DevOps case study — How are organizations leveraging devops automation?

Hardik Shah
3 min readAug 26, 2022

--

Automation is the future of DevOps. Using DevOps with automation offers the optimal solution for managing and modernizing IT infrastructure. There exist mainly five different types of DevOps automation namely -

  • Infrastructure automation
  • Configuration management automation,
  • Deployment automation,
  • Test automation,
  • Logging and monitoring automation.

Many tech giants and government bodies have leveraged DevOps automation to gain the edge over their potential competitors. DevOps has paved the way by maximising investment utilisation, improving code reusability, and developing standard delivery methods. You can extract the maximum benefit from your serverless systems using DevOps. Let’s know about the popular organizations and how they used a particular devops automation to their advantage.

The British Army relies on infrastructure automation for effortless IT environment management.

The British Army relies heavily on its IT infrastructure for software solutions like application delivery and web services. The services are exclusively designed to be used by personnel across international borders. As such, it’s extremely crucial to have the servers running at all times.

Previously, they were relying on IAS’s LINUX platforms. The platform was running on Oracle technology that experienced performance and compatibility issues. This resulted in unexpected downtime and slow updates during deployment. The team at IAS decided to combat this issue by migrating on-site infrastructure to a

Software-defined data center with automated configurations. This resulted in improved agility, reduced human errors, and faster delivery time by up to 75%.

Hughes network system leveraged configuration management automation for a stable infrastructure

One of the leading broadband providers, Hughes network system faced scalability challenges due to its monolithic architecture. As such, they wanted a solution capable enough for managing their global consumers and ensuring that their system infrastructure remains stable.

To address the above-mentioned concern, Hughes network system opted for configuration management with Ansible and automated the state of its infrastructure system in a constant state. They automated the test environment that drastically reduced the processing time from weeks to mere hours.

Deployment automation for a presidential campaign

Not only for enterprises and military organizations, but automation has also served its purpose at the political forefront too. In a bizarre incident, deployment automation was used during the presidential campaign of 2020. The current US president, Joe Biden used Netflix’s spinnaker to automate their deployments.

Automating their devops process during the presidential campaign allowed them to keep their services available for supporters throughout the country. The team succeeded in building, testing, and deploying new features with zero downtime of the application.

Netflix employs test automation for a secured user experience.

Netflix is one of the giant organizations that have implemented an agile development process and adopted devops. Over the years, the company has witnessed both pros and cons of manual testing. Netflix’s testing team put forward a unique problem — rollback of released feature is not possible once it’s released to devices as fixing bugs on the client-side is a very strenuous and costly process.

To minimize the errors, Netflix introduced a low-cost automated framework responsible for verifying test scripts before release. Tests scripts include — UI tests, unit tests, functional, stress, and performance testing. Netflix made the automation customization to make it more user-friendly across various departments.

Capital One leverages logging and monitoring automation to isolate and troubleshoot bugs.

In 2010, Capital One came to the conclusion of adopting devops to develop the company’s technical infrastructure as consumer demands were growing at an exponential rate. In order to deliver services in a short time, incorporate a feedback loop, manage inconsistent releases and eliminate manual errors, Capital One relied on continuous monitoring and logging to improve the consumer experience.

Capital One automated its entire DevOps process by adopting an agile methodology for developing, generating automated test cases, and automating their deployments using continuous integration/continuous delivery techniques. To assure system stability, their cross-functional teams established an automated infrastructure and enabled configuration management. Wherever their system behavior was abnormal, monitoring instruments generated regular alarms for the team. It kept up with the CI/CD cycle by recording all logs and automatically analyzing data.

Automation has become an integral part of the devops process. Many organizations have leveraged the benefits of devops automation to their advantage. Which one of the above-mentioned examples intrigues you the most? Let us know in the comments below.

--

--

Hardik Shah
Hardik Shah

No responses yet