DevOps Automation: Its Importance

The pandemic forced businesses to acknowledge the value of investing in and fully embracing DevOps automation. To meet the needs of their customers, the IT industry witnessed an evolution in the technological platforms, procedures, and processes. DevOps and automation are currently in such high demand that enterprises rely increasingly on their DevOps strategies to fill in the gaps caused by this period.

The Definition of DevOps Automation

To put it simply, DevOps automation is the use of automation to streamline processes by handling all of the repetitive tasks associated with the software development life cycle. This also implies that the amount of work that requires human support has decreased due to DevOps automation. Teams can swiftly and frequently update the system thanks to it, which greatly increases system reliability. The emphasis has been expanded beyond product delivery due to DevOps automation. DevOps and automation are now more about giving the consumer value than merely delivering innovative features and upgrades.

In agile development, DevOps and automation go with each other. However, automation is more difficult to accomplish than it might seem. Determining what to automate, how much to automate, and how to automate it all requires selecting the best automation testing systems and considering the technology at hand. In the DevOps environment, automation speeds up software development and deployment while preserving and enhancing quality. It eliminates manual interference and improves team performance by allowing members to focus on the crucial duties rather than the menial ones.

Why Should DevOps Automation be Used?

With the aid of top-notch DevOps technologies, DevOps automation improves the efficiency of the engineering teams from the viewpoint of application development. By dismantling organizational silos, it promotes collaboration across teams. The software team can now concentrate on making frequent releases, getting timely feedback, and enhancing user experience due to reduced team interdependencies and manual processes for infrastructure administration. From an administrative standpoint, DevOps automation lowers the possibility of human mistakes and reduces the time spent on error detection with the aid of auto-healing capabilities. Additionally, it considerably reduces the time needed to deploy new features and eliminates any anomalies brought on by human mistakes.

What Ought to be Automated?

Businesses should start by concentrating on the areas where they are most challenged. Their organizational needs and technology viability determine what will be automated. They may take into account automating the following processes:

● Code contributions, software builds, and app deployment in relevant production environments are all included in the pipeline for continuous integration and delivery.
● Infrastructure management involves minimal or no human participation during initial setup, settings, and maintenance
● Another essential element of DevOps is automation testing, which can be accomplished with the aid of a good automation testing tool like Selenium. Selenium can automate every form of DevOps test, including acceptability, integration, unit, and smoke testing.
● Additionally automated by DevOps is the monitoring of process modifications. Overall, by defining monitoring policies to activate alerts, the DevOps team can keep records of Infrastructure availability, speed, and security concerns, etc.
● Every program generates a large number of logs, each of which contains vital data that can be used to pinpoint problems. With the use of log management systems, the log analysis carried out through DevOps and automation can swiftly identify the issue-causing variables.

How Can DevOps Processes Be Automated?

The most effective and appropriate technologies to address the automation issue immediately come to mind while attempting to respond to this topic. The engineering team should always choose the appropriate tool rationally. Before choosing a tool, it should take the following into account:

● Cost-effectiveness,
● The cost of the rollout,
● The maintenance required,
● Tool dependability and system of support,
● The tool’s capacity for system adaptation and its added advantages.

The tools should be adaptable enough to address both current issues and potential future difficulties. DevOps technologies like Jenkins, GoCD, and others handle software development and deployment. Every company needs CI/CD solutions that build pipelines for deployments and automatically execute quality control and feature flagging.