DevOps is all about automation and continuity. I’ve written in the past about continuous as a DevOps buzzword, and the continuous continuousness of DevOps because it seems like everything is continuous. There’s continuous delivery, continuous integration, continuous testing, continuous deployment, etc. Perhaps the executives at AUTOMIC read my work and it inspired them to skip straight to Continuous Everything.
DevOps is fundamentally about culture more than tools, but once the culture is in place the tools make all the difference and many of the tools revolve around automation. Every task that is routine and repeatable should be automated so that actual human beings can devote their time to more complex or important tasks. The goal of DevOps, ultimately, is to enable developers, IT operations, and other teams to work more effectively and efficiently.
AUTOMIC—a play on words that has “auto” as its root, but is pronounced like “atomic”—is focused on driving DevOps automation. The AUTOMIC Continuous Everything business automation platform is designed to help businesses by combining continuous delivery, continuous operations, and continuous services into a single, unified platform.
“Never has there been so much pressure on businesses to increase their speed of execution”, said Todd DeLaughter, CEO of AUTOMIC in a press release statement. “We are at a turning point in how enterprises embrace change, manage disruption and deliver new services with pace. Point tools for automation are inadequate against this challenge. AUTOMIC’s approach through a unified business automation platform, One Automation, allows seamless integration from the business processes through the IT services supporting those processes and the delivery of applications to differentiate the business. AUTOMIC empowers businesses through automation – end to end.”
Since one of the primary goals of DevOps is efficiency it makes sense to combine tools into a unified platform. Giving DevOps teams a single, consistent interface to manage multiple facets of DevOps automation seems like a logical solution.
I have a couple issues with the AUTOMIC offering, though. First, I’m not entirely sure what it’s actually called. AUTOMIC uses Continuous Everything—capitalized as if it’s a proper name—but it also states that the AUTOMIC Business Automation platform delivers three levels of DevOps automation, and DeLaughter refers to One Automation. When all is said and done, I’m not really sure if AUTOMIC is referring to three different tools or just has three different names it uses to refer to the same platform.
The second issue I have is the use of the word “everything” for an automation solution that only covers three things. There is a wide variety of continuous automation solutions for DevOps: continuous delivery, continuous deployment, continuous improvement, continuous integration, continuous monitoring, continuous testing, and more. Providing continuous delivery, continuous operations, and continuous services in a unified platform is ostensibly better than delivering just one or two of those options, but it’s far short of being “everything”.
The names become an issue again when you try to buy the tools. They aren’t actually called continuous delivery, continuous operations, or continuous services. There is AUTOMIC Release Automation, AUTOMIC Workload Automation, and AUTOMIC Service Orchestration, which are each plugins that work with the AUTOMIC platform. All plugins are immediately available on the AUTOMIC Marketplace. Pricing is available on-demand.