5 Common Process to Automate as Best Devops Practices

Hardik Shah
4 min readMay 10, 2022

--

DevOps is an approach to software development and operations that emphasizes the collaboration of both software developers and other IT professionals while automating the process of testing, deployment, and management of applications. It aims at establishing a culture and environment where building, testing, and releasing software (or better product) can happen rapidly, frequently, and more reliably.

Source

Software development often involves multiple people who are working simultaneously on different parts of a project. DevOps tries to bring these different groups together with automation by following these principles:

  • Continuous integration: All changes should be merged with mainline source code frequently; this helps developers identify bugs sooner in the cycle when they may be easier to fix, rather than later when they might cause more serious problems.
  • Continuous delivery: The goal is for every change (including all tests) to complete successfully before being released into production; this limits disruptions caused by failed deployments like unplanned downtime or new bugs introduced into production environments during deployment updates/patches etc..

The following is a list of some of the most common processes that DevOps teams around the world have automated as part of best DevOps practices.

1. Infrastructure automation for an effortless IT environment management

Infrastructure automation is a process of deploying and managing infrastructure components across multiple environments. An IT environment management tool allows you to perform day-to-day tasks such as setting up new servers, installing software packages and applications, updating systems, and managing permissions for user accounts. The benefits of using the right tools are:

  • Less manual effort — You can automate the majority of your routine tasks without having to do them yourself. This saves time and eliminates human errors that can cause major problems if they aren’t caught before they become serious issues.
  • Reduced costs — Once you’ve set up an automated system that works well for your organization’s needs, there won’t be any need for consultants or third parties because everything has already been taken care of through automation tools that have been integrated into your existing infrastructure system with minimal effort required from employees who know how operate them properly (if at all).

2. Automate configuration management for a consistent system

Configuration management is the process of keeping track of changes made to your system and ensuring that you can roll back to a previous state if needed. This is important because it allows you to ensure that you have a consistent system, so that you always know what version of code was running when an error occurred, or when another team member’s change broke something in your application.

Configuration management tools like Chef and Puppet allow us to define our infrastructure as code, which makes it easy for anyone on the team (DevOps engineers included) to see what state all servers should be in at any given time.

To set up configuration management:

  • Create a directory on your computer where you will store all configuration files for your application (e.g., /etc/appname).
  • Initialize the “cookbooks” directory with all cookbooks required by your app (e.g., chef generate cookbook appname_cookbook).
  • Add any custom recipes needed for configuring specific services within your application (e.g., chef generate recipe service1_config).

3. Frequent releases with deployment automation

Frequent releases with deployment automation.

Increase the number of deployments per day and reduce the time to market. This can be achieved by automating the release process, taking care of all deployment steps, including test, build and promotion phases.

Tools like Jenkins or Docker are great examples of how to automate this process. Automating tasks like testing and building allows you to reduce human error while also cutting down on costs (e.g., manual testing is expensive).

4. Test automation for constant security

As software development becomes more complex and competitive, the need for automation is becoming increasingly clear. In this section, we’ll explore why testing should be automated, how you can automate your tests and what benefits that brings to your company.

Automated testing helps ensure that your system operates as expected in a variety of scenarios. Automation also allows you to test code paths automatically as part of regression or integration testing.

This means that when something changes or breaks, you don’t have to manually re-run all the tests against it — you can instead verify if everything works as expected using an automated process. This makes it quick and easy for anyone on your team (not just developers) to get a high-level view of whether any changes broke anything else without having any prior knowledge about how code works or what was tested previously!

5. Automate logging and monitoring to keep an eye on metrics

Logging and monitoring are vital components of any DevOps process. You must be able to view and track metrics such as CPU utilization, memory usage, application performance and so on. The logs generated by your networks devices should be collected from all environments — not just development or staging but production as well. Logs should also be collected from firewalls, routers, load balancers etc..

Devops Automation: Tips for Best Practices

Let’s get into the details of what Devops Automation is, and how it can help you achieve all six phases of DevOps.

  • Continuous Integration
  • Continuous Delivery
  • Continuous Deployment
  • Automation helps to reduce the chances of human errors by using automated testing tools like Selenium and Jenkins etc., which allows you to work on your code without worries about breaking things while doing so
  • The other advantage is that automation saves time and money as well

Thank you,

Resource:

--

--

Hardik Shah
Hardik Shah

No responses yet