How to Implement Automation in DevOps

DevOps is a culture that combines operations and development. It involves key concepts, automation, principles, and tools. DevOps life cycle management is an important concept to know that involves a plan, code, build, test, release, deploy, operate, and monitor. DevOps pipeline is the automation of the key DevOps function that involves continuous development, configuration management, continuous integration, continuous testing, continuous deployment, continuous operations, and continuous monitoring. It is also called a CI/CD pipeline which stands for Continuous integration and continuous delivery pipeline. Enroll in DevOps online course at StarAgile for a better career and reach new heights in the career.

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Automation is the key to DevOps culture which is considered in the key features DevOps pipeline. That is why DevOps culture requires one to know programming and scripting knowledge to automate tasks that are repetitive, prone to human errors, requires a lot of effort, and is monotonous. The tools are also used to automate the features in DevOps, by customizing various tools used in DevOps to tailor to the project requirements of the Organization. It is worth mentioning some of the important tools used in DevOps, they are as follows,

• Artifactory tool-Nexus
• Backend Servers-Linux/Unix
• Build tool-Maven /Ant or Gradle
• Catching, Load Balancer, Reverse Proxying, HTTP request-Nginx/Apache
• Cloud Services-GCP, AWS, Azure
• Coding: Java & Python
• Configuration Management tools- Ansible, Chef, and Puppet
• Containerization tools-Docker & Kubernetes
• Database tools-Oracle, SQL, MySQL
• Front end Web servers (Application servers)-Tomcat/Weblogic
• Incident & Alert management tool-Splunk, QRader, LogRythm, and Arcsight
• Log analysis- ELK
• Logging Tool(IT, Network, Server & applications monitoring)- Nagios
• Monitor Web pages-Solarwinds
• Orchestration tools-Jenkins & Bamboo
• Scripting: Perl, Python, Javascript
• Servers Automation-Shell and Bash
• Testing-Selenium
• Version Management- GIT, CVS, Perforce, Subversion, and SVN

Also Read: What is Orchestration in DevOps?

Why DevOps Automation Services

DevOps culture requires automation as it is the key principle. Traditional software development has many bottlenecks when it comes to large and complex project management. DevOps culture has eliminated or mitigated some of the bottlenecks that were there in the traditional software development such as operations and development are no longer functioning in silos, faster delivery to market, reduction in cost, automation of the key functions in the DevOps life cycle management, committing the code frequently in the version control repository, there are no or fewer errors or bugs, catching the issues early, knowing and rectifying the errors and bugs early in the DevOps life cycle, easy operations and maintenance of applications in the production, transparent communication, accountability from the team members, collaboration in the team, code, build, test, deploy and monitor in the single iterations, etc. All these are possible with the DevOps tools automation and DevOps life cycle automation. DevOps automation is done by customizing the tools and DevOps life cycle tasks and activities so that there is no or less manual intervention. Take up the Online DevOps course at StarAgile and learn DevOps with excellent trainers in the market.

DevOps culture adopts standardized workflows, technologies, processes, protocols, and metrics. The standardization of the DevOps is the necessary enabler for automation. Therefore standardization is playing a key role in the automation strategies of DevOps.

However, there is a need to make a balance between the standardization and the adaptability of the DevOps culture. Every organization is evolving in DevOps and has got a variety of DevOps implementations, workflows, and strategies.

The automation is used in a variety of ways in the DevOps some of them are discussed here

Code Development - Automations in applications and processes are saving time and simplify the development of complex and large software projects. Automation in source control is helping developers to produce newer codes on top of the old codes in the version control repository which is frequently accessed by QA, deployment team, and operations team. Explore more of the key DevOps concepts in the DevOps course online at StarAgile institute.

Visibility - An excellent feedback loop is important to keep QA, Dev, and Ops team together and prohibits any team from working in silos, and eliminates the bottlenecks between the teams.

Continuous testing - Again the automation of the QA or the testing function is key to the DevOps culture. This is done by continuous testing of the approved build code and committed codes in the version control repository. Also, there is automated communication that takes place when the build codes are committed so that continuous testing and integration of the code are tested.

CI/CD - In this continuous integration and the continuous delivery pipeline is automated and ensures that the build, data, tests, and code changes are delivered to appropriate environments. This enables frequent software releases in the market.

Monitoring and Incident management - Instead of collecting and managing the flood of alerts the automation helps in software-defined IT operations and other automation strategies help to scan through the alerts mechanisms and finding the root cause and automatically do the incident response.

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Best Practices of DevOps Automation

The 5 best practices of automation are as follows,

Prioritize the automation - The key is to automate what is most important or critical to your projects. The automation helps in managing the build automation, or testing automation or deployment automation or integration automation, or operations automation. Decide which is critical to your organization. Get the DevOps certificate by attending the training and by completing the course requirements at StarAgile institute.

Automation Testers - Manual testing has a lot of issues and errors and bugs in the testing. Ensure you have an automation testing team that can take care of the build and frequently committed codes in DevOps.

Pair Testing - This is a kind of testing where one person does the automated testing and another person reviews and analyzes the testing and the results. It can be one person from dev and another from the test team or junior and senior testers etc.

Dashboard automation - A dashboard consists of metrics and reporting that can be automated to reduce human errors and reading the dashboard provides accurate results. The dashboard provides the automatic wayfinding the issues in the projects and analysis such as the number of tests, duration of tests, number of failures, and success in testing.

The context for insights - The dashboard, logs, metrics are good tools but we need to get context for insights provides information about when and where to search for results. To provide a proper response to the problems context helps the team to automatically discover alerts.

Also Read: AI Tools for DevOps

Benefits of Automation in DevOps

DevOps automation has key benefits to the organization as provided below,

• Elimination of repetitive actions and helping staff to focus on value addition.
• The faster rate of delivery
• Reduction in the continuous operations costs
• Fewer errors caused by humans and fewer bugs
• Eliminates relying upon single sources or single individual and single teams. 

Q: Which of the following is not a benefit of automation in DevOps?

• Faster delivery rate
• Operations, QA, Dev team working together
• Fewer errors and bugs
• Frequently committing codes, testing and deploying it
• Transparent communication
• Excellent collaboration
• Customizing various tools etc

Conclusion

Now that you have seen that you automation has a lot of benefits. Try to answer the above question in this article. If you can answer and need more training, StarAgile institute provides the Best DevOps training online in the market. Register now for the DevOps Course reap the benefits of being certified in DevOps and command a high salary and high growth among the peers.