With the rapid growth of technology sector software, development teams are under constant pressure to meet the increased customer expectations for business applications. These expectations usually involve:

• Improving performance
• Extending functionality
• Providing guaranteed availability and uptime

The traditional software development process has changed with the advent of cloud-based applications. The current paradigm is to consider developing the software as an ongoing service, rather than simply creating software for a specific requirement provided by a customer. Software development has changed from a monolithic structure to an agile structure, where developers consistently improve the software to meet the evolving customer requirements.

Software development companies have responded to this new approach by embracing modern Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) methodologies such as Agile, Scrum, and Kanban, to deliver product features, improvement, and bug fixes.

DevOps and automation are two key components that help organizations streamline the development process. This results in two significant changes:

• Increasing cross-department/inter-team collaboration
• Automating manual and repetitive tasks in the development process

The combination of DevOps with automation leads to a more efficient SDLC.

(This article is part of our DevOps Guide. Use the right-hand menu to navigate.)

What is DevOps automation?

DevOps automation is the practice of automating repetitive and manual DevOps tasks to be carried out without any human interaction. Automation can be applied throughout the DevOps lifecycle, spanning:

• Design and development
• Software deployment and release
• Monitoring

The goal of DevOps automation is to streamline the DevOps lifecycle by reducing manual workload. This automation results in several key improvements:

• Eliminates the need for large teams
• Drastically reduces human errors
• Increases team productivity
• Creates a fast-moving DevOps lifecycle

Automation relies primarily on software tools and presetting configurations to automate necessary processes and tasks.

Automation enables standardization

We already know how a monolithic SDLC approach will be unable to provide the flexibility and responsiveness you need to tackle the requirements of:

• Varying customer needs
• Evolving technological landscape
• Market trends
• Compliance requirements
• Internal business goals

Certainly, each constraint comes with its own technical and business dependencies.

To address these challenges, DevOps teams must adopt standardized workflows, processes, technologies, protocols, and metrics. All these tools support an environment that:

• Minimizes duplications
• Provides proper guidelines
• Reduces risks

Using standardized practices also enhances the potential for automating other manual processes—moving from automation to orchestration. So, we can say that:

Standardization is a key component of successfully and accurately capturing the automation scope and implementing a proper automation strategy for DevOps.