With the skyrocketing upsurge in the tech domain, software developers and project managers are under the overwhelming burden of addressing the evolving customer expectations regarding enterprise-grade apps or frameworks. These evolving expectations usually revolve around:
- Better performance
- Competitive functionality and features
- High-end reliability and durability
DevOps & automation come in parallel with a range of advantages that push organizations to Automate DevOps Workflows. It helps you:
- Improve inter-departmental collaboration
- Streamline manual and iterative workflows of the development phase
This article will shed light on how DevOps with automation drives more smart SDLC. Let’s get deep into the details.
What is DevOps automation?
DevOps automation involves implementing the automation on iterative and manual DevOps workflows to make them efficient and streamlined without human assistance. DevOps Automation can be implemented in all areas DevOps framework, including:
- Design & development
- Deployment
- Testing
- Monitoring & Management
The primary objective of DevOps automation is to automate the DevOps lifecycle by eliminating manual workflows. This automation helps in ensuring:
- No need to have large teams on board
- Significantly curb human errors
- Improve productivity of team members
- Focus on core development areas
- Reduce time to delivery
Why is There a Need to Automate DevOps Processes?
The perks that come along with automation in DevOps are not restricted to better performance or some slight improvements. Below are some vital benefits that make it mandatory to automate DevOps workflows and achieve efficiency like no other strategy can ensure.
Consistency
Automation in DevOps is remarkable in identifying errors and the final response of underdevelopment applications.
When you automate DevOps processes, the outcomes are always accurate and according to the expectations. You can significantly eliminate human errors and attain perfection by leveraging a range of automation tools and limiting the human factor.
Scalability
Automation in DevOps is much easier to scale and expand compared to manual and supervised workflows. For rich scalability, it is mandatory to automate DevOps by ensuring the availability of additional resources to address the increasing demand.
In manual tasks, scalability depends on the availability of resources or team members. For instance, In cloud environments, resources are automatically scaled based on the user demand or load.
Speed
Another notable factor in DevOps is its agile nature which notably influences the deliverability of the final project or application.
A streamlined process can be sourced irrespective of the team’s time, effort, or availability. Whereas the manual approach limits us to managing and revamping the entire process that comes amid multiple deadlocks and delays. In simple words, you can skyrocket your development speed by automation in DevOps compared to manual handling.
Flexibility
Automation enables us to remain flexible throughout the SDLC. This flexibility remains prevalent in terms of scope as well as functionality.
Generally, the only factor that limits your functionality & scope is the need to manually set up or configure the process that can be automated easily.
The Workflows You Must Automate in DevOps
It is recommended to implement automation in every key area where it can be implemented. Practically, it involves the workflows that mainly rely on external factors like:
- Business requirements
- Human Resource
- Technical area
An efficient DevOps team must be capable enough to opt for the processes that can be streamlined in the development cycle. Below are some mutual processes that every organization opts for automation.
Continuous Integration or Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)
As per the fundamental principles & software tools or utilities that drive the agile development framework, CI/CD is the primary component that must be streamlined in any development model. The aspects that can be influenced by automation include:
- Management of private GIT repositories as managed services
- Deploying containerized apps inappropriate testing or production frames
- Practical implementation of Infrastructure-as-a-code
It allows you to scale your infrastructures, such as networks and servers, based on demand and resource expansion. By doing so, you don’t have to set up, configure, and invest in the maintenance of in-house resources.
This automated management of infrastructure by creating pre-implementing infrastructure-as-a-code can help manage infrastructure without critical and dedicated human supervision.
Software Testing
This is another remarkable aspect of implementing automation across the entire framework. You can leverage a range of testing automation utilities such as selenium or Puppeteer. These tools are known to turn the entire process of automated testing into a more simple and easier task. It includes:
- Unit testing
- User Interface testing
- Smokes tests
- Human-machine interaction testing
Monitoring
Continuously evolving DevOps processes come amid another complexity in terms of monitoring and tracking the changes throughout the development phase. Automation in this area can assist your DevOps teams in ensuring streamlined and rules-based monitoring and getting notifications about the latest developments or changes. It ensures:
- Durability & reliability of infrastructure
- Enterprise-grade performance
- Security check and balance, etc.
Managing Logs
Logs are the building blocks for the process of finding any existing or potential issues in an application. An application can generate a range of logs during different phases. Ensuring automation in this area offers in-depth analysis and assessment of these logs. You can leverage a range of log management software tools to help uncover all sorts of issues in an application.
End Words
Keep in mind that automation is intended to eliminate human counterparts. Consider automation as an additional facility or 3rd arm to turn your DevOps process into a more efficient and result-oriented approach. Therefore, when you automate DevOps processes, it guarantees you the development of high-end and error-free software.