DevOps Automation: How is Automation Applied in DevOps Practice

DevOps Automation: How is Automation Applied in DevOps Practice

DevOps is based on the philosophy of “Automate everything,” which states that automation is essential to the success of any DevOps automation initiative. From the time code is generated on the developer’s machine until the time it is pushed to the code and even after that, when it is being monitored in production, DevOps is a fully automated process.

Application performance monitoring is an integral part of the DevOps automation pipeline, which also includes automated testing and deployment. The most important part of DevOps is the automation of infrastructure deployment and configurations. Deliveries within a few hours and frequent deliveries across platforms are impossible without automation, which is why DevOps automation is so reliant on it.

In this tutorial, we will examine the role that automation plays in the DevOps methodology in greater depth.

In this article, we will talk about:

What Role Does Automation Play in DevOps Automation Processes?

Automation plays a critical role in DevOps automation processes, enabling organizations to speed up the delivery of new features and updates while ensuring quality and consistency. By automating key tasks, such as provisioning and configuration management, organizations can reduce the time and effort required to manage their environments. Additionally, automation can help to ensure that changes are implemented consistently and accurately across multiple servers and environments.

In many cases, automation can also help to improve the security of DevOps automation processes, by providing a way to enforce security policies and procedures. For example, by automating the application of security patches and updates, organizations can reduce the risk of vulnerabilities being exploited. Additionally, by automating the monitoring of systems and applications, organizations can quickly detect and respond to potential security threats.

How Important is DevOps Automation, and What Role Does It Play?

DevOps Automation is increasingly important in today’s world. It can speed up processes and make them more efficient, which can save time and money. It can also help to improve safety and quality control. Automation can play a role in almost any industry, from manufacturing to healthcare. In many cases, it can help to improve productivity and efficiency.

Which Tasks Should Be Automated?

There are many tasks that can be automated in order to improve efficiency and productivity. For example, tasks such as data entry, appointment scheduling, and email responses can all be automated. This can free up time for employees to focus on more important tasks. Additionally, automating tasks can help to reduce errors and improve accuracy.

How about a framework and tools for constant testing?

Bringing up the topic of robots and AI makes me nervous. This is due to the fact that, in my opinion, automation can never be fully implemented.

Obviously, the primary motivation for adopting automation is to reduce or eliminate the need for human intervention. People would rather devote their time and energy to something creative and novel than to monotonous, repetitive jobs.

However, automation plays a significant part in DevOps and is essential for providing ongoing value to the client. Because the answers to both “how” and “what” to automate are intertwined in DevOps automation practice, let’s address them together.

To Automate or Not to Automate?

Now that we live in an age of increasing automation, I don’t think the answer to this question needs much of an introduction. It seems like wherever we go, more and more tasks are being automated with little or no human involvement. Thus, DevOps is not an outlier.

It used to be that only the development team and their activities, especially testing, were automated in the conventional approach to creating software. Once upon a time, testing automation meant testing and automating test cases, and only functional test cases at that; non-functional testing, such as performance and security, was not even considered.

When it comes to operations, in particular, none of the other tasks were ever automated. The failure of a manual deployment on a massive cluster consisting of 8 servers and the resulting loss is a prime example of the complexity involved in deployments and the evident necessity of automation for DevOps automation activities.

I’ve witnessed firsthand how companies pay top dollar for the services of highly qualified individuals in order to manually configure their networks and environments, a task that previously required a great deal of brainpower, specialized training, experience, and expertise. No one has to be reminded that manual configuration is prone to mistakes. After a while of performing the same tasks over and over again, even the most intelligent network configurators might grow tired of them and make careless mistakes when setting up networks manually.

You are well aware that these tasks will be too easy and dull for them, despite their intelligence, and that they require new challenges on a daily basis. Therefore, the advent of automation for software installation and version managing the infrastructure component became a big gain and decreased a lot of human errors in addition to saving time and allowing any common man to perform this, thus eliminating the need for trained workers.

In addition, you won’t have to go through any unnecessary hoops, like submitting a ticket to have a new environment set up, or having your IT department put things up in the background. As a result, members of the team have the autonomy to complete the assignments. Imagine the time savings, security, and uniformity that automation would bring about. Because of this alarming rise in deliveries to the industry, automation has become increasingly necessary.

Therefore, the key to the success of DevOps is now automation, which the Operations team has begun implementing across the board. In DevOps, automation begins with code generation on the developer’s machine and continues through the deployment of the code to production and the subsequent monitoring of the program in its live state. This loop represents a typical DevOps automation process.

After the development and operations, teams have committed their code and environment settings to version control, automation can begin to initiate the build and execute unit tests as well as other fundamental code quality, coverage, security-related, etc. tests. After this is complete, the code is automatically compiled, added to version control, and deployed to additional environments for testing and, eventually, the production release.

Every step of the process, from triggering the build to doing unit testing to packaging to deploying to the specified environments to performing build verification tests to smoking out acceptance test cases to releasing to production, is being automated.

In the same vein, when we talk about automating test cases, we’re not just referring to unit tests, but also to installation tests, integration tests, user experience tests, UI tests, and so on. The DevOps methodology mandates that the operations team automate all of their tasks, including provisioning the servers, configuring the servers, configuring the networks, configuring the firewalls, and monitoring the application in the production system.

So, to answer the question of what to automate, we can say: build trigger, compiling and building, deploying or installing, automating infrastructure set up as a coded script, environment configurations as a coded script, needless to say, testing, post-deployment life performance monitoring in life, logs monitoring, monitoring alerts, pushing notifications to live and getting alerts from life in case of any errors and warnings, etc.

All Project-Related Paperwork is Ultimately Digitized

Continuous Integration, Continuous Testing, Continuous Deployment, and Continuous Delivery are the four pillars of automation in the terminology of DevOps automation. In the next sections, we’ll dive deep into each of these topics.

DevOps automation, as a whole, allows for the automation of any and all development and operations tasks that can be automated, are repetitive, require a high degree of precision, or are time-consuming. However, a talk about automation is not complete without mentioning the tools that will be employed.

Therefore, the most important prerequisite for automation in DevOps is the choice of the appropriate framework and automation tool. There is a wide variety of open source and licensed tools on the market today that facilitate the full automation of the delivery pipeline, from the initial provisioning of machines to the automated spinning of servers, the configuration of networks and firewalls, and the monitoring of software performance.

In addition, some businesses have created their own framework to integrate the entire DevOps automation process, beginning with code commitment and ending with code deployment and documentation, all within a single integrated tool. This means that the development team need not look elsewhere for help with any phase of the program’s lifecycle, including but not limited to version control, test case writing, review, test case results dumping, analysis, etc.

The Value of Automation in DevOps

In the past, releases took years to reach production because of a lack of automation; now, with the advent of agile practices like lean, scrum, and safe, and the ongoing improvement of DevOps automation, release times have shrunk to only a matter of months or weeks.

Nonetheless, if the releases have to be made in a matter of hours, automation is an absolute necessity. As a result, I believe it is difficult to create such rapid and frequent releases without implementing automation throughout the pipeline.

So, obviously, we need to automate everything if we want to meet the goals of DevOps, which are to provide high quality and value to clients via frequent and rapid delivery.

Automation, as we all know by now, eliminates human mistakes and dependence on individual performance, allowing for greater speed, precision, and reliability. As a result, the DevOps automation goal of high-quality delivery, frequent releases, and speedier releases can be attained through a comprehensive program of automation.

Essentially, DevOps Automation,

DevOps automation encompasses the full spectrum of the process, beginning with the construction phase and ending with the monitoring of the finished product. This means that automation can be used to help manage everything from project planning to system administration. In addition, automation can help to speed up the process by automating tasks that would otherwise be time-consuming or error-prone.​

• Eliminates the possibility of making a mistake when typing
• Everyone on the team has the ability to make decisions
• Independence restored
• Lack of Lag Time
• Maximizes birthrates
• Faster turnaround time
• A higher rate of releases is achieved
• Increases the rate at which you receive responses
• Faster processing, greater dependability, and uniformity are made possible
• Therefore, in a nutshell, automation in DevOps encompasses the full spectrum of the process, beginning with the construction phase and ending with the monitoring of the finished product

Conclusion

As discussed in our blog, DevOps automation is a necessity in the business world today. From the implementation of DevOps practices to the regular updating of the applications, it is necessary to have a streamlined, automated system in place. With all of the benefits of DevOps, you may be wondering what your options are in regards to DevOps automation. We have outlined some of the best options for you below.

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.​