DEVOPSdigest

Organizations used to comfortably deploy new releases every couple years or so under the traditional Waterfall methodology — until Agile and DevOps hit them and shook them awake. Suddenly, every organization was adopting Agile, escalating their processes, delivering releases in a matter of weeks. Everyone was in a hurry, twisting their arms while competing to deploy faster, leading to constantly burnt-out employees, and in turn, decreased productivity and quality. A Logz.io survey results showed that 70% of the respondents felt overworked under DevOps. This entire scenario defied the whole purpose of DevOps, which was originally meant to bring focus to quality at speed in a continuous manner.

Then, came the ultimate savior — Automation!

Despite being in the picture for a decade, DevOps is starting to become mainstream only now, thanks to automation. More than 50% of enterprise businesses have adopted DevOps, while more are in the process of doing so. While DevOps has gained traction and attention of the decision-makers, implementation of automation remains inconsistent. From a bitter experience, organizations have now started to realize that without automation, DevOps is meaningless, inefficient, and extremely difficult to harness.

DevOps - a Constantly Evolving Mindset and Culture

Implementation of DevOps calls for a cultural transformation from top to bottom in an organizational hierarchy. DevOps encourages all the involved parties to communicate, collaborate, and share their responsibilities while driving toward their business's customer-centric objectives. Comprised of intelligent technology, innovative people, and UX-driven culture, DevOps streamlines the entire software development life cycle.

The processes in a DevOps enterprise are ongoing — continuous development, continuous testing, continuous feedback, continuous improvements, and continuous deployment. Amidst these continuous processes, automation provides the involved professionals a room to breathe. This window allows them to be creative in their approaches and focus more on the business-oriented activities instead of the mundane process tasks.

Shortened Time to Market with Reduced Operational Costs

Aimed toward the same goal of reducing time to market, DevOps and Automation go together. While DevOps breaks the traditional barriers between developers and operations professionals, automation bears the load of arduous, repetitive tasks.

When the limitation of manually performing such tasks is lifted, the average duration of a software development life cycle is reduced significantly. Through continuous integration and testing, errors, bugs, and anomalies are identified and rectified automatically. This makes it possible for organizations to supply quality releases within days and hours, as against the previous duration of several weeks and months.

Even in case of a failure, automation results in fast recovery. It helps achieve heights of operational efficiency and enables quick adjustment to the trending market demands by facilitating inter-departmental collaboration.

Continuous Automation in DevOps Improves Customer Experience

By limiting the requirement for human intervention to minimal, continuous automation makes the possibilities of manual errors negligible. Through small and iterative automated feedback loops, DevOps equips organizations to act on the ever-changing and growing customer needs.

The combined input received from a collaborative communication between different departmental units makes it easier to create a standardized product that can be customized as per client demands without compromising on quality. With the symbiotic act of machine diminishing the downsize time and human professionals monitoring the efficacy of the automated processes, organizations can deliver high value to their customers, yielding high user satisfaction levels.

Better Practices Allow Focus to Shift on the Business Goals

With the elimination of human errors, automation makes the processes more efficient and cost-effective. It also eradicates the issue of limited resources and allows their better utilization. As automation takes over the boring, time-consuming tasks of the development and operational processes, professionals can invest their time in honing their skills and intelligence to enhance quality through innovation and strategic improvements. Organizations get more time to spend on activities that will have a direct impact on their business growth.

Conclusion

DevOps and Continuous Automation boost the efficiency of organizational processes, leading to improved practices. Better practices yield quality products, which in turn establish credibility and trust, producing high customer satisfaction and resulting in increased revenues. Automation being the key enabler of the DevOps journey across organizations and industry verticals, it is time that the top-level management get rid of the redundant, manual processes and accelerate their business toward its goals.