On paper, a DevOps department offers no shortage of advantages.
Of course, as anyone who has overseen the transition to DevOps can tell you, the process – and even resulting department – can sometimes create brand-new problems.
One of the most common is simply that DevOps becomes needlessly complicated. This is why it’s so important that your company streamlines their DevOps processes right away. Otherwise, minor complications can quickly evolve into major problems.
2 Ways Automation Can Streamline Your DevOps Process
DevOps automation tools, like JFrog and private NPM registries, have become absolutely essential for departments of all sizes and across every industry.
However, they’re not enough all by themselves.
Instead, here are two very important ways you can leverage automation to streamline your entire DevOps process.
1. Take an Architectural Approach to DevOps
The vast majority of companies take similar approaches to automation – solving point problems with point solutions.
Unfortunately, this kind of reactive approach suffers from a lack of efficiency. What’s worse, it almost always results in friction between your DevOps teams.
A much better option is to take an architectural approach to automation.
To institute this at your company, automate your processes right from the beginning instead of applying automation piecemeal when challenges arise. This requires assessing your opportunities for automation before you even begin a process.
What are the most time-consuming tasks?
Is it maintenance? Cleanup?
Where do redundant activities extend your timeline the most? Testing is usually a prime candidate.
This is where you can institute automation with an architectural approach, so your DevOps personnel stay focused where their expertise are needed most.
Don’t forget about automating your monitoring, too. Just automating your provisioning could greatly decrease the timeline for standing up a brand-new application or handling necessary troubleshooting.
2. Consider the Rest of Your Ecosystem
Perhaps the most important reasons automation is vital to DevOps is because, once the aforementioned time-intensive tasks are handled, you can move on to streamline the complex steps that may otherwise fall victim to human error.
Just be careful that you consider the consequences of automating these processes.
In complex ecosystems, doing so could mean that your team has to work harder to keep up. If you’re not careful, it could also mean that one automated task triggers another before those responsible are ready to begin monitoring.
This is why automation-testing is a must. The practice involves writing scripts with automation frameworks that can then automate the type of ongoing testing your DevOps team needs to verify an application is working correctly.
Typically, companies do this by integrating their automated tests with their preferred continuous integration tool. Doing so leaves no stone unturned when carrying out your tests.
Don’t just test to make sure your automation works. Test to make sure you know what will happen once it’s implemented.
Prioritizing Automation as a Streamlining Solution
If your company’s DevOps team is constantly obstructed with needless complications, the solution may be as simple as applying automation to streamline your process.
Don’t rush into doing so, though.
Instead, follow the two pointers above and your automated process will soon be capable of effectively carrying out your every DevOps need.
