DevOps Automation: Meaning, Best Practices and Benefits

Technology is the engine driving world’s systems today. Technological advancements are making headlines every day everywhere. With technological advancements, challenges follow too.  Earlier engineers used to manually update systems and applications to meet the required alterations. However, it was not only time-taking but also highly prone to human errors. But today with DevOps task automation, this cumbersome process has become fast, reliable, and seamless.

But how is it done? Let’s explore the aspects of DevOps that have transformed the world of developers, IT industry and made it a much happier place.

What is DevOps?

If you are even a tiny bit keen on technology, you must have heard this term a hundred times. But are you aware of its functionality & necessity? Before we go any further, let’s understand what DevOps is and whether is it worth the hype.

DevOps is defined as “a collection of software development process’s best practices and a working methodology that helps in shortening plus optimizing the development cycle and support practices including continuous integration, delivery & deployment (CI/CD).”

DevOps helps teams deliver updates at a higher rate with a short turnaround time along with maintaining production stability. The DevOps team works with software development and IT operations to reduce downtime, accelerate release time, and reduce human errors.

Now the question is that if DevOps is this awesome then why look for DevOps automation? 

Automation in DevOps means automating repetitive manual tasks without requiring any human intervention. In DevOps processes such as designing, developing, deploying, releasing, and monitoring can be automated to reduce the developer’s workload. Automation helps in minimizing human error, enhancing productivity, and removing the need for bigger teams. It also helps programmers develop faster and more efficiently.

What is the advantage of DevOps automation?

Several reasons make DevOps automation such a popular tool for both, engineers and organizations. Some of the key benefits of DevOps automation are listed below:

Easier to achieve consistency–

Mostly, bugs and errors in software applications occur due to human error. But by automating the DevOps process, it not only gets easier to identify these errors but to also reduce them and maintain overall consistency. It is advised to implement best practices of DevOps automation to streamline the development cycle and generate consistent results every single time.

Easier to achieve scalability–

Manual process is time-consuming and often scalability means additional workforce or time. Comparatively, DevOps allow automation and with it comes easier scalability option. Businesses can scale in any environment using DevOps.

Easier to achieve speed–

Speed is everything. Technological updates if not available at the right time mean nothing. The speed of development plus deployment is one of the specialties of DevOps automation. It allows developers to move the entire process quickly resulting in faster project delivery. As automation eliminates the need for human intervention, a developer can focus on necessary aspects of the project to meet the timeline goals.

Easier to achieve flexibility–

DevOps allows easier modification of process configuration, thus providing customization of the automated process. A developer can configure the process as per the requirement to enhance the process scope plus functionality. This flexibility to alter the process provides much-needed flexibility to developers in a DevOps environment.

Easier to achieve cost optimization–

Since human error is reduced, investment in remodification is cut down which saves production costs. Automating redundant activities allows developers to focus on higher revenue tasks and achieve business goals.

Easier to achieve enhanced productivity–

DevOps automation is all about reducing developer workload and helping them focus on higher productivity tasks. With automation, developers can focus on tasks that machines cannot handle.

Easier to achieve transparency–

Automating processes such as security testing and monitoring helps in identifying system bottlenecks and security threats while maintaining process transparency. It is easier for teams to check if each component is working as expected or not and fix vulnerabilities quickly.

But the key lies in following the best practices of DevOps automation. For the complete optimization of DevOps automation, it is recommended to follow a set of rules. 

DevOps automation best practices

Developers need to collaborate and contribute to operations. Collaboration is key to ensuring the smooth production of newer updates without adversely affecting the overall application. 

Developers should be involved in operations

By involving operations it gets easier to avoid disruptions caused by limitations of hardware, deployment, security, or tooling systems. 

Storing everything with the version

It is a recommended practice to store every new alteration in the version control system. This allows developers to keep a track of source code, hardware and software configurations, policies plus other vital information related to the application. It is easier to control everything in a production environment by following this practice.

Keep Infrastructure in mind

It is important to check every change in real-time by running it on the required infrastructure to ensure the success of software/application updates.

Automation is the key

Reduce redundancies, human intervention, time consumption, and errors with pipeline automation in DevOps. 

Follow CI/CD

Checking every modification through continuous implementation and integration must be followed. This practice allows a faster recovery in case of any mishap.

Integration

DevOps ensures the smooth translation of development to production by integrating key tools and platforms of development, staging and production processes in a unified environment. Integration is the best way to optimize process configuration and hardware resources in DevOps.

Leading DevOps Automation tools

Some of the popular DevOps automation tools used by developers worldwide are –

• Terraform
• Ansible
• GitHub
• GitLab
• Jenkins
• Chef

Conclusion

DevOps is all about enhanced productivity and quality with speedy development and DevOps automation is all about reducing human intervention and error at each stage. Both combined make the life of a developer easy by reducing repetitive tasks and redundancies. 

Techpartner is a trusted IT-advisor globally who is known for guiding future-ready IT landscapes and help businesses achieve efficiency using modern IT infrastructure. We help businesses go parallel with IT acceleration while achieving business continuity. Reach out to expert today to know how we can help your business scale up today!

About the author:

Prasad Wani is the founder and Director of Techpartner Alliance.