CI/CD Support: Can Support Reduce Your Typical Troubleshooting Time?

This is a guest blog from Evan Glazer.

Can paying for CI/CD support reduce your typical troubleshooting time? Do you have a dedicated software engineer to work on your continuous integration, delivery and deployment processes as your technology is constantly advancing? Are CI/CD updates on the back burner of your list? Can you afford to use CI/CD?

These are all questions to think about when it comes to enabling your engineering team to release and test software. Paying for support might sound expensive, but consider the time spent with your engineers getting an understanding of a problem; an expert certified engineer might be able to identify and provide a solution for the issues you're facing. Support might only be thousands per year while it can cost months of CI/CD work by your in-house engineers which is far greater in cost.

Let's be honest ... Keeping up with all the changelogs for your dependencies and plugins could be a full-time job. It is tough to keep up with fast-changing technologies and knowing the defects that can cause your build to break. No matter how well we plan and engineer, we'll always encounter slowdowns that can give us downtime. Having the expert support of the platform chosen is key to having long term success with being able to identify to create custom jobs to ensure proper delivery.

How would it feel to be updated with all the latest features and plugins to optimize your build process and reduce custom bash scripts? Having a success manager or support engineer keeping up with your engineering team can lead to less downtime and faster CI/CD updates as you're using the LTS versions for each project.

Over time, your CI/CD will have to support multiple cloud platforms, artifact types, application run times, monitoring tools, etc. This will require regular updates for your engineering team and having someone keep an eye out for your success while you focus on the everyday operations of product is the way to go.

A dedicated support engineer will help your team make sure you're ready to update your CI/CD with ease along with meeting project schedule needs. It is important to consider these capabilities: triggers, pipelines, infrastructure, workflows, reporting. Having someone to talk about the upcoming release changes, etc enables smooth sailing and a less stressful day for your engineering team.

Or you might have specific delivery needs for how you want your engineering team to function and you need to communicate actively with an expect CI/CD engineer who understands how you can achieve your goals.

It is release day and the build process is breaking from your current updates. Having support already paid for to get an expert certified engineers to help fix your problem quickly so you don't have to push the release back two or three days is key.

You can never go wrong with support. Regardless, it is safe to say you get quite a few advantages in the process: expert guidance, regular updates, assisted upgrades, and 24/7 technical support. Being able to save time and align your engineering teams in an organized, collaborative work environment to avoid merge conflicts and build failures saves days or weeks of the team in the year. And having a strong CI/CD suite will enable your team to be able to focus on the product, which is key.