The DevOps approach has gained significant momentum over the past decade as today’s enterprises require shorter development and deployment cycles to gain faster time to market and obtain fast feedback for improvement. DevOps helps in continual product rollouts by bridging silos and streamlining change management practices, improving not only development efficiency but also ensuring consistency and reliability of deployments.
Gartner forecasts a 5.1% increase in Worldwide IT Spending in 2023, with organizations focused on realizing operational efficiency, cost reductions, and/or cost avoidance during the current economic uncertainty. One can infer from this that investments in DevOps and improving DevOps practices is likely to increase. As HPE NonStop customers increasingly embrace DevOps, this is the right time to look at DevOps offerings for the HPE NonStop platform. And now is even more important than ever, as HPE NonStop is taking its steps towards becoming cloud-ready!
DevOps is a culture and a continuous process of improving efficiency. It can be applied to the various phases of software development, deployment, and post-deployment with the aid of tools and automation. While the culture aspect is organization-specific, I will discuss the tools, recommendations, automation, and artifacts that aid the DevOps adoption for HPE NonStop in this article.
HPE NonStop is DevOps-ready!
DevOps is based off of CI/CD, and is a continuous process. The first part refers to Continuous Integration (CI) and includes phases such as plan, code, build, and test, while the second part (CD) represents the continuous delivery and deployment aspects. These include the release, deployment, operation, and monitoring of the software.
HPE NonStop is DevOps-ready. This means that, for each of the phases, there are toolsets specific to the platform identified and workflows that can be automated to achieve efficient, repeatable, and reliable production-ready software.
HPE NonStop DevOps starter kits
HPE NonStop supports multiple languages, and usage of DevOps for HPE NonStop is classified based on languages. (CustomerUsageProfileClassification). This classification is not only required for toolset recommendations but also for demonstrating tool usage through starter kits. The starter kits are customer usage profile-specific, ready-to-use, developer-friendly, and production-ready. Each starter kit consists of a sample application (typically client/server), a set of pipeline scripts, and a README file with usage instructions. These are hosted on GitHub https://github.com/HewlettPackard/NonStop/tree/main/nsdevops
The intent of the starter kit is to demonstrate pipelines and tools for a language usage profile. These reusable scripts and pipelines in the starter kit are an effortless way to get started with DevOps and try it out with customer applications.
The starter kits currently available are:
| Name | Description | Location :NonStop Git /nsdevops/ |
| C Starter Kit | CI sample for C/C++ based applications built using cross-compilers | C |
| Java Starter Kit | CI sample for Java based applications built off-platform compilers | java |
| Java JNI Starter Kit | CI sample for polyglot Java and C applications built on-platform on HPE NonStop | javajni |
| Python Starter Kit | CI sample for Pythons based applications | python |
| CD Starter Kit | Continuous Deployment using HPE NonStop Manageability Framework (NSMF) and Ansible | cd |
Most of the starter kits demonstrate continuous integration (CI). For the continuous deployment, NSMF and Ansible-based deployments are used. While the CD starter kit is demonstrated with a Java application, the dev, test and production environment setup and concepts remain the same for applications of any language profile. The CD starter kit can also be extended to HPE NonStop system configuration management and HPE NonStop system administration activities.
Using the Starter Kits
Developers new to DevOps should use the HPE NonStop ModernDevOps – Instructions for CI-CD setup for preparing the environment to get started. If the enterprise already has a DevOps setup, go through the recommended setup (Recommended Setup) and the instructions in the above guide to ensure HPE NonStop systems are configured to be accessible in the CI Tool.
Getting started with the starter kits is easy.
- First, download the starter kit from the HPE NonStop git repository.
- Select the appropriate folder applicable to the language profile.
- Upload the code from that folder to the organization GIT. Go through the instructions in the README.md file of the starter kit and update the pipeline script to point to the right repository.
- Make appropriate changes based on the environment. Commit the changes to the organization git. The pipelines will start executing.
The scripts can be reused for applications in the same language profile with minor changes, such as modifying GIT repository and build steps, if any.
Starter Kits are cloud-ready!
As more development environments are moving to the public cloud, cloud vendors are offering DevOps services. HPE NonStop development environment (NSDEE) and cross-compilers and tools are now available on the public cloud.
The starter kits have ready-to-use pipelines for popular cloud vendors and their DevOps services, such as AzureDevOps and AWS CodeBuild, can be used to demonstrate how the HPE NonStop development and deployment can be integrated easily using those cloud services.
For the platform agnostic language profiles on HPE NonStop, such as Python and Java, follow the instructions given in the vendors’ DevOps documentation. Alternately, specific scripts are provided in the starter kit. The buildspec.yml file, if present in the root folder of the repository – i.e., the AWS CodeBuild, will automatically build the project. Similarly, while using Azure, create a build script or choose to use the one provided with the starter kit.
The C, Python, and Java starter kits are cloud-ready. Currently, support is provided for AWS CloudBuild or AzureDevOps. In the future, the HPE NonStop development team will include other cloud vendor-specific scripts and integrations in the starter kits.
DevOps is supported on HPE NonStop, and starter kits are here to help you get started. Go explore the HPE NonStop DevOps starter kits now!
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