It has been a long since we first started hearing about DevOps Automation. I have been reading all the popular blogs articles about it ever since. So many articles describe why you should implement automation in your DevOps practices and how you can start doing that and stop living under the fear of your application deployment process. However, I have little reason to doubt that actual adoption numbers for DevOps automation are still relatively low.
What is DevOps?
DevOps is a culture, a mindset, and a professional movement that stresses communication, collaboration and integration between software developers and information technology (IT) operations professionals.
It aims at establishing a culture and environment where building, testing, deploying and maintaining applications is done rapidly, frequently, and more reliably. The term DevOps came from the merging of the words development and operations. It implies that both software developers and IT operations work together to provide an improved and streamlined process to develop, maintain and support applications.
Why is DevOps Automation so important?
DevOps automation is essential if you want to make DevOps work. It is the very foundation of continuous delivery and continuous deployment, which are, in turn, the foundations of a truly agile delivery platform.
Trying to do DevOps without DevOps automation is like playing baseball without a field or bats or a ball: it may be a better exercise than sitting in front of a computer all day, but it isn't going to win any games.
The DevOps movement has grown out of the idea that it is more effective to work between developers and operations staff. This means that they should both have a common goal. DevOps automation aims to automate processes, software, and systems so that humans are not required to perform them.
This ensures that the processes, software and systems can be easily maintained. The DevOps movement aims to ensure no separation between development and operations. One way this can be achieved is through automation.
This means there has to be a common language between the two teams to communicate effectively with each other. There has also been a growth in the number of open-source tools developers can use to assist with their work.
Tools such as Puppet, Chef and Ansible are used for automating software installation, configuration and security updates on servers. In addition, cloud computing platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) allow users to use pre-built applications for testing purposes without spending a lot of time setting them up or configuring them first.
They also create environments in which users can collaborate without investing a lot of resources into doing so.
The Problem with DevOps Automation
DevOps Automation is the need of the hour in many IT organizations. Many companies are adopting DevOps Automation to enhance their software delivery capabilities and get the rapidity required in software delivery.
But the problem with DevOps Automation is that it takes a lot of time to develop an automated solution, especially when you are dealing with a complex system. The other problem with DevOps Automation is that it is not very flexible. For example, you cannot use dynamic variables with your scripts because they will corrupt them.
Furthermore, there is no scope for making changes in the existing scripts as they are rigid and have no scope for changes. All these problems can be resolved if you get a simple script that can help you automate your DevOps tasks easily without compromising on quality and flexibility.
This article will make you aware of some essential tools that can help you automate your DevOps tasks quickly and efficiently.
The Problem with Traditional IT Automation
One of the significant challenges in information technology is automating complex processes that involve multiple applications and multiple technologies. The traditional approach to this problem has been to write a program that has knowledge of all the steps and can orchestrate them, often through some command-line interface.
The idea here is that the program can be used by anyone who wants to automate a particular process. So, for example, a program could be written that allows you to specify different inputs and outputs and have it orchestrate performing the steps. It might have a command-line interface or an interface on some graphical user interface. We call this approach "programmatic."
It's based on the idea that computers are good at following instructions, but humans are good at understanding processes, so we should let people describe what they want to happen and then write software that automates it. The problem with this approach is that it makes automation hard, especially if you want to do it at scale.
If you need to support thousands of users and automate hundreds of thousands of processes, giving all those people programming interfaces for each one becomes cumbersome. And even if you did give everyone an individualized programming interface for each process, how would you make sure they were all using the correct information.
Why DevOps Automation is Different?
The DevOps culture believes that IT should be easy, fast and reliable. Easy means reducing the number of steps required to deploy a piece of software—fast means building a system that can handle peak traffic.
Reliable means ensuring that the system is up 24/7 and quickly recovered. When automating your infrastructure, especially for code deployments, it's critical to understand how DevOps automation differs from conventional systems administration. The most significant difference is the attitude toward automation tools.
In most organizations, infrastructure management tools are seen to make life easier for sysadmins — or at least less complex — but tend not to be seen as core to maintaining uptime. However, the DevOps mindset sees automation tools as an essential part of running the service.
Automation tools are vital in that they are an integral part of the software development lifecycle and are tested before every deployment as part of continuous integration (CI). Operations teams don't just use automation tools in DevOps; developers and testers also use them in CI pipelines to automate the deployment of their applications into test environments.
The Good Parts of DevOps Automation
There is a lot of good in DevOps. The problem is that the whole idea of DevOps is based on the press release, not the actual reality that people are experiencing in the trenches. The press release says: "We're going to put all our infrastructure engineering into one organization so they can do continuous integration, continuous delivery, and automate everything.
" The problems with this strategy are threefold:
- It doesn't automate anything.
- It doesn't integrate anything.
- It doesn't deliver anything.
But as long as you know that, you're fine. You can still get a lot out of DevOps; you have to shift your expectations about what it does for you and what you do for yourself.
DevOps Automation Tool Selection
It is a good idea to have a good DevOps automation tool in your organization. Many such tools are available on the market today, but not all of them are equally suitable for DevOps.
Therefore, choose a tool that will help your team and organization deliver software updates faster and more confidently. There are several factors that you need to take into consideration when choosing an automation tool for DevOps.
The first thing is whether it supports deployment automation for different environments, including testing and production environments. You will also want to know whether the tool offers hot-fix capabilities and what kind of support it provides for updating applications that run on a Linux or Windows operating system.
In addition, the automation tool should be easy enough for non-programmers to use effectively by the entire team involved in application development and testing. Another is whether the chosen tool has integration capabilities with other tools that your team uses, such as Git, Jenkins, Jira, etc. Finally, you will want to know whether the chosen tool offers full software lifecycle support or only covers certain stages of the process.
Conclusion
Tkxel provides a reliable, automated platform to monitor your applications from development through production. Automated Slack notifications, webhook integrations, and intelligent log processing mean you'll never have to worry about which tools to use or how much work it will be to get started. Instead, you can Contact Tkxel and get started your business with us!
Top comments (1)
Automation in DevOps iwanta.tech really opens up a wide range of perspectives and improves processes. It is important to properly implement and support these changes to maximize efficiency!