The term “shift left” refers to a practice in software development in which teams focus on quality, work on problem prevention instead of detection, and begin testing earlier than ever before.
The goal is to increase quality, shorten long test cycles and reduce the possibility of unpleasant surprises at the end of the development cycle or, worse, in production.
Shifting left requires two key DevOps practices: continuous testing and continuous deployment. Continuous testing involves automating tests and running those tests as early and often as possible, along with service virtualization to mimic unavailable systems.
Continuous deployment automates the provisioning and deployment of new builds, enabling continuous testing to happen quickly and efficiently. The first and most obvious way to shift left operations is to work side by side with development in creating the deployment and testing processes. Failures observed in production often are not seen earlier in the life cycle. Many times these failures can be attributed directly to differences in deployment procedures. Development may create its own deployment procedures that are very different from those used by operations for production. Sometimes production procedures are much more manual and may even use different tooling. Operations and development need to take ownership in building standard deployment procedures. The deployment process is then practiced potentially hundreds of times in test environments before reaching production. You then have much more confidence that the production deployment will be successful. Another way to reduce the failure rate is to make all environments in the pipeline look as much like production as possible. This is almost impossible using traditional provisioning processes. Production environments usually are much heavier and detailed than are needed by development. But by using cloud and pattern capabilities, you can get much closer.
The goal is to increase quality, shorten long test cycles and reduce the possibility of unpleasant surprises at the end of the development cycle or, worse, in production.
Shifting left requires two key DevOps practices: continuous testing and continuous deployment. Continuous testing involves automating tests and running those tests as early and often as possible, along with service virtualization to mimic unavailable systems.
Continuous deployment automates the provisioning and deployment of new builds, enabling continuous testing to happen quickly and efficiently. The first and most obvious way to shift left operations is to work side by side with development in creating the deployment and testing processes. Failures observed in production often are not seen earlier in the life cycle. Many times these failures can be attributed directly to differences in deployment procedures. Development may create its own deployment procedures that are very different from those used by operations for production. Sometimes production procedures are much more manual and may even use different tooling. Operations and development need to take ownership in building standard deployment procedures. The deployment process is then practiced potentially hundreds of times in test environments before reaching production. You then have much more confidence that the production deployment will be successful. Another way to reduce the failure rate is to make all environments in the pipeline look as much like production as possible. This is almost impossible using traditional provisioning processes. Production environments usually are much heavier and detailed than are needed by development. But by using cloud and pattern capabilities, you can get much closer.
