Automation use cases that expedite insights for answer-driven DevOps

Preamble

​Answer-driven DevOps automation can help businesses understand things more quickly and reduce the risk of unplanned downtime. How? Read on. 

Organizations are starting to understand the need for automation, and more particularly, DevOps automation, as they progress along the path of digital transformation.

However, as multicloud setups grow, they become more complicated and create a lot of data. As a result, manual ways of finding and fixing code problems are not scalable. With these conventional methods, organizations are unable to properly manage their cloud systems.

In fact, 55% of the people who answered the 2023 Global CIO Survey said that they often sacrifice code quality, reliability, or security to meet the demand for quick software delivery.

More site reliability engineering (SRE) and DevOps teams are utilizing automation to decrease the number of manual tasks and free up time for innovation. DevOps automation, on the other hand, does more than just get rid of human work and speed up processes. It also focuses on learning through answer-driven operations.

Maturity: Addressing the DevOps automation obstacle

Even though many businesses have invested in automation, DevOps teams still encounter difficulties.

The difference between how much money was spent and how confident people were in automation was caused by how mature DevOps was. Companies that are just starting to automate tasks like reporting and infrastructure procedures often rely on scheduled frameworks that use low-code and no-code solutions. Event-driven automation is often the next step in the maturity of DevOps automation. This functions as a service to protect against threats and solve problems. When it has tools for progressive delivery and answer-driven DevOps automation, the maturity model is finished. This lets DevOps teams and site reliability engineers (SREs) take targeted actions that improve results.

Even though many companies have set up scheduled automation, the problem is that event-driven frameworks are much less common and answer-driven innovations are still rare. Because of this, many businesses don’t fully utilize automation. Although companies are still making progress in comparison to manual procedures, there is still a lot of opportunity for development.

Key players: SREs and DevOps professionals

Automating processes benefits both SREs and DevOps experts. With the help of DevOps automation, they can get their priorities done quickly while reducing their problems.

DevOps teams, for instance, strive to deliver applications and services that are both safe and high-performing more quickly. As a way to reach this goal, they are interested in automating self-service and making feedback loops shorter. But these efforts are often thwarted by things like complicated pipelines, a heavy reliance on manual processes that are hard to understand, and bad software that gets into production.

Meanwhile, the top priorities of SREs are automation, reliability, and resilience. SRE specialists face challenges from app outages, security flaws, and incident management. Downtime and worries about dependability can hurt the customer experience, so the reputation of the brand is another important thing to think about.

The four stages of feedback-based effective DevOps automation are sense, think, act, and optimize.

Teams can better grasp what answer-driven SRE and DevOps automation looks like in practice by looking at the automation use cases below:

Targeted notification and collaboration in automation use case 1

The goal of targeted notification and collaboration is to automatically let the right teams know what’s going on and give them the information they need to triage faster. Ideally, this notification and collaboration should extend to any event type and status. It should also include actions that depend on the situation, like notifying the right teams, looking for existing tickets, and making new ones as needed.

Automation use case 2: Closed-loop remediation

MTTR reduction and steady state restoration are the objectives of closed-loop remediation. This workflow is set up to get information about a problem, analyze details about the problem, and fix the problem if possible without human help.

Automation use case 3: Change/release impact analysis

Organizations are better able to increase the dependability and quality of the software they produce the more they comprehend the effects of software updates and releases. Organizations can go beyond straightforward analysis with answer-driven automation and incorporate trigger-based actions. For example, a “fail” result from release analysis can cause a rollback action. It is a good idea to have a backup plan in case the backup plan fails. A “warning” result might cause an approval action to be taken, then more research is done.

4th use case for automation: orchestrating progressive delivery

Software releases take place in stages. The software is initially made available to internal teams. It then becomes available to limited test groups and finally to the public at large. At each step, DevOps teams must evaluate the functions and features and make sure they are delivered safely and securely.

Three steps for successful DevOps automation

The first step in switching from time-based or event-driven automation to answer-driven efforts is to realize how important it is to be able to see what is going on and to have security data in context. Teams can streamline crucial operations and better prepare to handle potential problems by comprehending what is occurring and why.

The three actions listed below can lead to more effective DevOps automation:

1. Start small and build upon it

Start small and simple. The advantages of automation are ultimately undermined by doing too much too quickly because complexity makes it difficult for teams to distinguish between signals and noise. Organizations can learn what works and what doesn’t by starting with a straightforward, use-case-based implementation and then expanding it from there.

2. Automate what is most important.

While automation benefits most processes, not every process has the same priority. As a result, putting the most important things first may help organizations succeed the most. For instance, reducing mean time to response (or MTTR) and ensuring user satisfaction depend greatly on automating processes surrounding issue identification and a return to steady operations.

3. Introduce frameworks that are answer-driven

The final step is to move past time- and event-driven options and set up answer-driven frameworks after processes have been identified and ranked. Context is the key advantage of this step. By putting the event or issue in question in the context of other operations, organizations can find new ways to streamline processes and get information that will help them make decisions in the future.

About Enteros

IT organizations routinely spend days and weeks troubleshooting production database performance issues across multitudes of critical business systems. Fast and reliable resolution of database performance problems by Enteros enables businesses to generate and save millions of direct revenue, minimize waste of employees’ productivity, reduce the number of licenses, servers, and cloud resources and maximize the productivity of the application, database, and IT operations teams.