In the book, “Life and the Art of Engineering,” author Haresh Sippy said, “Automation is cost-cutting by tightening the corners, not cutting them.” Today, businesses and organizations are constantly on the lookout for ways to improve productivity while reducing inefficiencies across their operations. Automation has emerged as the natural answer as it addresses these issues while enabling organizations to scale their operations.
And this is a natural fit with DevOps, which aims to automate and streamline and accelerate the development process from code generation to application performance monitoring. Automation promises better results, greater efficiency and reduction or elimination of errors, but many organizations remain hesitant to deploy it in critical operational areas.
But there are many benefits to DevOps automation that organizations shouldn’t ignore:
- Consistency: The most crucial benefit of DevOps automation is consistency. The absence of human effort can remove errors because automation tools repeat processes in the same way, ensuring the development environment remains of consistently high quality.
- Scalability: DevOps automation not only allows new code to be released quickly but in larger quantities, as well. Automation also allows teams to deliver multiple projects in multiple environments simultaneously, reducing manual processes.
- Speed: One of the first visible benefits DevOps automation will bring to the table is the sheer speed of the product delivery process. DevOps automation streamlines the configuration process, the development environment and other aspects of deploying new software, making the process significantly faster. With DevOps automation, software delivery becomes less dependent on people.
- Flexibility: Flexibility can often be an overlooked aspect of automation. However, with DevOps automation, organizations can change and modify critical code based on new requirements and deploy these changes in real-time, rather than having to train the team to manage the operations based on the new changes.
Critical DevOps Automation Processes
Once an organization is aware of the benefits, the obvious next step is to figure out which processes to automate.
While a core tenet of DevOps is to automate everything logically possible, that is a long-term goal. On a more immediate basis, organizations would be well-advised to focus on automating a few critical standard processes.
This will allow for a smoother transition as well as more efficient results. But the question of which exact processes to automate is a subjective decision that will depend on each organization’s unique needs and technological requirements. However, some fundamental areas that may benefit from DevOps automation in any organization include the following:
- Software Testing: Any organization with a digital service or product to offer spends considerable time and human resources testing the new offering or updates before rolling them out. Naturally, automating the testing process would bring greater efficiency to the test results while significantly reducing any errors, especially human errors. Additional tests that may be automated include unit tests, smoke tests and UI tests.
- Monitoring: Most organizations understand how important it is to adopt a proactive approach to monitoring. A key aspect of DevOps is consistently reading, recording and maintaining crucial data from regular monitoring. By automating this process, organizations can further increase the extraction of valuable B2B data and insights while ensuring greater security against possible breaches and data theft.
- Infrastructure: Infrastructure management is a critical area that serves a vital role in ensuring things run smoothly. This includes networks or servers that are consistently in need of maintenance, configuration modifications and initial setups. By deploying an automated infrastructure, organizations can increase efficiency while freeing up valuable human resources to be deployed elsewhere.
- Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD): CI/CD’s entire purpose is fast application development and delivery. By its very nature, this task is ripe for automation as it requires testing and monitoring every little change or modification. Similarly, automating the deployment phase of CI/CD would ensure the distribution of successful updates is carried out proactively the very second it is ready. As a result, organizations will see updates being rolled out more efficiently with minimal errors or bugs in the final updates.