Updated October 27, 2023
Introduction to DevOps Automation
Many organizations have accepted DevOps as a methodology, but the major fact of bridging and leaning the gap between the DEV team and OPS team is getting sacrificed somewhere. That is where we need DevOps Automation to remove and overcome those existing glitches.
Why do we Need Automation in DevOps?
DevOps is a drastic shift from traditional to modern software delivery practices without hampering the quality. To fully adopt this method, it is necessary to put significant effort into ensuring that stakeholders, developers, and testing teams already familiar with traditional waterfall models and agile conventions understand the new approach. We will take an example to understand why we need automation in DevOps. When a customer product is brought to production, it is assumed that it goes through various software development life cycle phases. Each step, from development to deployment, includes lots of manual effort. Therefore, what if we automate and change all stages without involving much manual effort between DevOps and stakeholders?
We can take another example, like the old way of raising change requests or tickets, to get a good understanding. A customer will first submit a concern or ticket. The IT team will forward it to the OPS team for testing, and after testing, it will be sent back to the IT team, creating a communication gap between all the teams and leading to time-consuming processes. Most importantly, hampering the final feedback loop.
How does Automation Work in DevOps?
Automation with DevOps has become a compelling and valuable way of delivering quality products with continuous integration in every software development life cycle phase. Incorporating tools with every development phase to deployment essence of automation gets stronger. Developers in the development team will use git or SVN to maintain their quality code structure and flow; they will write unit test cases using various tools and give builds that will be tested and supported by the test environment using Jenkins or Hudson for integration.
Similarly, Staging Environment can use Pipelines using bash scripts to simplify the manual process. But then it all depends on the project requirement and how integration occurs in every stage for respective builds. Followed by the Production environment, which can use any monitoring tool. When integration is achieved using the right tools and techniques, the project’s flow becomes streamlined, requiring minimal manual work. It provides a good view for all the teams in stages to get in sync and bridge the gap between themselves. Continuous feedback enhances and makes the entire logical flow of the SDLC improvised with automation.
DevOps Automation Tools
Thousands of tools are available for DevOps, but ultimately, the choice of tools depends on the project requirements and how they will be used.
Let’s see how we can use tools with every phase of SDLC or general product development:
- Continuous Development: Continuous development includes ongoing planning and integration, involving tools like git SVN and bitbucket to maintain the code structures or versioning.
- Continuous Testing: When the development team forks a branch and commits code, the testing team will fetch the test branch and feed it to the testing team, where tools like Jenkins, Hudson, and Bamboo can maintain the builds with unit testing and all.
- Continuous Delivery: Continuous delivery involves packaging and deploying the applications into one resource. People use tools like Docker and OpenStack to deploy and deliver products into production.
- Continuous Monitoring: Continuous monitoring involves that phase of production that uses monitoring tools like Nagios and Kubernetes. Constant feedback and loops also enhance the overall automation process, thus making it more powerful.
Advantages of Using Automation in DevOps
Given below are the advantages of using automation in DevOps:
- Quality Product: As a product starts its development phase, one makes sure to start continuous planning and continuous integration, which is where the improvisation begins.
- Customer Satisfaction: When an end customer gets a product with minimum bugs and defects, end customers’ faith and belief in your product will increase.
- Less Time to Market: Automation makes the product release cycle less cumbersome, involving fast deployments and continuous improvements.
- Bridging the Gaps Between Teams: A DevOps engineer can maintain and bridge the gap by bringing all the teams in sync and coordinating all by making them into unison, which is the next innovation.
- Shortened and Automated Workflows: Automating the continuous deployment and development chain, making the entire flow fast and improvised.
- Resource Management: DevOps has helped manage and maintain the entire cloud and infrastructure related to servers and virtualization. Open sources like OpenStack and AWS have helped keep the stacks and servers with the deployed machines and infrastructure maintenance.
- Security and Less Risk Involvement: The entire SDLC for product development involves and undergoes serial loopback or continuous integration and continuous growth as feeds it ultimately leads to the upliftment of the product without hampering the security issues.
- Outbound Monitoring: You can easily monitor real-time projects by regularly checking the dashboards. This allows you to stay updated on new releases and fixed defects.
- Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery: Tools like SonarQube, a static code analysis tool, help in suggesting and providing ongoing code analysis with the system without switching between systems and making drastic changes. Delivery factors do not get hampered.
- Business Improvement: Business units across an organization can focus on improvising and other innovative projects instead of keeping an eye on project management.
Conclusion
DevOps is not a traditional automation method but it cannot be ignored. One must take the initiative to break the silos of manually doing things and hampering the quality and satisfaction of the customers. Although it’s not easy to adopt DevOps automation, it can simplify simplify tasks, freeing up time for many more innovative, creative, and quality matters needed for product enhancement.
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