Enabling DevOps Collaboration and Continuous Delivery Using Diverse Application Environments

Aiming to provide the means for efficient collaboration between development and operations personnel, the DevOps paradigm is backed by an increasingly growing collection of tools and reusable artifacts for application management. Continuous delivery pipelines are established based on these building blocks by implementing fully automated, end-to-end application delivery processes, which significantly shorten release cycles to reduce risks and costs as well as gaining a critical competitive advantage. Diverse application environments need to be managed along the pipeline such as development, build, test, and production environments. In this work we address the need for systematically specifying and maintaining diverse application environment topologies enriched with environment-specific requirements in order to implement continuous delivery pipelines. Beside the representation of such requirements, we focus on their systematic and collaborative resolution with respect to the individual needs of the involved application environments.