DevOps Automation - What is it & How it Works?

• By Likhitha K
• 17-01-2023
• Technology

There's always a balance between speed, efficiency, and effectiveness when it comes to application and infrastructure management. The faster and easier you want your processes automated, the more effective they will likely be at fulfilling the overall business goals.

The term 'DevOps' has gained much traction in the last few years, and the basic idea it propagates is to automate anything time-consuming, boring, or repetitive.

However, things are easier said than done. So, before diving into the exciting world of DevOps automation, let's break down what it means and learn some interesting examples of how it could be applied to your workflow.

What is DevOps?

DevOps is a set of processes and tools that help organizations deliver software faster and more reliably. DevOps is a collaborative effort between developers and operations teams to improve software deployments' speed, quality, and stability.

DevOps is often used interchangeably with continuous delivery and continuous deployment. Continuous delivery is the process of automatically building, testing, and deploying software changes. Continuous deployment goes one step further, automatically deploying code changes that pass tests to production.

While DevOps is not a new concept, it has recently gained popularity as organizations strive to move faster and be more agile. DevOps can help organizations improve their time to market, increase efficiency, and reduce costs.

Many tools and technologies are associated with DevOps, including automation tools, containerization platforms, and monitoring tools. DevOps is also often tied to the cloud, as cloud-based platforms and services can help organizations achieve the agility and speed they need to be successful.

What is DevOps automation?

DevOps automation is the process of automating the tasks involved in a DevOps workflow. This includes automating the building, testing, and deployment of code, as well as the management of infrastructure and application environment.

The goal of DevOps automation is to make sure that developers can focus on writing code, while IT operations staff can focus on keeping their systems running. DevOps automation can help improve the speed and efficiency of a DevOps workflow and the quality of the software being delivered.

How does DevOps automation work?

Here's how DevOps automation takes place.

• To automate the software development process, it is important first to identify the tasks that can be automated.
• Once these tasks have been identified, the next step is determining which tools and technologies will best suit the job.
• After selecting the tools and technologies, the final step is implementing automation.

DevOps automation can improve the quality of software applications and shorten the software development cycle. Automating the build process, deployments, testing, and monitoring can make the software development process more efficient.

DevOps automation tools can be used to manage tasks from the beginning of the development cycle through release into production. Some tools are focused on specific goals within this process, such as continuous integration, continuous delivery or continuous deployment. A few tools can handle multiple tasks; for example, Jenkins is an open source tool that can be used for continuous integration and continuous delivery.

Which DevOps processes can be automated?

1. Provisioning

Environments for DevOps use a range of technologies. It can take a while to provision and deploy changes to these intricate settings, and each component needs to be understood at a high level.

IT teams can offer self-service capabilities and supply preapproved resources and configurations with a minimum of manual intervention using infrastructure as code (IaC) techniques.

2. Development

Software developers need IT resources to create, continuously test, and deploy new apps and services. Resource delays and service delivery pipeline complications might result from manual IT procedures. It might slow down proof-of-concept performance, which would slow down development.

IT teams can offer resources faster and facilitate quick proofs of concept, development, testing (using test automation open source projects like Jenkins), and deployment by integrating API-centric design with automation.

Benefits of DevOps Automation

1. Reduced Time-to-Market

Automating repetitive tasks allows developers to focus on more important areas, like coding new features or fixing bugs. The developers don’t need to perform manual tasks like deploying software applications or making infrastructure changes across multiple environments, such as test, staging, and production environments, which significantly aids in faster development.

With automation in place, IT teams can push out new features more quickly than manually releasing them would allow. This benefit is especially significant for organizations that have multiple software releases per year.

2. Improved Quality

For any organization, quality is a key factor for success. In the world of software development, quality management is a continuous process that helps to ensure that all aspects of the development process are performed in accordance with standards and best practices.

DevOps automation helps to improve the quality of software. It enables developers to incorporate automated testing and other quality assurance techniques into their workflows.

3. Faster Feedback Loops

The faster you get feedback from your customers, the better your chances are of building successful products and services.

With DevOps automation, you can continuously deliver new features and bug fixes to your customers in a timely manner. This is because automated tests typically run much faster than manual tests. They allow developers to get results faster, allowing them to make adjustments sooner rather than later (and potentially avoid costly bugs).

Continuous delivery also allows you to adapt quickly in response to changing market conditions or user needs.

4. Scalability

DevOps automation helps in scaling up or down based on the demand by providing elasticity to applications. This also makes it easier for IT organizations to manage resources efficiently, which ultimately results in cost reduction.

With most DevOps tools, you can create deployment plans from a library of reusable templates. These templates define your setup and configuration, including what should be installed and where and how services should be set up. The templates automate the process of preparing for your deployments, so you can quickly scale with minimal effort.

5. Increases no of deliveries

With DevOps automation, there is no need to wait for manual intervention, which results in an increase in the number of deployments being done by a team during any given period of time.

Automation processes help you deliver more frequently while reducing the lead time. This makes the development process faster by reducing the time a developer or tester will wait for feedback from others before proceeding with their tasks.

6. Reduces the lead time

Automation allows you to test your code faster than manual testing methods would allow. You can also test your code against multiple environments with a single click. This reduces the lead time required to test new features or fix bugs.

Automation also increases developers’ productivity and helps them provide customer satisfaction by providing better quality products at a faster pace.

Wrapping Up

DevOps automation is about taking care of time-consuming tasks for a developer and offering them an automated solution. This helps improve the overall efficiency and productivity of the application development process. So, you can automate the management and monitoring of your servers with DevOps automation tools.

DevOps automation is not easy; however, it's worth investing time in. If you have a good development process, implementing or creating a good deployment system can be very profitable for your business.