What is DevOps Automation and how does it Work?

What is DevOps Automation and how does it Work?

The pressure on software development teams to deliver new products and features to finish users is constant. Many businesses have adopted a DevOps culture so as to deliver new products quickly without sacrificing their commercial value.

DevOps Automation has numerous advantages: it reduces downtime for IT teams, improves business operations efficiency, improves quality assurance, and lowers costs. Automating your software development lifecycle can improve your software products while also improving the end-user experience.

We’ll check how DevOps automation works and the way it benefits the software development lifecycle during this blog post.

What is DevOps?

To better understand each term, let’s start by defining DevOps and automation separately.

DevOps brings development (Dev) and operations (Ops) together (Ops). It is a way of mixing strengths to enhance workflows. By eliminating manual tasks that are vulnerable to human error, DevOps can make work more efficient and versatile.

DevOps is additionally a software development approach that focuses on delivering business value quickly and enabling responsiveness through high-quality delivery. DevOps practices eliminate data silos and improve communication by bridging the gap between development and operations.

DevOps practices accelerate the transition of ideas and projects from development to production, with rapid changes to code and infrastructure that may be impossible under the normal, manual software development paradigm.

How does DevOps Work?

DevOps practices are a subset of the agile methodology’s tasks and methods. DevOps influences the look, development, building, releasing, monitoring, and management of your product throughout its lifecycle. Each phase, as shown within the DevOps cycle diagram, depends on the others and supports continuous delivery at each stage of the project.

As previously stated, teams aren’t any longer siloed within the DevOps model, and both dev and ops teams collaborate across the appliance lifecycle and therefore the DevOps pipeline.

The 6 C’s of the DevOps cycle, which structure the whole DevOps lifecycle, reflect the requirement for a tech stack change and a culture change for a DevOps team to figure correctly. Let’s take a glance at them to work out how DevOps works.

• Continuous Business Planning identifies the required skills, outcomes, and resources.
• Collaborative Development: Creates a rough plan and builds the software unitedly with others.
• Continuous Testing: Using unit testing and integration testing, it’s possible to enhance the efficiency and speed of development.
• Continuous Release and Deployment: Combines the continual Delivery pipeline with code reviews to create code check-in a breeze.
• Continuous Monitoring: Constantly monitors changes and corrects errors or mistakes.
• Customer Feedback and Optimization: this enables you to induce immediate feedback from customers on your product and make changes to support that feedback.

Let’s speak about DevOps automation now that we’ve covered the basics.

What is Devops Automation and the Way Does it Work?

The DevOps practice relies on the principle of “automating everything.” Because the bulk of the tasks within the DevOps lifecycle is repeatable, they’re ideal candidates for automation. DevOps Automation begins with the generation of code on the developer’s local machine and continues until the code is deployed, additionally as during the monitoring phase.

IT automation, robotic process automation (RPA), AI automation, machine learning, and deep learning are all samples of software development automation processes. All of them are employed in DevOps processes.

Automation streamlines DevOps processes and makes them faster and more efficient, allowing developers and operations teams to make, test, deploy, and maintain code in less time and with fewer errors than manual methods. Companies can use automation to make pipelines for continuous integration (CI), continuous delivery (CD), and continuous deployment (CI/CD).

How Automation Benefits DevOps

If you would like to realize your DevOps goals of delivering prime quality and value through frequent and rapid releases, DevOps Automation is critical. Let’s take a glance at a number of the benefits of DevOps automation.

Flexibility

Even after changing pieces of your tech stack, automation software allows you to configure and improve your processes. DevOps automation tools and process automation improve operational efficiency and adaptability, both in terms of scope and functionality. Furthermore, automating your pipeline is both quicker and less expensive than hiring someone to stay track of everything.

Consistency

DevOps engineers can spot bugs faster with consistent testing. Throughout the deployment process, automation allows you to spot errors and proper behaviors. Due to the DevOps toolchain, results are always consistent and predictable in a highly automated environment.

Scalability

Manual processes limit your capacity to the number of trained employees in your company, whereas automated processes allow you to rescale as your business grows. DevOps automation uses cloud-based, automated tools to supply unrestricted scalability to fulfill your company’s needs.

Which DevOps Operations Processes should be Automated?

To automate the lifecycle, automated testing tools and pre-set configuration are used primarily. Let’s study a number of the DevOps processes that you just can—and should—automate.

Testing

The amount of human intervention within the testing process is reduced by test automation. To verify an application’s functionality, automated test scripts and tools are often used.

Provisioning

Automated provisioning could be a critical DevOps capability that permits you to deliver computing capacity on-demand without the necessity for manual intervention. The organization can deliver apps faster than before by providing a versatile, scalable infrastructure that’s highly scalable and has dynamic resource allocation.

Deployment

DevOps tools facilitate resource synchronization and deployment across a dynamic infrastructure. As changes are made, deployment automation provides a resilient platform that keeps computing resources (manually and automatically provisioned) in sync.

CI/CD

Continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD) processes are often automated to support agile monitoring, integrations, and testing in order that changes to the application may be delivered and deployed more quickly.

Infrastructure Automation

The goal of infrastructure automation is to automate tasks and reduce human input so all of the hardware, software, network, operating systems (OS), and data storage components involved in delivering information technology services and solutions are better controlled.

Monitoring

Continuously monitoring the performance of your application becomes tougher as developers add new features on a day to day. You have got access to a good range of tools and methods to observe applications employing a dedicated interface because of DevOps practices.

Management of Logs

Every software application and also the infrastructure on which the software runs generate log events, which must be handled. Collecting logs, aggregating, parsing, storing, analyzing, searching, archiving, and destroying them are all a part of the log management automation process, with the goal of troubleshooting and gaining business insights while implementing compliance and security measures to your code.

Before You Automate Your DevOps Pipeline, Here are Some Pointers

Let’s take a glance at some tips to contemplate before automating your DevOps pipeline now that we’ve covered DevOps automation and discussed the advantages.

Choose open standards: Your tooling doesn’t should change simply because your contributors and team do. Using tooling that follows standard and open standards, the onboarding process is often simplified, and specialized training will be reduced. Moving to the cloud has also resulted in the creation of open community standards for packaging, runtime, configuration, networking, and even storage.

Create a CDP (Continuous Delivery Pipeline): A CDP establishes a workflow that permits software products to maneuver more quickly from concept to release. A CDP enables the delivery of smaller code releases and improves business agility in response to changing market demands.

Use dynamic variables to your advantage: Prioritizing reusable code will reduce rework and duplication in the future. Using externally defined variables in scripts and specialized tools makes it simple to adapt your automation to different environments without changing the code. Also, confine in mind that your DevOps automation should be held to the identical high standards as your regular code/feature development. Critique, reusability, modularity, scalability, source control, and unit tests should all be included.

Go Headless: Traditional or monolithic CMSs aren’t built to support DevOps practices, so go headless. Headless CMS, on the opposite hand, are built with automation and modularity in mind, giving them a plus in terms of content delivery and software development support.

Mind MACH architecture: Microservice architecture enables modular software development, which is in line with supporting an endless Delivery Pipelines. The MACH architecture gives you more flexibility in terms of improving, scaling, or updating these standalone components.

Activate AI:

Data-driven AI algorithms can spot specific patterns in DevOps processes, allowing them to identify bottlenecks and solve problems. Computer science can help DevOps tools, especially when it involves monitoring development and production.

Integrate DevOps and Marketing: the application of DevOps practices to other areas of your business has the potential to spice up productivity. Marketing, development, and operations functions are all combined in an agile, DevOps-driven management style, which creates interdependency between teams for coordinated action.

Make use of adaptable tooling: Although there aren’t always tools that fit every situation, employing a DevOps tool that enables you to modify technologies will reduce rework when a corporation shifts its focus. You’ll be able to define your own unique set of best practices and overcome any toolchain constraints with an answer that works with any cloud and offers a good range of partners and integrations.

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.