DevOps Automation: All You Need to Know in 2022
The process of getting machines to undertake repetitive work in the software deployment and operations life cycle is called DevOps automation. This allows system administrators to deliver iterative upgrades more quickly and ensures that their systems continue functioning successfully.
Why Should You Consider Automating DevOps
From an engineer’s point of view, using DevOps tools gives development teams more power. An increase in the frequency of releases and receiving feedback more quickly is a byproduct of automation.
It eliminates the requirement for big teams, minimizes the duplication and repetition of efforts among the various development teams. And lowers the amount of friction between the teams.
Because DevOps services integrate so well with the Agile Methodology, deploying DevOps tools to accomplish those goals is not only possible but also strongly encouraged.
How to Achieve DevOps at Scale with Automation
DevOps is essentially a cultural shift that flows from top to bottom. As leadership teams embrace the DevOps methodology, with the CIO leading the brigade, aligned process changes should be implemented across the hierarchical level.
Building a DevOps mindset among employees that accepts omnidirectional communication and collaboration is essential. Here are seven steps to achieve DevOps implementation at scale.
1. Train Your People
It is essential for an enterprise that desires DevOps implementation at scale to train its people and build acceptance. Everyone needs to understand what DevOps is, what it brings to the table, and how it can benefit and improve the efficacy and productivity of their efforts.
DevOps training helps in knowledge acquisition and builds a culture of collaboration and communication critical to successful DevOps implementation.
2. Build an Air-Tight DevOps Plan
Development best practices like enhanced automation of repetitive tasks, reduction of manual intervention, seamless testing, and integration administrations facilitate better software development.
By clearly defining business goals, with a robust DevOps strategy on hand, enterprises can effectively track changes, implement updates, streamline teams and processes and build awareness of duties and responsibilities shared across departments. Deploying IaC (Infrastructure as Code), your DevOps plan should include integration, test automation, and smooth release and deployment processes.
3. Define Processes and Policies
Aligned processes and policies of an enterprise are critical to successful DevOps implementation at scale. Security is one of the primary action areas of DevOps, second to seamless and continuous delivery. For every company that has opted for DevOps implementation, having robust security policies is crucial.
4. Application Containerization
A leading name in application containerization, Docker, provides the best container technology toolset.
With image management tech like Amazon ECR, it is now easy for developers to perform IT Ops tasks in a collaborative environment. The prime agenda of application containerization is to build applications that run everywhere at any given time.
5. Deploy a Microservices Architecture
Creating a Microservices architecture is the process of decoupling the thousands of lines of code in your enterprise’s legacy applications into multiple smaller yet autonomous elements.
With a Microservices approach, engineering teams can focus their efforts on crafting features that build competitive advantages using devops services.
6. Define the Toolchain
With the implementation of DevOps, a highly valued methodology, organizations feel great pride. Ranging from CI to source control and management and CD, defining the DevOps toolchain allows enterprises to proceed incrementally towards DevOps automation.
7. Continuous Monitoring and Feedback
Upon deploying the application and making it available to the end-user, monitoring surfaces as the next step. Continuous monitoring enables the team to locate errors, misconfigurations, and even crash situations like outages. It is essential to monitor application health, and logs should be easily available for perusal and analysis
What Should be Done with Automation
If you’re searching for a place to concentrate your automation efforts, we suggest beginning with the bottlenecks causing the most difficulty for you.
The objective of the DevOps company you bring on board is to go in the direction of a completely self-service model in which:
- Incident responses are automated
- Resources are available to developers on demand
- There is collaboration between design and development teams involving security personnel
To reach this point, an organization must first advance through a series of automation stages. Resolving common issues along the way.
The Approach
Research current event data, paying particular attention to repeatedly occurring incidents to identify operational bottlenecks. Determine the issues that are responsible for protracted or ongoing events.
After identifying the issues that can be remedied with the assistance of automation, the next step to build a business case for the endeavor.
Considerations to Keep in Mind
Consider the following before adding a new piece of software to your technology stack:
- The immediate expenses (licensing and hosting)
- An endeavor to roll out (initial investment)
- Maintenance effort (ongoing investment)
- An increase in the system’s level of complexity
- Requirements concerning dependability and support
How Should DevOps Processes be Automated
Try to determine what tools are available to address your automation challenge after having it in hand.
Ideally, you want a tool that can help you with your current issue and problems you might face in the future. You ought to be able to choose which tools you want to host on your own and which you want to use as a SaaS.
Locations Where Tooling is Available
- Constant Delivery and Continuous Integration
Deploying artifacts reliably and safely to all environments is one of the core principles of DevOps.
You can build a deployment pipeline using CI/CD tools that start with a commit in a version control system. Depending on your design, the deployment pipeline may involve infrastructure provisioning, continuous integration (CI), and continuous delivery (CD).
- Infrastructure and Configuration as Code Tools
Another essential element of DevOps automation is maintaining all infrastructure, configuration, and application code in a version control system.
- Tools for Observability and Monitoring
Application log services (ELK stack), data gathering agents, and visualization tools for metrics and instrumentation data are tools in the observability and monitoring space (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic).
- Adaptability and Dependability
There is a lot of innovation taking place to automate the organizational incident process of on-call management, incident process management, and remediation.
What Does a Good Automation Strategy for DevOps Look Like
The application repository utilizes a module common to all apps.
Jenkins will execute the newly created pipeline after making a repository commit. The developers are notified via a Slack message to evaluate the outcome and perform any additional manual tests. If the developers are pleased with the outcome. They can promote the build in Jenkins by clicking a manual approval button. Which will cause a Terraform deployment to be triggered and sent to production. This brand new feature is restricted to the use of internal personnel only and is controlled by feature flags.
Conclusion
Tools that automate testing and deployment, such as CI/CD and Terraform, have reached a point. Where they are quite well established. With the right DevOps development company in your corner. The time and effort required to ship code have been drastically reduced. DevOIps automation is now a must-have for organizations across sectors and verticals. With machines picking up the slack for human intervention and the errors incumbent of the same, DevOps automation provides an unmatched competitive advantage if done right. With the right mixture of effort, methodology and tech prowess, DevOps automation can prove to be the match-winner for your development initiative.
We trust that this article will prove informative. Until next time, happy developing!
