Devops Automation in Software Development: What to Automate?

Devops Automation in Software Development: What to Automate?

The DevOps culture has become increasingly popular among businesses of all sizes in recent years as the simplest way to extend business value. In step with reports, 83 percent of IT decision-makers adopted a DevOps culture in 2021. the explanations behind the unstoppable growth of DevOps practices are understood by observing the concrete numbers below: In 2021, 68 percent of companies reported improved end-to-end customer experiences as a result of implementing DevOps practices, and 47 percent of them admitted they sped up the time it took for his or her software and services to achieve the market. Evidently, DevOps’ influence within the software development sector can’t be understated, especially as automation enters the image and upends the establishment.

How Does DevOps Automation Work?

The software development life cycle is often accelerated with the employment of the acceptable DevOps tool (SDLC). However, what precisely is DevOps automation?

In its most elementary form, DevOps automation refers to the utilization of automation tools and technologies in DevOps practices to hold out repetitive tasks with little to no human involvement. From build and deployment pipelines to automatic testing and monitoring, this process automates every step of the software development lifecycle. The goal of the automation is to form DevOps procedures simpler while still promoting cooperation between the operation and development teams and securing high-quality results.

IT automation, infrastructure automation, robotic process automation (RPA), AI, machine learning, deep learning, and other technologies can all be employed in DevOps automation processes. A DevOps team should also give some thought to employing a number of automation tools that are currently available. The DevOps toolchain refers to the technologies and equipment utilized in automation.

Which Devops Processes must be automated?

The development and operations teams are ready to automate all of the manual lifecycle processes with the assistance of DevOps tools and automation technologies. The subsequent DevOps processes will be specifically targeted by automation:

Testing

The DevOps team should automate testing because it’s an important but laborious and time-consuming process. The DevOps team can then create and execute tests on the code in development more quickly and accurately before deploying it to production. This might make it easier to ensure that the code is error-free and in accordance with the required quality standards. Automated testing can even be wont to keep an eye fixed on a system for potential problems after deployment. Finally, automated testing can assist development teams in reducing the quantity of human involvement within the testing process, thereby assisting in the prevention of human error. A number of the tests that may be automated within the DevOps cycle are regression tests, system tests, integration tests, and unit tests.

Deployment

With the help of DevOps automation tools, the event team can configure and founded an automatic end-to-end deployment process whereby code changes are automatically deployed to production following testing and approval. With the assistance of process automation, it’ll be possible to deploy application or code changes consistently and properly throughout the delivery cycle with little to no downtime. Additionally, by minimizing manual work and lowering human involvement, continuous deployment can hasten the method.

CI/CD

Developers use continuous integration (CI) to automatically and often integrate code changes into a shared repository. Utilizing this method will facilitate your finding errors quickly and through the first stages of development. Contrarily, continuous delivery (CD) could be a procedure where approved code changes are automatically built, tested, and deployed to production. Automation can aid in accelerating and streamlining CI and CD, both of which are crucial components of the DevOps lifecycle.

Setting up and configuring

Infrastructure provisioning in DevOps is the process of allocating and fixing resources for development, testing, and production environments, whereas configuration management is the process of monitoring and controlling changes to the system configuration. Both procedures are necessary to stay the system operating smoothly and to keep up consistency across various environments. These procedures are often applied more quickly and precisely with DevOps automation. Keeping track of the configurations of the varied environments and ensuring that they’re per each other also can be accomplished through automated provisioning and configuration.

Infrastructure Control

The operations teams should take automation of infrastructure management under consideration additionally to provisioning and configuration. Infrastructure automation’s overarching objective is to minimize manual intervention within the workflow and improve the management of all resources within the development, testing, and production environments, including hardware, software, operating systems, data storage, etc. Automating the deployment of recent resources, managing and monitoring already-deployed resources, and scaling the infrastructure up or down as necessary are all included during this. The continual optimal operation of the system and also the consistency of the varied environments can both be guaranteed with the help of automated infrastructure management.

Monitoring

Continuous performance monitoring of the systems is crucial in a DevOps pipeline so as to identify any problems or errors as soon as they arise. In this manner, the event team can address issues before they need a major effect. To accomplish this, the DevOps team should install an automatic monitoring system that may gather information from numerous sources and send alerts when something goes wrong. The system’s overall quality is going to be improved and heavy problems are going to be avoided with continuous monitoring.

Controlling Logs

This procedure involves gathering, storing, and analyzing log data. In order that the event teams can quickly find and proper any errors, it’s crucial in DevOps to own a centralized log management system in situ. When something goes wrong, an honest log management system will alert the team and enable further investigation. By giving insights into the system’s behavior, it’ll also aid in enhancing the system’s functionality.

The Effects of DevOps Automation

The advantages that DevOps provides are numerous, and they become even more powerful when automation processes are added. Here, we’ll reconsider a number of the advantages of DevOps automation in general:

Enhanced Productivity

First of all, having all manual processes automated by DevOps tools and software will undoubtedly increase productivity. Additionally, your development and operations teams will have longer to specialize in other high-order tasks instead of wasting it on repetitive and unproductive tasks.

Cut Down on Human Error and Intervention

In this article, we’ve got emphasized numerous times that automation does reduce the requirement for human involvement in each step of the agile software development lifecycle. This means that the number of manual work and chances of human error in your DevOps workflow is minimal. You’re able to conserve human resources because DevOps automation tools vastly reduce the requirement for human intervention.

Quicker Time to Promote

All pipeline processes, procedures, and updates are streamlined and automatic through DevOps. As a result, development and deployment are completed far more quickly.

Excellent and reliable

Your development teams can specialize in other important factors, like code reviews and testing, which will help improve the standard of the software now that every one of the time-consuming processes is automated. Additionally, automated procedures can aid in enhancing the accuracy and consistency of the outcomes.

More Scalability

All processes are standardized and less resource-intensive because of the DevOps toolchain and automatic processes, which makes scaling up or down easier PRN. As a result, your business is ready to react quickly to promote demands without having a fabric effect on the budget.

Conclusion

In conclusion, DevOps automation may be a critical component of the DevOps pipeline that helps to streamline the procedure and lift the quality of the system as a full. It is vital to recollect that DevOps automation should not be accustomed to completely replacing the human component. Instead, it must be utilized to help teams, augment current procedures, and improve efficiency. As we mentioned above, DevOps automation may be effectively accustomed to offering the organization variety of benefits. It’s now up to you to come to a decision whether to automate your DevOps processes and gain a competitive advantage for your company or fall behind.

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.