DevOps Practices on the Telad Cloud Platform

DevOps is a very popular system development and management model in recent years, and many companies are practicing DevOps to varying degrees. Today we will discuss the practice of DevOps on the Telad Cloud Platform.

DevOps, as a term, is often defined in various ways. In short, DevOps is a capability that enables a team to deliver software products or services of high quality quickly and reliably. This definition captures the spirit and core essence of DevOps.

A set of processes, methods, and systems used to promote communication, collaboration, and integration among development, operations, and quality assurance departments.

DevOps is a cultural shift, or a movement that encourages better communication and collaboration (i.e., teamwork) to build more reliable, higher‑quality software faster.

DevOps is an engineering model; essentially it is a division of labor that, through the separation of responsibilities among development, operations, testing, and pipeline roles, maximizes engineering efficiency to meet business needs.

DevOps mainly solves two problems:

Deliver software products and services on time, quickly, and with high quality.

Save costs through process automation.

How does DevOps relate to Agile development? While they appear similar, Agile focuses on rapid, frequent iterations—producing early prototypes and continuously updating them. DevOps goes beyond Agile by not only enabling fast change but also removing waste throughout the software development lifecycle (SDLC), addressing issues such as inconsistent environments, manual build and deployment processes, poor quality and testing practices, lack of communication between IT departments, frequent interruptions, and resource‑intensive operations.

In the DevOps capability loop, the focus is on:

Releasing product updates earlier and more frequently, maintaining a perpetual beta version, and responding to changes quickly.

Leveraging automation tools (testing, deployment) to integrate development, testing, release, and deployment processes for immediate delivery.

To acquire this capability, DevOps involves stakeholders from development, testing, and operations working together toward shared organizational goals, tightly coordinating to improve product delivery. Implementing DevOps brings transformation in three main areas; its core is role division rather than organizational restructuring, aiming to maximize engineering efficiency.

When practicing DevOps, the Telad Cloud Platform’s core idea is to achieve unattended, end‑to‑end automation (automatic build, packaging, deployment, testing, and release), enabling a pipeline‑style workflow for software development and deployment.

After developers check in code, an automatic build is triggered, compiling the source code and executing unit tests. All unit tests must pass 100%, covering five aspects: core class public methods, service methods (HSF, SG), scenario‑based tests, performance tests, and destructive tests. The build then proceeds to automatic packaging. The Telad Cloud Platform uses Microsoft .NET and builds its CI pipeline on Microsoft TFS. Since TFS lacks native automatic packaging, a custom patch management platform provides this capability, also handling patch installation on servers.

The resulting patch package from continuous integration is automatically deployed to three environments: a regular test environment (interface automation testing), a pre‑production test environment (interface and UI automation testing), and a stress‑test environment (performance and destructive testing). After all automated tests pass and an administrator approves, the patch is first gray‑released in the Shanghai data center and, 24 hours later, released in the Beijing data center. Continuous delivery also uses TFS Release, integrated with many Telad‑developed systems. Both test and production environments run Telad’s distributed operation management platform and patch installation tool, allowing unattended updates across 500+ servers. Additionally, each environment hosts Telad’s service governance platform, which conducts interface, UI, and stress testing and automatically generates test results and reports.

Below is the operational view of continuous delivery built on TFS:

During the CI/CD setup, many pitfalls were encountered, both technical and managerial. Here are some important recommendations that may help others:

1. Maintain a clear product layering structure.

2. Keep assembly reference relationships clear and explicit (e.g., NuGet, shared directories).

3. Implement comprehensive automated test code.

4. Ensure thorough API testing and UI automation; otherwise, continuous integration devolves into merely a patch‑distribution tool.