Zuora central platform
Streamline Monetization with Zuora DevOps
Learn how adopting DevOps best practices in your Zuora landscape can lead to more seamless customer experiences, fewer disruptions, and greater innovation to drive faster releases and higher quality.
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Innovate, test, and move to production faster
In today’s fast-paced and competitive market, businesses face immense pressure to iterate and launch product updates and versions faster than ever, while also ensuring a simple and easy customer experience.
A robust monetization platform should provide a seamless experience throughout the customer journey, from initial subscription to reading invoices and modifying payment methods. Any disruption can significantly impact customer satisfaction and trust.
For business users in accounting, finance, and IT, managing subscriptions and revenue on the platform must be intuitive and straightforward.
Implementing DevOps best practices can enable your business to build reliable, scalable solutions that are resilient to issues, protecting the bottom line and ensuring the success of customer-facing initiatives.
What is DevOps?
DevOps fosters coordination and collaboration between previously siloed roles by integrating tools, processes, and people. It is a cultural or organizational approach where everyone has access to essential tools and shares responsibility for all aspects of the product. This includes development, IT operations, quality engineering, security and vulnerability compliance, and release management.
Why is a DevOps Strategy Recommended for Zuora?
The estimated growth for the DevOps market is expected to achieve a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 19.7% within a span of 5 years from 2023 to 2028. The key drivers for growth in this market are:
- Increasing demand for continuous and faster application delivery.
- Increasing growth of microservice architectures over monolith applications. Microservices are created, tested, and deployed independently, thereby making it easier and faster to support releases and bug fixes. In contrast, a monolith application requires a complete version release for new versions, making it difficult to introduce changes.
- Increasing demand for streamlined collaboration between IT and operations teams in order to break the silos and involve all the teams and subject matter experts engaged in software development and its lifecycle.
Zuora supports a range of financial processes, from straightforward subscriptions scenarios to highly complex models, and our solutions are tailored to the unique needs of each organization. Zuora provides a range of customizable features, including pricing models, payment methods, dunning, and other customer notifications. Plus, Zuora enables advanced custom fields and extension studios for managing configurations that enable our customers to craft business operation specific solutions.
With all of these customizations can come increased complexity, further increasing the need for a thorough and streamlined DevOps strategy. Such an approach can help achieve:
- Reduced time to market by leveraging automation to shorten release cycles for bug fixes and new features.
- More predictable and repeatable development, testing, and deployment to increase quality and governance.
Zuora DevOps Best Practices
1. Managing Zuora Environments
To successfully deploy your DevOps strategy, you must first develop a testing approach and determine which environments will be required for execution. Best practice is to have at least three or more stages in the deployment process for releasing to production: development sandboxes, a merging environment, and a production environment
Development sandboxes
The developer environments should be used for development and testing of new and existing customizations to help ensure that production data, integrations, and applications are not compromised.
Merging environment
Also called System Integration Testing (SIT), the merging environment is used for syncing all the code from all the dev environments. User Acceptance Testing (UAT) can then be done to understand how changes will work once in production.
Production environment
In this operationally live environment, subscribers access the product catalog and services directly. The production environment should be highly stable and reliable in order to handle large volumes of transactions.
Regularly refreshing lower environments, like development and merging, with production data is highly recommended. This will help ensure that these environments accurately reflect the production environment. This consistency aids in the early identification and resolution of issues within the development lifecycle.
2. Defining a Testing Strategy
After establishing and adopting high-level DevOps best practices for your business, you’ll need to clearly define your testing strategy. To improve efficiency and accuracy, use Automated Test Scripts to programmatically evaluate your most common use cases.
In the case of major releases and changes directly impacting the business and subscriptions, run the UAT in a production-like environment. This will help certify that the changes work as expected.
Making changes in the production environment is not recommended, as it can result in errors or failures that directly impact users. Instead, always test modifications using relevant production data and users, then deploy the last successful set of configurations tested in the UAT environment.
3. Automating Collaboration
In low-code platforms and shared environments, it becomes difficult to monitor modifications and issues. Implementing version control is essential for tracking changes to metadata. This will help improve collaboration among teams for tasks such as peer reviews and implementing merging and branching strategies for deploying programmatically to various tenants. These strategies are essential for managing releases, bug fixes, and maintaining an audit trail of changes, including details on who initiated the changes and when they occurred.
When the Version Control System acts as a source of truth for a given application, the continuous merging of the changes triggers a series of automated builds and tests. By merging changes continuously, the bugs are identified and fixed faster. After the success criteria post testing and integration have been met, the changes can be deployed to production, thus reducing time to market.
4. Monitoring and Observability
The automated processes integrated with DevOps tools necessitate continuous monitoring and observability across the entire development and release lifecycle. This entails seamless integration between tools and collaboration among IT and operations teams.
DevOps monitoring tools play a crucial role in providing visibility throughout these processes, aiding in achieving efficient monitoring and observability across the entire development and release pipeline.
DevOps and Application Lifecycle Management with Zuora
What is Application Lifecycle Management?
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) is a set of processes and tools that an organization can define and implement for maintaining the application, development, testing, and deployments.
ALM encompasses the entire process of software development, while DevOps focuses on the methodology used within that process. For example, testing is a component of ALM. If an organization decides to incorporate automated testing through source code-driven development, the organization is leveraging DevOps practices.
When ALM is synchronized with DevOps, the objective is to attain quicker and higher quality releases.
Zuora provides and extensive framework of tools to support businesses across all 5 stages of ALM: plan, create, test, release, and monitor.
Zuora Application Lifecycle Management Tools
Both Zuora Central Sandbox and Zuora Developer Sandbox are interconnected with production for unification of data. This gives developers direct access to production data in an isolated environment where they can develop and test.
Data security and protection of sensitive information is vital for any organization in order to meet compliance and regulatory requirements. Zuora Object Manager may be leveraged for downstream masking, encryption, and scrubbing. Organizations can enhance data security, protect sensitive information, and ensure compliance with regulatory requirements.
The Zuora Data Migration tool kit provides more than one way for ingesting data from various sources into the Zuora tenant, whether the developer requires a subset of data for testing, or migration of data from external sources.
Application Lifecycle Management Stages
- Plan: This stage is about gathering requirements, creating user stories, and breaking them down into smaller tasks for the developers to initiate the development.
- Create: The build on the requirements and user stories is initiated. The developers verify the changes they have made before merging work with others. As the development expands and the operational business complexity increases, it becomes essential to optimize Application Lifecycle Management. The key area for optimizing the process end to end is strategic use of multiple types of developer sandboxes. Zuora Developer Sandbox provides a dedicated, isolated environment for creating, modifying, and testing changes using a snapshot of production configuration data. It provides frequent refreshes and is an ideal set up for testing changes and integrations.
- Test: All the created, modified, customized artifacts are consolidated, bundled together, and moved to a higher environment for user acceptance testing. Zuora Central Sandbox is designed to provide an identical copy of the production environment for various development, testing and training purposes. Central Sandboxes are valuable and highly recommended for UAT, performance and load testing.
4. Release: After successful testing and meeting quality benchmarks, deploy the updates to production. Releases in Zuora Tenants can typically fall into one of the two categories:
- Minor changes such as bug fixes, modifying any of the existing billing documents, or adding a new batch or communication profile etc.
- Major changes with significant impact that may impact the user experience and data accuracy. For example, adding a new workflow for performing a mass update action on price changes or data integration from external sources such as Netsuite, Salesforce, SFTP integrations etc.
5. Monitor: Zuora Platform enables monitoring your deployments and optimizing your UAT with Zuora System Health Dashboards. These dashboards provide visualizations of the usage and performance of Zuora products. This data enables you to understand workload and performance and make data-driven decisions. System Health dashboards can be configured with threshold-based alerts (callouts/ emails) to help you closely monitor your continuous DevOps processes.