How DevOps Automation Improves Productivity?

How DevOps Automation Improves Productivity?

As a result of the rapid expansion of the software sector within the technology industry, development teams are under constant pressure to fulfill the elevated expectations of consumers for business applications. These prerequisites typically carry with them the following:

• Enhancing one’s performance
• Increasing the scope of a function
• Providing availability and uptime guarantees in the least times

The introduction of cloud-based applications caused fundamental shifts within the conventional method of developing software. Instead of merely developing software in response to a selected requirement that’s provided by a client, the quality practice now could be to consider software development as an ongoing service that will be provided. The event of software has transitioned from a monolithic structure to an agile structure, within which developers continuously improve the software to satisfy the ever-changing requirements of shoppers.

In response to the current new methodology, businesses that specialize in software development have begun to implement contemporary methodologies for the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC), like Agile, Scrum, and Kanban, so as to deliver product features, improvements, and bug fixes.

Automation and DevOps are two key components that help organizations streamline the event process. DevOps is an acronym for “development operations.” This ends up in two major shifts, which are as follows:

• Fostering greater collaboration between departments and among teams
• The process of development is automated to eliminate manual and repetitive tasks

Automation and DevOps together produce a more practical software development life cycle (SDLC).

What exactly is supposed by “Devops Automation”?

The practice of automating repetitive and manual DevOps tasks in order that they will be distributed with no interaction from a personality’s being is thought of as DevOps automation. Automation is applicable across the board within the DevOps lifecycle, including but not limited to the subsequent areas:

• Design and development
• Monitoring the software deployment and release process

The lifecycle of DevOps should be simplified through the utilization of automation so as to chop down on the number of labor that has to be done manually. The implementation of this automation ends up in several significant enhancements, including:

• Removes the requirement for working in large groups
• Significantly cuts down on mistakes made by humans
• Boosts the efficiency of the team
• Makes possible a DevOps lifecycle that moves quickly

When it involves automating necessary processes and tasks, automation primarily depends on the appliance of software tools and presetting configurations.

Advantages of DevOps Automation

The advantages led to by automation don’t seem to be restricted to merely increases in productivity. a better look reveals the subsequent additional advantages:

Consistency

Finding errors and other problems with behavior in software applications is created much easier with the help of consistency automation.

Any process or activity that’s highly automated will always produce consistent and predictable results at the tip of it. You have, for all intents and purposes, eradicated user errors by virtue of its underlying static software configuration still because of the absence of any human interaction.

Scalability

It is much simpler to scale automated processes than it has to scale manual processes. The automation processes can easily be scaled up by simply creating additional processes so as to satisfy the increased requirements.

Any attempt at scaling in a very manual environment is severely hindered by the limited number of team members who are available.

In contrast, scaling is barely limited in an automatic environment by the supply of the underlying software and hardware. This, however, isn’t a problem in cloud-based environments because resources are automatically scaled in step with the workload. The automated Scale In/Out and Automatic Scale-Up/Down functions are excellent illustrations of this idea.

Speed

The speed with which one can progress through the assorted stages of a project’s lifecycle is one of the foremost important aspects of DevOps because it’s a right away relating how successfully the project may be completed.

Because an automatic procedure is going to be administered no matter the time of day or the supply of team members to manually trigger the task, we are going to be ready to move quickly through each procedure without experiencing any delays. Additionally, running a process manually is sort of never visiting being quicker than automating it with a regular template and making it run automatically instead.

Flexibility

The power to automate a process grants us the power to be flexible in terms of both the scope and also the functionality of the method that’s being automated.

The majority of the time, the configuration of the automation process is the only thing that limits the functionality and scope of the project, and this can be something that will be easily altered to fulfill the wants. It allows for greater adaptability to changes within the process than training a member of the team to try to do so.

Which Aspects of the Devops Workflow should be automated?

The straightforward response is nearly everything that will be done by machine.

In actuality, the selection of which processes to automate is decided by external factors like the following:

• Organizational needs
• The practicability of technology

A competent DevOps team will have the power to pick the procedures within their DevOps lifecycle that ought to be made more automated. The subsequent are some samples of common processes that may benefit greatly from being automated.

Continuous integration and continuous delivery, abbreviated CI/CD, means.

According to the basic principles and tools that govern agile software development, continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) is the primary component that has got to be automated in any given organization. The subsequent are a number of the areas that may be covered by automation:

• Code commits
•  Builds
• Putting pre-packaged applications to use within the appropriate testing and production environments

Infrastructure management

It takes a major amount of your time and energy to manage infrastructure, like networks and servers, beginning with the initial setup and continuing through configuration and maintenance.

Create a software-defined infrastructure, which is able to manage the infrastructure with minimal or no human interaction in the slightest degree, and automate the management of the infrastructure using this software.

Examination of software

The application of automation across the board would be most beneficial here. Automating tests of any kind is now simpler than ever before due to the provision of test automation tools like Selenium and Puppeteer. This could include the subsequent:

• Simple unit tests
• UI tests
• Smokes tests
• Experiments on the user interaction

Monitoring

Because of the rapid nature of the changes, it’s nearly impossible to stay track of the varied components and therefore the changes. Automation is useful because it makes it possible for the DevOps team to form automated monitoring rules and generate alerts so as to stay track of the following:

• Infrastructure availability
• Concerns Regarding Performance and Security
• Etc.

Log management

When it involves diagnosing problems with an application, logs are of the utmost importance. It’s possible that an application will produce a major amount of logs.

You’ll have a better time locating software problems if you automate the gathering, analysis, and reporting of those logs and make use of tools that are designed specifically for log management.

Some samples of DevOps Automation

Let’s undergo some samples of automation in DevOps that are implemented within the globe.

• Creating software environments with the assistance of Infrastructure-as-Code tools like AWS CloudFormation and Terraform, which use predefined templates to instantaneously deploy packaged applications, is one use of those tools.
• Developing a Jenkins pipeline to hold out automated testing or to automate the method of building a software application is often done automatically.
• Installing programs like Snort and Suricata in order that they’ll keep an eye fixed on the network and function automatic intrusion detection and prevention mechanism respectively will be done.
• The testing phase should involve the utilization of automation frameworks to simulate user interactions so as to check the user experience.
• Developing an Elastic Stack consisting of Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats, and Logstash for the aim of automatically monitoring the application additionally because of the logs, likewise as providing alerts and visualizing the knowledge.

Automation is useful to DevOps

There are aspects of automation that don’t involve the elimination of human interaction. Instead, consider automation as a tool that may facilitate you achieve a more productive workflow throughout the DevOps lifecycle.

It is essential to direct automation efforts toward those activities and procedures that stand to profit most from a big increase in either performance or efficiency. Therein case, you run the danger of wasting automation on a routine task, which is able to end in lower returns compared to the resources that were allocated to automate the task.

On the opposite hand, automation in conjunction with an efficient DevOps workflow will lead to the software of the next quality with more frequent releases. This improvement won’t have any unfavorable effects on either the organization or the top users.

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 clouds, RDBMS, NoSQL, and machine learning database platforms.