Introduction to DevOps Automation
DevOps is a methodology that is accepted and followed by lots of organizations but the major fact of bridging and leaning the gap between 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 kind of drastic shift from traditional software practices to modern practices of software delivery that too without hampering the quality. To adopt this method fully a lot of efforts must be put to make understand already following the agile and old convention way of waterfall models stakeholders or developers along with testing team and development teams. We will take an example to understand why do we need automation in DevOps. A customer product when goes for production is assumed that it goes through various phases of the software development life cycle. Each phase from development to deployment includes lots of manual efforts. Therefore, what if we automate and change all phases without involving much manual efforts between DevOps and stakeholders.
To get a good understanding we can take one more example like the old way of raising the change requests or tickets. A customer will first raise a concern or ticket. It will be then be forwarded to the IT team and then the IT team will further send it to the OPS team and send it back to the OPS team for testing, thus leading to a communication gap between all the teams and time-consuming processes. Most importantly hampering the final feedback loop.
How does Automation Work in DevOps?
Automation with DevOps has become a very powerful and useful way of delivering quality products with continuous integration in every phase of the software development life cycle. By incorporation of tools with every phase of development 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 which will be tested and maintained by test environment using Jenkins or Hudson for integration. Similarly, Staging Environment can use Pipelines using bash scripts to simplify the overall manual process. But then it all depends on the project requirement that how actually integration has to take place in every stage for respective builds. Followed by the Production environment which can make use of any of the monitoring tools. Therefore to maintain the end to end flow of the project minimal manual work is left if integration is done with a desirable set of tools and techniques.
It provides a good view for all the teams in stages to get in sync and bridging the gap between themselves. Continuous feedback enhances and makes the entire logical flow of the SDLC improvised with automation.
DevOps Automation Tools
There are merely thousand’s of tools which can be used for DevOps but again I will say it all depends on the project requirement and the way these tools will be used.
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Let’s see how we can use tools with every phase of SDLC or general product development:
- Continuous Development: Continuous development includes continuous planning and continuous integration which can involve 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, then the testing team will fetch the test branch and then will feed into the testing team where tools like Jenkins, Hudson and bamboo can be used to for maintaining the builds with unit testing and all.
- Continuous Delivery: Continuous delivery involves packaging and making the applications deployed into one resource. Tools like Docker and OpenStack are used to deploy and deliver products into production.
- Continuous Monitoring: Continuous monitoring involves that phase of production which makes use of monitoring tools like Nagios, Kubernetes. Continuous feedback and loops also work as an enhancement to the overall process of automation thus making it more powerful.
Advantages of Using Automation in DevOps
Below are the Advantages of DevOps Automation:
- Quality Product: As a product starts with its development phase it is made sure that the continuous planning and continuous integration gets started. That is where the improvisation gets started.
- Customer Satisfaction: When an end customer gets a product with minimum bugs and defects, end-customers’ faith and believe in your product will increase.
- Less time to Market: Automation makes the product release cycle less cumbersome as it involves fast deployments and continuous improvements.
- Bridging the Gaps between Teams: A DevOps engineer has the capability of maintaining and bridging 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: Continuous deployment and development chain gets automated which makes the entire flow fast and improvised.
- Resource Management: DevOps has helped in managing and maintaining the entire cloud and infrastructure related to servers and virtualization. Open sources like Openstack and AWS have helped in maintaining the stacks and servers with the deployed machines and infrastructure maintenance.
- Security and Less Risk Involvement: As the entire SDLC for product development involves and undergoes continuous loopback or continuous integration and continuous development as feeds it ultimately leads to upliftment of the product without hampering the security issues.
- Outbound Monitoring: A continuous check on dashboards for real-time projects with releases being made and defects getting fixed very easily.
- Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery: Tools like SonarQube a static code analysis tool helps in suggesting and providing continuous code analysis with the system without switching between systems and making drastic changes delivery factors does 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 or conventional method of automation but then it cannot be ignored, initiatives have to be taken to break the silos of manually doing things and hampering with the quality and satisfaction of the customers. Although it is not that easy to adopt DevOps automation once adopted can simplify and make tasks easy keeping time for many more innovative, creative and quality matters to be checked as needed for product enhancement.
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This is a guide to DevOps Automation. Here we discuss the Introduction to DevOps Automation along with the Important Tools used in DevOps along with its Advantages. You can also go through our related articles to learn more –
