They not only ease the process but also cut down costs, improve team productivity, and boost user experience. Nowadays, people use a lot of software solutions in their everyday lives, be it for professional use or personal. They look for faster, reliable, and secure software solutions that can ease their lives. Not to mention, competition is increasing in every field. And in order to stand out, you must be able to produce the best solutions that can perform faster, have impeccable features, and are secure from cyber risks. To meet this demand, you must be able to deliver software solutions faster with security. This is where modern software delivery platforms help. In this article, I’ll discuss what these platforms are and the best software delivery platforms for every business, from small to enterprise. Let’s get started!
What Is a Software Delivery Platform?
A software delivery platform is a tool that helps deliver applications and software solutions securely and reliably to the end-users. Software delivery includes Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Delivery (CD), feature management, cloud cost management, and more. It makes one of the most important components of the DevOps methodology. Furthermore, modern software delivery platforms offer an end-to-end platform to transform the complete software delivery process. It can automate and make software delivery seamless and streamlined. It is a suite of different technologies that manage application services such as load balancing, traffic in cloud environments and data centers, security controls, and more.
How Do Software Delivery Platforms Work?
Software delivery platforms can help you create pipelines to automate and standardize releases. These pipelines involve five stages: Testing: The software is tested again in this phase in addition to the tests performed during the development process. The software delivery platform will help you automate the tests and incorporate existing tests such as regression testing into your pipeline. This will allow the quality assurance team to evaluate the software’s quality and ensure you deploy performing and secure software for the end-users. Change management: This is when you decide what things are ready to deploy for production. It involves governance in all the processes and making informed decisions. Here, the responsible persons will evaluate and approve the services to be deployed. This stage may also require advanced version control tools. Deployment strategy: After the software or its improved components are approved for deployment, teams define strategies to deploy the software for production. Verification: In this process, the software is verified whether it was successfully deployed or not. It is done with the help of monitoring tools which must be plugged into the deployment pipeline. Rollback: If a problem occurs during the verification step, the deployed software must be rolled back for correction.
Advantages of Modern Software Delivery over Traditional Methods
Modern software delivery solutions offer a bunch of advantages to businesses, from small to enterprises. They are better than traditional methods of software delivery in various terms. Here are some of those advantages:
Automation
Traditional approaches to software development, delivery, and deployment took significant time for each step with complexity. Not only do they require more time but also more effort at each stage. Using software delivery platforms, you can automate the tasks and streamline workflow to save your time and effort. This enables you to have free time for innovative jobs. As a result, your entire team can become more productive.
Cost Reduction
Using advanced software delivery platforms eliminates the need to spend much on hardware systems and their maintenance. You can use cloud-based software delivery platforms that are easy to use, scale, and more affordable. They also don’t require maintenance from your side. All these factors combined help to reduce the cost to a great extent.
Faster Delivery and Deployment
Automating the processes helps you deliver and deploy your software faster. You not only can detect the issues in the software more quickly but also remove them easily before the launch.
Easy to Roll Back Changes
If you find some issues, bugs, or errors in your software after production, you must be able to roll back to the initial phase to make suitable changes. This is easier with modern software delivery platforms than traditional methods.
Improved User Experience
User experience is the most important factor for your software’s success. If you can create and deliver a superbly performing software solution with top-notch security, it’s highly likely that your end users are going to like it. Using modern software delivery platforms helps you produce software with excellent quality and deliver them to win users. So, if you are looking for the best software delivery platform, you can consider the options I’ve listed below.
Harness
Harness is one of the best modern software delivery platforms that are loved by developers and trusted by businesses. It leverages artificial intelligence (AI) to simplify DevOps processes, including cloud costs, feature flags, CI, CD, and much more. You will find the next-level delivery pipelines with Harness’s AI. It helps you prioritize the tests to run, automate canary verifications, automate cloud costs, determine the impact due to the changes, and a lot more. Manage the delivery pipelines with developer-first experience, i.e., Git Commits, speed up developer productivity, remove all unwanted toil, and YAML. Get everything starting from infrastructure-as-code (AI) to change tracking in one integrated pipeline. Allow your development team to run fast but with guide rails to secure your business and make it compliant with regulations. Harness’s OPA-based governance engine builds DevOps compliance automated and simple. Furthermore, make artifacts into production with Harness CD, which is the Self-Service Continuous Delivery module. It allows your teams to deploy software on-demand without plugins, toil, anger, downtime, version dependencies, and scripts. Harness’s self-service CI solution is container-native that can take the source code into the artifact to standardize the extensions and isolate the builds. In addition, you can optimize cloud costs to empower engineers with visibility of microservices, applications, and clusters without any tagging. Allow your development teams to release new gestures quickly with minimal risks and maintain a continuous velocity in delivering secure application services. Additionally, you can enable automated DevSecOps application security governance and scanning. Deploy even faster by improving the reliability of the services by using SLO-based delivery management with reliability goals, verification, and automated governance. Get started with Harnes for FREE, or choose a paid subscription at $100/month per service.
CloudBees
Advance your business from code to customers with CloudBees, an excellent software delivery platform. CloudBees allows the world’s brightest and most prominent companies to travel from disconnected and incoherent DevOps to self-service, secure, and fast workflow. Liberate your developers with model-driven pipelines, security by default, and self-service automation. You can also curate and create a self-service library of various components and manage workflows with anything or everything as code. Get feature flags for common governance, experimental freedom, and progressive delivery. In addition, you will find event-driven and secure pipelines that simplify cross-communication. It also provides out-of-the-box integrations with valuable tools. Build release workflows and generate reports on-demand easily. You will also get declarative pipelines for durable and repeatable pipelines as code. Plus, CloudBees offers consistency, reliability, and quality that allows developers to work better on software development and delivery. The platform provides more comprehensive visibility across your processes, pipelines, and tools to get higher predictability, management, and scope. Improve software delivery continuously and get CI, CD. release orchestration, analytics, feature management, and compliance with CloudBess.
Codefresh
Codefresh is a decent software delivery platform that enables DevOps in one single platform. This is powered by Argo, which combines the open-source with software delivery specialists for better end-to-end GitOps. Get improved confidence, from development to deployment, using the unified Argo platform. You will find robust dashboards with end-to-end traceability. It will help you manage everything from Argo runtimes to deployments from one control panel that provides complete visibility into the code-to-cloud enterprise. Codefresh’s functionality passes through a rigorous compatibility and security evaluation in order to provide critical auditability. It supports industry-based SLAs, which are combined with the community of DevOps. It also powers many innovative companies with its unique features. Moreover, Codefresh provides flexibility and an intuitive path to help you leverage robust native-workflow engines and advanced deployments. Its dashboard can integrate with various build workflows, issue tracking, artifacts, triggering events, and more. Gain detailed insights and information across the deployments and environments and monitor recent trends with Codefresh. It will provide you with valuable data that can help you streamline the software development and delivery process. Get the community edition for FREE for up to 5 developers and up to one Argo runtime. Sign up with a paid version at $49/month per developer and access more benefits.
Ozone
Break the speed limit of your application delivery and ship at lightning-fast speed with Ozone, an on-demand software delivery platform. It is built to deliver faster values to the customers. Connect your modern software with any Kubernetes Cloud Provider and allow Ozone to take good care of CI/CD automation. Ship the application securely, reliably, and quickly without any headache by using Ozone. Ozone can automate software delivery with various integrations and automation tools. In addition, it automates pipelines to deploy, verify, test, and deploy software faster hundreds of times. Connect any image registries and git repository, allowing Ozone to handle the rest with automated CI workflows. You can also manage container deployments on private or public clouds and automate K8S cluster management and multi-cloud deployments in just a few clicks. Furthermore, deploy blockchain applications, even without prior knowledge of the frameworks. You can also set up runtime security and static scans for artifacts as well as code. In between this, secret management and RBAC help you manage the CI/CD landscape. Get complete visibility of notifications across all the application clusters and deployments and analyze logs, audit trails, and metrics across multiple applications in the Kubernetes cluster. You will also receive real-time notifications and alerts to make immediate changes and stay secure from cyber risks. Modern development teams love Ozone for its fast velocity, reliability, security, productivity, and more. Talk to Ozone’s sales teams and allow your development team to minimize their work pressure and focus on other essential things. Try Ozone for FREE.
OpsMx
OpsMX is an intelligent software delivery platform that helps boost the productivity of DevOps teams. It provides automated workflows that leverage a central policy engine and AI/ML to enhance the quality, security, and velocity of your application deliveries. OpsMX simplifies the orchestration of the complete delivery process workflows, from code check-in to safe VM. In addition, it supports over 50 native and deep integrations with CI/CD tools for compliance, security, monitoring, performance, testing, and build automation. Jenkins, Argo, and Spinnaker help power an AI engine that continuously improves the performance of all your CD workflows. Every DevOps team will have access to use the tools they like in order to get global insights across the toolchains through one pane of glass. Reduce your maintenance burdens to focus on value creation and innovation. Developers can easily deploy software through automated pipelines without any scripts and deploy your code securely by maintaining every compliance requirement. OpsMx’s built-in AI/ML analyzes logs and metrics automatically to identify quality and performance issues with every release. In addition, you can collaborate more with your teams to make better and more effective decisions through deep insights and real-time visibility across your development processes. It will also enable your team to deploy the application safely with multi-cloud deployments. Get simple pricing options starting at $50/user/month.
Spinnaker
Get repeatable, safe, and fast deployments with Spinnaker cloud-native delivery platform for each enterprise. You will get application deployment and management that helps you release software changes with confidence and high velocity. Spinnaker is a multi-cloud and open-source delivery platform that combines flexible and robust pipeline management. It integrates with popular cloud providers to do the job. If you are looking for quality improvement and an easy release process, Spinnaker is for you. You can easily create deployment pipelines to run system tests and integrations, monitor your rollouts, spin up and down server groups, and perform many other things. You can also trigger the pipelines via Jenkins, CRON, Docker, git events, Travis CI, and other pipelines. Leverage the immutable infrastructure with built-in strategies, such as canary and red/black deployments to deploy in the cloud. In addition, deploy your software across various clouds, including Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Microsoft Azure, AWS EC2, Google App Engine, and more. Moreover, you will get chaos monkey integration, role-based access controls, CI integrations, CLI for admin, deployment strategies, restricted execution windows, manual judgments, monitoring integrations, notifications, and VM bakery. You can join Spinnaker Community, a workplace where you can ask and give answers, connect with users and operators, and discuss issues with SIGs. Start your ride today and deploy your software faster than before.
Conclusion 👇
Delivering quality software solutions helps you win customers, and modern software delivery platforms can help you do that. They will help you deliver superbly performing software with security and speed while reducing costs and increasing productivity.
