How to implement DevOps to automate the software delivery process?

Automation happens to be an indispensable part of DevOps practice. 'Automate everything' happens to be the crucial DevOps principle, which can offer a lot of benefits to the business enterprise. Speaking of DevOps, the automation begins from the generation of code upon the Developers machine, until the code will be pushed towards the code.

The whole DevOps pipeline comprises continuous deployment, continuous testing, continuous integration, and include the app performance monitoring live. The software development and automating infrastructure setup happens to be an integral part of DevOps practice.

The DevOps practice depends on Automation, which helps in making the deliveries over the due course of time. Thus, it offers a helping hand in making quicker deliveries across different platforms. Automation within DevOps assures improved accuracy.

Thus, it helps in fostering speed, reliability and boosting the total count of the deliveries. The DevOps automation is capable of encapsulating each and everything, including deployment, development, and monitoring. Check with devops consulting services companies to automate the software delivery process. 

What is DevOps automation?

DevOps automation refers to the practice to automate manual and repetitive DevOps tasks, which are executed without human disruption. It is possible to apply the automation across the DevOps lifecycle, which includes the development and design, software deployment and release, monitoring.

The objective of DevOps automation is the streamlining of the DevOps lifecycle, with the decreasing of manual workload. Such kind of automation leads to a plethora of improvements. It reduces the requirements for large teams.

In addition, it decreases the risks of human errors and glitches drastically. Moreover, it boosts team productivity. Also, it helps in developing the fast-moving DevOps lifecycle. Besides this, automation depends on a bunch of presetting configuration and software tools for the automation of the prerequisite tasks and processes.

Let’s go through some steps which should be implemented to automate the software delivery process:

Organization of DevOps initiative

The DevOps initiative is considered to be an integral part of the IT department program. The IT department offers the prerequisite opportunity to introduce certain changes in the operational and development department for the whole company.

CIO allows the arrangement of human resources and financial investments in an optimal manner. The programmer manager allows the designing and developing of DevOps strategy, along with the tracking of the implementation.

Creation of DevOps strategy

Developing a well-planned DevOps strategy happens to be the next step to implement DevOps, after the initiation of DevOps culture within the business enterprise. It is essential that the project manager should adopt the prerequisite practices, to reap the benefits of DevOps technology. In the first phase, it is essential to adopt the shared DevOps environment.

A wide assortment of software teams, such as designs teams, operations, and testing are known to work at once to seek an improved understanding of the duties and roles. It brings an improvement in the software quality and boosts the SDLC speed.

The next step involves the implementation of IaC for the nullification of the human errors and glitches, which are caused owing to different manual configurations. The test engineers and developers offer a helping hand to create the new codes confidentially.

It allows monitoring the existing codes' quality with a single click through uniformed infrastructure. In addition, you should adopt a plethora of automated testing methodologies to launch the life cycle. Consistent testing is known to be practiced via the delivery pipeline, in which the primary objective is monitoring the release-time and check-in minimal.

Containerizing

With the implementation of Containerization with tools like Decker, it is possible to resolve the issues of software reliability. During the migration from the software development to the specific testing environment, following the production, containers involve each and everything, which is essential to execute the apps, viz., libraries, dependencies, and the configuration files.

The software containerization parts' isolation from the entire IT infrastructure enables stabilized execution, irrespective of the environmental differences. As the app pieces are exhibited into different containers, it becomes easy for the DevOps operation team to handle the specific app. Hence, there is no need to recreate the whole software, as the changes are essential in either of the microservices.

Integration of the powerful DevOps tools

If you want to automate the infrastructure of the Company, you should opt for the proper DevOps tools. It helps in streamlining the DevOps project lifecycle process. With the implementation of the Containerization process, essential automation tools are beneficial to handle the software apps within the container.

There are a bunch of tools, such as Kubernetes which offer a helping hand in streamlining the business enterprise infrastructure. Ansible is another worth mentioning tool that is believed to be an excellent choice for startups. Jenkins allows the development, testing, and deployment of the latest builds into the Kubernetes.

Proper alignment between the Development and QA processes

It is a prerequisite to foster a consistent testing environment to boost the delivery pipeline. It plays an integral role in the successful implementation of DevOps. It is a prerequisite to adopt certain practices, thereby assuring that there will be no further bugs, errors, and glitches. Thus, it plays an integral role in creating the prerequisite alignment between the development and QA processes.

It is recommended to schedule the automated tests for about 1-2 times daily. Before the launch of the next build, it is recommended to rectify the defects. The next step involves the implementation of the prerequisite QA practices. Then, you should practice the integration tests and unit tests at the proper phases. Then, you need to log the data and execute the earlier tests frequently.

Tracking the app performance through a specialized software

A wide assortment of special monitoring software, such as Nagios, Prometheus, Zabbix, are available which are beneficial in finding the actual cause of different performance problems and resolving them. Such kinds of software apps monitor memory leaks, runtime errors, and slower response time. It is possible to track the whole app performance through the crucial categories.

DevOps offers a helping hand in making the IT infrastructure trustworthy, owing to the stronger collaboration between the alignment between the production and testing, development environments, and DevOps related teams.