DEVOPSdigest

DevOps is not new. Every business in the IT world knows it is the right software development methodology. Indeed, DevOps has enticed the world with its promise of high-quality product delivery at a faster pace. Despite the clear promise of DevOps, many businesses are failing to realize its complete potential.

While cultural inertia and skillset sparsity are some of the reasons, the inability to completely automate the DevOps lifecycle remains the greatest impediment for businesses to drive full value from their DevOps investments. Integration of DevOps and automation is what leads to a more efficient software development lifecycle (SDLC).

So, let's understand what it is all about automating DevOps and how you can start automating your DevOps processes:

Automation is the fundamental principle of DevOps. In fact, "automating everything" is the ultimate objective of the DevOps methodology. So, DevOps automation is the process of automating nearly every repetitive and manual task across the DevOps SDLC, from design and development to deployment and release management.

Generally, software development involves many tasks handled by various teams, such as code analysis and unit testing by development teams; functional, performance, and other testing processes by testing teams; and stage-wise deployment and release management by operations teams. DevOps automation tries to automate and streamline all these tasks with no human intervention by leveraging various automation tools or technologies.

Automation is imperative to achieve the DevOps promise of delivering high-quality products at a faster pace. Automation in DevOps makes software development processes simpler, faster, and more efficient, empowering Dev and Ops teams to build, test, deploy, and maintain code faster and with higher quality compared to manual practices.

DevOps automation offers numerous business benefits, here are the top 5:

1. Enhanced Productivity

As almost all the DevOps tasks like code integration and application deployment are automated, it certainly results in faster software releases, increased time-to-market, and higher productivity. With automation, there is no delay in processes, as in the case of manual processes. Moreover, as human intervention is almost reduced to zero with the use of automation tools, the developers and operations team can now focus on business-critical tasks instead of wasting time on repetitive, low-priority tasks.

2. High Standardization

DevOps automation enables the standardization of DevOps workflows, processes, technologies, and metrics. This, in turn, helps minimize duplications, reduce risks, and provide proper guidelines. Leveraging standardized practices also provides the scope for automating other manual processes, helping your DevOps ecosystem to move from automation to orchestration.

3. Increased Flexibility

Automating DevOps provides your DevOps teams with greater flexibility in terms of both scope and functionality of the automated process. So, they can now configure and enhance the processes even after changing the tech stack.

4. High Scalability

DevOps automation provides the ability to easily scale the processes as required by simply creating additional processes to meet the increased requirements. Conversely, in a manual environment, any scaling is a challenge, as it is completely constrained by the availability of the team. However, with automation, scaling only depends on the availability of underlying software or hardware, which is not an issue in the cloud where resources are automatically scaled as per the workloads.

5. High Consistency

As the DevOps processes are highly automated, the end results are highly consistent and predictable. Courtesy of the underlying software automation tool that consistently does the same thing until it is reconfigured to do the otherwise. The same is not true for manual processes, where human intervention potentially leads to errors.

Opsera's continuous orchestration platform enables you to democratize DevOps by integrating your choice of CI/CD tools and no-code automation across the entire software development lifecycle. With Opsera, your development teams have the freedom to choose the tools they need, the operations team gains improved efficiency, and business leaders have unparalleled visibility. Moreover, Opsera's continuous orchestration platform provides self-service toolchain automation, drag-and-drop declarative pipelines, and unified insights, giving you peace of mind.