BUDDY: Automation Tools For the DevOps and Blockchain application development

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Introduction

In recent times, developers have always been faced with the challenge of initiating works of their own mastermind say for example, the development of several or a new version of an app or a new model of a mobile phone or laptop, usually from the scratch as always; all because they lack the necessary resources to provide the much-required assistance. And most times such process leaves them unproductive and reduces their level of creativeness.

The need for a groundbreaking system arose, one whose aim is in line with the developers need being able to provide a means of support by delivering high end services and the ability to automate any process such that developers are granted lease to focus on being masterminds once more. That application automation development industry was formed and it is on this note I would like to introduce you to my Buddy.

What is Buddy?

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Buddy is the solution presented to companies who require automation of their application development process. It is a blockchain-based platform created to revolutionize and enable automatic development operations.

It was established in 2015 with the goal of empowering developers with definitive and clear-cut tasks of designing new products, having taken care of the hitherto, application development processes that make developers waste time on repetitive tasks aided by automation.
Now here’s the challenge. Most companies are tasked with executing a huge number of tests all in the bid to improve efficiency and this is usually backed by heavy infrastructural investments. The end results? An expensive, complex and maintenance-greedy system that requires 24/7 supervision. But the solutions are not far-fetched with Buddy. They include:

The Open DevOps Marketplace
Private Automation GRID
Shared Automation GRID

Open DevOps Marketplace

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As the name implies, the DevOps Marketplace is a place where developers come in to trade. As much as I can go to buy goods in a mall, so it is with this market, only the commodity up for sales are automation scripts. And just as I get free goods for buying a certain amount of goods in the mall, so it is in the DevOp marketplace signifying free (the goods I get for purchasing a certain number of other commodities) and premium (the goods I paid for). There is also provisions for developers to share their own scripts and get fiat currencies for them.

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Buddy has over 80 carefully crafted automation actions that help users develop and deploy software. The actions are arranged into pipelines, making building, testing and deploying just a matter of a few clicks—even when it comes to complex applications & multi-cloud workflows.

Buddy Whitepaper, pg. 9

The Buddy platform is also unique in that it extends its accessibility by granting third-party developers’ access to carry out their activities and use them in their own automation pipeline. Below is an example of such third-party actions.

Although it shows room for great value and available possibilities, these developers are not 100% efficient as they are prone to errors hence the need for a measure of security, in order to make up for their shortcomings. Guess what? With a system like securify, we can increase productivity. securify is a free service that the Software Reliability Lab came up with for purposes like this. It allows for automated analysis of vulnerabilities and insecure coding through a website.

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So how does securify aid Buddy? securify, when integrated with the DevOps Marketplace, would permit users to add its services to their automation pipelines.

This means that any shortcoming that might arise during coding would be reported instantly it is generated in the codebase and actions taken to rectify such mishaps.

The tedious tasks of re-writing such codes after having only discovered such errors when testing would be eliminated and thus increase productivity level of developers and quality of the codes they write.

There is also the tool of curation employed by the DevOps marketplace. This tool is for coders who generate quality contents to be rewarded and to secure their works from wannabe thefts/pirators. This measure is to encourage and support talented developers, spurring them to do a lot more at the same time contributing to the growth of the blockchain.

Private Automation GRID

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Basically, this is all about making the user autonomous on top of a trusted infrastructure thanks to Buddy’s decentralization. Through the Auto-scaling feature, new Buddy instances that show up in the network are automatically assigned roles. The first two create a master-master replication to create a High Availability System and the next instance generated is used to run more pipelines in parallel. The goal is to create a network of Buddy instances that will auto-discover and replicate to create High availability auto-scalable infrastructure for development and deployment automation.

Buddy can create new and also end unwanted instances instantly on-the-go depending on the loading situation at that present time. If there is need for such creation, buddy can replicate itself by using a user’s Iaas account outside the private network and discard such instances once the job has been completed. Thanks to its integration with IaaS providers like AWS, google Cloud or any other trustworthy and related Buddy GRIDS provided by its certified partners, this is made possible.

Shared Automation GRID

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Instances operated by users can have its high-intensive automation tasks reduced to the minimum. Its P2P network has peers that are moderated by its DAO. In the event of a dishonest peer or unavailable peer probably due to poor connection, nodes can report this technical glitch to Buddy.

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The relevance of this storage is that it allows for the performance of requested services, after which it then saves the results and sends it to the user who requests for it. It is then released when all the operations have been completed.

The SAG Compute Unit
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Buddy introduces a Compute Unit which has the ability to be assigned as a node of the SAG (shared automation GRID) and also can be used to trade for the BUD token by the user. The compute unit is as such the smallest assigned node possible and its specifications include: 2 vCPUs, 2GB of RAM and 4GB of SSD storage

So how does the SAG run its economics. Simple, the supplier is given a Buddy token, which can be used to rent the Compute Unit (billing per second), to carry out a task. This token is given only when that task has been rounded off.

The requester is granted a settable maximum price to pay and the supplier asides setting the minimum possible price, he/she also sets the Compute units to be assigned and provides a time frame where sales can occur with the price at that point declared.

The creation of a 3-layer parallelism system is so as to setup a market and create demand for the Buddy compute units. This has the ability to ensure fast delivery by the users and introduces multitasking of running actions in divided pipelines.

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The number of pipelines being run is dependent on the available compute units at Project Level, running 2 at once which requires 2 compute units

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While at Pipeline Level, running 2 pipelines with 2 concurrent actions requires 4 compute units with multiple actions being run in a single pipeline

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At Action Level, running 2 pipelines with 2 concurrent actions with 2 tasks each requires 8 compute units with the action divided into tasks running in parallel.

Buddy for Blockchain Apps (BlockchainOps)

Buddy is also developing blockchain-based projects. This gives the blockchain developers the building tools to design automation pipelines with all processes having been simplified for easy use.

dAppOS.

This is a ready-to-use development environment created by Buddy. It is a turn-key solution for bootstrapping blockchain-based projects like dApps and can be easily extended with additional services like Redis Mongo or MySQL. The dAppOS environment can be used for development, testing and previews or can be assigned to a section and is worked upon continuously.

When used for testing purposes, a pipeline executes tests by running them against a dApp with dynamically testnets on every push running on the dAppOS.

Training tool.

dAppOS can be used to lay the basis on which smart contracts and dApp projects can be used in training of individuals or companies on blockchain technology. It is beneficial to development education offered by programmers who carry out the actual training process.

Sandbox & dAppOS Template Universe.

With dAppOS, Buddy takes us to a new whole level of Template Universe where templates offered by third-party developers can be traded; a marketplace sort of. These templates resist the limitations of testing and experimenting with Blockchain technologies.

dAppOS Swarms

Running of nodes in a single DC doesn’t mean it is decentralized hence decentralized projects requires relevant solutions. dAppOS Swarms can only be found when a task is being carried out. The per second billing of the compute units and the quick-to-launch vs quick-to-kill nature makes it less costly and more reliable.

DBaaS

This Distributed Blockchain-as-a-service allows blockchain developers to increase their productivity by granting the leave to build whatsoever project they wish to do of whatsoever nature. A snap of a finger can result in the development of a new blockchain, literally and deployment of unlimited blockchain nodes per Buddy is made possible now.

Benefits of Buddy

Buddy encourages innovations and support talented developers by its curation tool.
With Buddy, the user is in full control of what is trusted.
With SAG, only accepted actions which are open-sourced can be accepted in the DevOps marketplace.
Bad users will be eliminated through Buddy’s DAO and reporting systems.

Conclusion

The majority of the time the companies wishes to deploy the latest features and test the new tools. Similar problems can be found in the blockchain application development.The growing market is valued at 110 billion dollars, and the approach adopted by the company is community driven and developers focused. The need of the hour is the development of a transparent and reliable platform which the developers love to use.

The automation technology is not a new concept, but the tools provided by the team will greatly enhance the application development process of the enterprises and individuals

A Medium Article Explaining DevOps & EOSIO Smart Contract Integration

About Buddy's Working Product

The Bud Token

The BUD is a utility based token based on Ethereum (ERC20). It unites developers experts and users in the goal to achieve a safer, faster and of better quality shipping target.

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