The DevOps Automation Lifecycle: Automating Your Way Through the SDLC

The DevOps Automation Lifecycle: Automating Your Way Through the SDLC

To hasten both the creation and release of new code, automation has emerged as a major component of DevOps. Find out what successful multinational firms have done to automate their processes and learn from their examples.

• The financial advantages of DevOps automation are openly there for anyone to observe

Anyone familiar with ServiceMaster would attest to the company’s dedication to providing excellent customer care from the time of booking through the receipt of post-service comments. Thanks to automated DevOps processes!

In the beginning, the company had a hard time coordinating its software development pipelines, assigning jobs to developers, and communicating with its service providers. By using DevOps automation, they were able to speed up the process of adding new features to their app, improve the quality of their interactions with customers, save time on manual work, and improve teamwork.

In the field of development, automation has reworked IT systems, updated application development methods, and reduced the need for human labor. In light of this, let’s take a closer look at DevOps automation, how it’s used, and some of the best ways to make sure operations stay the same.

To help businesses reach their full potential, Simform is a top DevOps automation consulting and implementation firm that facilitates rapid deployment and product release. Get in touch with us right now so we can help you expand your company’s capabilities.

In other words, DevOps is just another word for automation. Having automated processes is crucial for DevOps.

With DevOps, developers, and operations staff may work together more efficiently and faster, and continuous deployments can be achieved by adhering to best practices.

As a general rule, in older models of software development, the development and operations teams were kept separate to avoid overlapping efforts and to speed up the more time-consuming tasks. Even more challenging was keeping track of everything because each step of development and testing had to be executed, recorded, and checked on by hand.

Application of automation has become mandatory as a result of DevOps methods. The advancement of tech stacks has made it possible for teams to effectively monitor and ensure the quality of the apps they build. The quality, adaptability, and administration of the physical infrastructure at the site were all enhanced.

The feedback loops are made easier and iterative adjustments are made possible via automation. Continuous feedback is used to make improvements over time, like making it easy to add more users, adding new features quickly and painlessly, making sure all the steps are the same and responding quickly to any changes in the environment. 

Which Parts of DevOps Automation Should be Mechanized?

In order to efficiently manage and modernize a sizable and complex IT infrastructure, DevOps automation is the best option available. Almost every phase of the software development lifecycle can be mechanized, beginning with code generation and ending with software testing.

As part of the best DevOps practices, several DevOps teams throughout the world have automated the following procedures.

Managing the IT infrastructure needn’t be a headache thanks to automated systems.

The ability to scale is constantly on the minds of business owners due to the ever-increasing needs of today’s businesses. Keeping up with the expansion of the industry might be challenging due to constraints on available resources and working hours. And among the greatest difficulties engineers have is overseeing a vast information technology infrastructure. The answer is to implement a dynamic infrastructure automation solution, which would enable the automation of many IT subsystems, including but not limited to servers, workstations, networking hardware, data storage devices, and even the operating system itself.

Managing a complex IT system with on-site manual management is time-consuming and inefficient; automating the underlying infrastructure is a more strategic option. Making the switch to infrastructure as code and the cloud has simplified the automation of routine tasks. Continuous integration, software deployment, and delivery are three features that would benefit greatly from a fully automated backend. As an added bonus, it could automatically scale workloads without requiring any additional hardware upgrades.

Automation of The DevOps Lifecycle is Best Exemplified By The British Army’s Move To A Mechanized Infrastructure.

Information Technology provides the Army with essential software engineering solutions like application distribution, hosting, and online services. It is crucial that these services’ servers are always up and running because they are intended for people stationed in different countries.

There were performance and compatibility concerns with the IAS’s LINUX platforms, which were powered by ORACLE technology, leading to unscheduled outages and sluggish upgrade rollouts. As a solution, IAS staff moved away from a physical infrastructure setup in favor of a software-defined data center and implemented configuration automation. As a result, they were able to increase their responsiveness, availability, and consistency while decreasing their reliance on human error and speeding up their delivery times by as much as 75%.

Automate System Configuration Management to Ensure Reliability

A stable and reliable server and software environment is maintained through configuration management. This method of change tracking guarantees that no alterations are overlooked in the documentation process, making it easier to track down and fix issues and make future adjustments. When configuration management is automated, engineers no longer need to constantly tinker with scripts to maintain the system’s defined state; instead, automation takes care of everything by itself.

Infrastructure provisioning takes less than half as long when managed using configuration automation as when done manually. The elimination of human mistakes allows for greater application performance, the correction of inconsistencies, and the resolution of compliance issues. Engineers can keep a server in the proper condition automatically, without using automated provisioning scripts, if they have access to the right automated tools.

Among the many providers of broadband satellite and network services, Hughes Network System is rapidly gaining popularity. Their initial assumptions about the capabilities of their monolithic design were proven wrong as they reached a wall. They needed a way to keep track of all of their users across the world and make sure their network never went down.

When Ansible Automation was used for configuration management, Hughes Network System was able to maintain a steady, fully automated state for the whole underlying network architecture. By using DevOps automation, they were able to reduce the time it took to set up a test environment from weeks to hours. This freed up resources for use in other, more fruitful ways, and ultimately benefited consumers and businesses alike.

Quick updates with automated deployments

Having deployments automatically executed allows for hassle-free, risk-free, continuous testing and production deployment, which is a huge boon for DevOps developers. DevOps automation speeds up the package deployment process from days or weeks to hours, and it gives you immediate feedback for iterations. The user experience, engagement, and usability of FIH’s website were completely revitalized when Simform made the architecture of the site more scalable and flexible.

To further reduce the time it takes to get your apps to market, it facilitates simple management of your continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines. In this way, you can confidently integrate, test, and roll out updated components of your modern apps. The only thing missing is a team that adheres to the finest DevOps standards and a consistent agile development methodology.

DevOps automation helped them maintain their services live and accessible to voters all throughout the country during the campaign. Even on days when demand for their services was at its peak, the development team was able to construct, test, and deploy brand-new features with not a single moment of downtime. Engineers on the campaign were able to focus more on actual engineering work and less on mundane maintenance activities as a result.

Constant Security Through DevOps Automated Testing

The DevOps testing cycle is a necessary yet difficult activity to automate. Typically, the development team does testing and hands off the results to the QA team. The cycle continues as the QA team returns the code to the developers after making the defect determination, which is often manual and has its own set of limitations. Aside from being a waste of time, this also makes it difficult for the group as a whole to concentrate on anything useful.

Developers, operators, and testers may all work together using an automated approach thanks to the DevOps automation movement. Using the appropriate testing framework and tools, we can ensure that the application is both reliable and ready for use at any time. Even in cases when extensive and continuous testing must be performed, it reduces the likelihood of human mistakes, boosts reliability, identifies defects rapidly, and streamlines the process.

Measurement Should Be Logged and Monitored Automatically

The final stage is to make sure that our focus is on the metrics that will tell us how well our app is doing, now that most of the crucial DevOps procedures have been automated. Log management assists with analysis and problem identification, while automated monitoring keeps track of all relevant indicators. When your app has reached a complex stage where scaling is essential, this is really helpful.

Engineers can better address the evolving needs of their customers and respond to emerging problems with a more efficient process. You can use the information gathered by an automatic monitoring and logging system to your advantage while debugging by reviewing the history of all modifications. Teams can establish their own criteria, and then the automation will evaluate the app in accordance with those standards, delivering notifications if anything is out of the ordinary. Rather than spending a lot of time and money manually processing information, developers can use automated log management technologies to analyze the data and aggregate it to locate the issue.

How Capital One Uses Real-Time Logging and Monitoring to Pinpoint and Fix Bugs

Capital One adopted DevOps in 2010 to advance the company’s technical infrastructure in response to increasing online consumer expectations. Their mission was to streamline their SDLC in order to speed up service delivery, improve feedback loops, handle inconsistent releases, and get rid of human error. As a result of the measurements and data analytics made available by the constant monitoring and logging, problems, faults, and opportunities to enhance the customer experience could be pinpointed and exploited with greater precision and efficiency.

Capital One adopted an agile development methodology, built automated test cases, and robotically executed deployments as part of their DevOps automation with continuous integration/continuous delivery. To secure the reliability of the system, their interdisciplinary teams constructed an automated backend and enabled configuration management. All abnormalities in the system’s behavior were immediately flagged by the monitoring tools and the team received notifications in real-time. Keeping up with the continuous integration and continuous delivery cycle, it recorded all logs and automatically analyzed data fast.

Tips for Optimal Practices in Automating DevOps

In order to improve performance and delivery, it doesn’t take long to automate agile DevOps automation processes after they have become the norm in an organization. In order to prevent unfavorable results, simply record and adhere to some of the best practices.

• Faster development, integration, and deployment is possible with CI/CD
• If a service can be handled or is essential to your company’s expansion, automate it. Don’t rely too heavily on automating and repeating case examples
• For better teamwork, it is important to eliminate the old barriers that have traditionally existed within organizations and replace them with an agile project management system
• For more scalable options, it’s best to go from using on-premises hardware to using public cloud services
• To avoid the trap of trying to keep up with the competition, it’s important to carefully choose your tools by studying your business needs rather than rushing to integrate what may turn out to be unnecessary ones
• Always monitor metrics for better system clarity, regardless of your DevOps automation strategy

Conclusion

​We hope you enjoyed our blog about the benefits and limitations of automation in DevOps. This is a key concept for DevOps as teams and organizations move forward with their digital transformation. If you have any questions or concerns about this topic, please contact us anytime at Enteros. Thank you for reading, we are always excited when one of our posts is able to provide useful information on a topic like this!

About Enteros

Enteros offers a patented database performance management SaaS platform. It proactively identifies root causes of complex business-impacting database scalability and performance issues across a growing number of RDBMS, NoSQL, and machine learning database platforms.​