Are you sufficiently automating your DevOps process?

The big players — Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Netflix, among others — are now devotees worshipping at the altar of DevOps. We know 81 percent of enterprises and 70 percent of SMBs are adopting DevOps, and this 2019 report indicates trends are only continuing on the upswing.

Automation is DevOps’ secret sauce. Are you there yet?

Organizations are stressed in new ways these days, thanks to the explosion of cloud-based applications. The need to deploy software releases to manage end-user needs regarding security, bugs, new features or unusual activity means that software and operations teams are stretched to their limits, creating internal struggles and strife. This child of Agile — DevOps — is far more than merely the latest flash-in-the-pan … It’s become a critical solution for this collaboration.

Combining software development (Dev) and software operations (Ops) is a practice little more than a decade old in software engineering. It’s underscored most strategically by monitoring and automation at every step of the process — from integration to testing, all the way to post-deployment management. Undeniably, the three main goals of DevOps are speed, cybersecurity and collaboration. Supporting all of this is automation.

How to sufficiently automate your DevOps process

The 2018 State of DevOps Report illustrates how organizations are benefiting from DevOps in ways that include lower change failure rates and less time dealing with security challenges, rework and unplanned work. At the same time, DevOps is vastly improving failure recovery, customer satisfaction and operational efficiency.

However, sufficient automation is required throughout the DevOps process to make these benefits come to life. Speed is the backbone of DevOps, and maintaining a steady sprint is all about automation done well. In this way, you can effectively manage things such as:

• Ensuring that your source code is interference-free so it is always releasable
• Transitioning manual to automated tests
• Supplying the most optimal test environment
• Implementing functional and non-functional tests
• Deploying code
• Rolling-back deployment to the latest version
• Capturing metrics
• Orchestrating the pipeline
• Updating the DevOps dashboard
• Four Ways to Improve Your Automation