Research and Professional Publication Award in 2019.
Junade Ali is a British computer scientist known for research in cybersecurity.
In software engineering, more specifically in distributed computing, observability is the ability to collect data about programs' execution, modules' internal states, and the communication among components. To improve observability, software engineers use a wide range of logging and tracing techniques to gather telemetry information, and tools to analyze and use it. Observability is foundational to site reliability engineering, as it is the first step in triaging a service outage. One of the goals of observability is to minimize the amount of prior knowledge needed to debug an issue.
Buildkite is a continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) platform used in DevOps and company was founded in September 2013. Companies using Buildkite include Wayfair, Shopify, Slack, Twilo, Canva, Pinterest, Envato, MYOB and Lyft.
