Collaborative gathering and continuous delivery of DevOps solutions through repositories

Collaboration is a key aspect for establishing DevOps-oriented processes because diverse experts such as developers and operations personnel need to efficiently work together to deliver applications. For this purpose, highly automated continuous delivery pipelines are established, consisting of several stages and their corresponding application environments (development, test, production, etc.). The DevOps community provides a huge variety of tools and reusable artifacts (i.e. DevOps solutions such as deployment engines, configuration definitions, container images, etc.) to implement such application environments. This paper presents the concept of collaborative solution repositories, which are based on established software engineering practices. This helps to systematically maintain and link diverse solutions. We further discuss how discovery and capturing of such solutions can be automated. To utilize this knowledge (made of linked DevOps solutions), we apply continuous delivery principles to create diverse knowledge base instances through corresponding pipelines. Finally, an integrated architecture is outlined and validated using a prototype implementation. © 2016, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.