“By 2020, we will have flying cars!” envisioned someone influential, and everyone present must have been reflected with the same enthusiasm.
Well, we didn’t have a flying car making a swirl yet. But we are in the process of achieving that with automation of course!
Automation is gradually touching every nook and corners of manual activities as businessmen put on their innovative-thinking hats and demand a solution to curb manual efforts.
While all eyes shift to Python when we drop the word automation, enterprises look at DevOps to automate and boost productivity of their development teams for iterative updates.
Spread the word–Automation in DevOps has been the truest form of automation for faster deployment of applications in production.
Have too many questions for us about automation in DevOps? Get it resolved with us.
How do I bring Automation in DevOps?
What is DevOps?
DevOps isn’t a technology per se. It is more of a culture to an optimized deployment approach. It is a link to bring the development team, operations teams, and key stakeholders for promoting a shorter and more manageable deployment. DevOps is a key approach for delivering increased business value as well as responsiveness with rapid alongwith high-quality and rapid service delivery.
By bringing proper automation in DevOps, your development and operations team can move projects and ideas faster from the development phase to the production phase.
Using automation in DevOps, you can accelerate processes as well as scale your project environments through continuous integration, continuous deployment, and continuous delivery workflows.
You can foster automation in provisioning and development. The DevOps environments combine numerous technologies. Since deploying and provisioning changes to complicated environments becomes time-consuming and needs expertise pertaining to each component, you need a seasoned team to take care of your processes.
Why Should you Think of Automation in DevOps?
Thinking why to bring automation in DevOps when one can even perform DevOps processes such as continuous integration and log analytics manually?
Think for a while of the unrealistic aspects that are essential to do it manually:
- A large team of technical and experienced professionals
- Ample amount of time spent, which increases workload
- Seamless coordination and communication amongst team members
Automation allows you to perform different DevOps processes with enhanced performance using various software tools and stipulated configurations. Let’s check the major points that make it essential to automate DevOps –
Consistent & Predictable DevOps Processes:
When you automate DevOps, you know that the underlying Software Automation Tool will deliver a consistent result if its configurations are not modified. Hence, also saving software applications from errors and behavioural issues that may have been occurred by software.
Quick to Scale:
Unlike the manual route, the DevOps automation facilitates you to release new code quickly and consistently across multiple applications. In addition, it allows developers to rapidly identify, address, and solve bugs as they show up. Hence, forming a highly secure and scalable development environment gives DevOps engineers the space to automate and innovate business processes.
Rapid Process:
Leave no stone unturned to deliver all the development projects on a timely basis. DevOps automation paves the way for speeding up processes such as code integration and application deployment any time of the day.
Effortlessly deploy a new release even at midnight without depending on any team members. Moreover, DevOps automation would not require you to type configurations and verify the deployment of the new version manually, thereby expediting the overall process.
Which Processes Need to be Automated?
Almost everything can be automated.
Now, the question is – how?
The process automation truly depends upon the factors like needs of the organization and the tech feasibility.
The devOps team at Quixom receives a lot of queries about how to choose the processes that should be automated in their DevOps lifecycle.
Here are the lists of a few standard processes automated through DevOps
Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD):
Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) is the main component for an enterprise utilizing agile software development for automation. Operations like Code commits, Code building, and distributing application data for testing/production can be automated.
Infrastructure Management:
Managing infrastructures is a tedious task; it requires a considerable amount of time and resources along with seamless configuration & maintenance. Introducing automation will create a software-defined infrastructure that eliminates the hassles and complexness involved in human interactions on infrastructure management.
Software Testing:
Introducing automation on testing operations could be the best. It eliminates human interactions and speeds the testing process. In today’s market, one can find various testing automation tools that can perform various testing operations, including user interaction tests, accurately.
Monitoring:
As the marketplace evolves, businesses and enterprises need to adhere to the ongoing trends. This may cause trouble in keeping track of all those changes made in business operations and business components.
In such a scenario, DevOps teams assist enterprises by creating automated monitoring rules and generating alerts when any changes happen in infrastructure, performance, and security.
Log Management:
Logs are the most important for identifying or spotting the issues of an application. In general, an application may generate numerous logs to assist developers or experts in tracking its functions & performance.
Introducing automation for analyzing logs through log management tools will allow experts and staff to pinpoint the issues easily & quickly.
How to Automate DevOps?
Introducing automation to an enterprise will help serve customers better and strengthen customer relationships. Here are the checklists that every enterprise should follow for creating a better-automated environment.
Start Automating Small:
Instead of introducing automation to the entire process, try automating small things and enjoy success.
Spread Awareness:
Having a broad vision is essential during the automation journey. Always create awareness by sharing the vision/information about automation among the employees of an organization.
Utilize the Power of Agile:
Adopting agile methodologies, and the professional team will be the first step for successful automation. Though the automation processes will take a long period to implement fully. It keeps evolving with agile development and creates open & cross-team collaboration among teams in an enterprise.
accurately.
Automate Tool Installing & Upgrading:
Sticking with the manual tool installation will lead to an unreliable & inconsistent environment. The upgrading process removes all the hassles of the tool management process.
Standardization:
For a successful & accurate automated process, standardization is the critical component. It helps build clean, readable, non-messy, manageable & stable codes for automation.
What are the Best Practices to Automate DevOps?
Agile Development Process:
Project management and software development using agile methodology suggests that one must aim to deliver large-scale projects in proportionate bits and parts. This helps the developers evaluate the outcomes on a constant basis, respond to required changes, and set the pace of the project accordingly. Agile teams use scrum and kanban as their core frameworks to deliver value-driven results to their customers.
Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery(CI/CD):
Continuous integration is one of the best practices that lets the developers test the code’s correctness by using automated tools. Developers also get an upper-hand in frequently merging the code changes using CI. On the other hand, continuous delivery approach ensures software deployments that come with low-risk and can be performed anytime.
Log Management:
Logs are time-series data that suggests the functioning of the web application or system. With the help of such logs, one can easily detect the underlying issues in applications and solve them. You simply need to automate, aggregate and analyze such logs using log management tools.
Bonus Section
Furthermore, there are other best practices to implement DevOps such as software testing, infrastructure management, and implement automation amongst a well-spun series.
Concludingly, it could be rightly stated that the automation in DevOps is all about providing a structured workflow in the DevOps lifecycle. If you can formulate an ideal workflow of DevOps and unite it with automation, you will definitely receive the best quality software!
