What is DevOps Automation? 8 Best Practices & Advice

Fernando Doglio · Improve this Guide

DevOps Automation is all about using technology to streamline and enhance the processes involved in software development and IT operations. By automating repetitive tasks, teams can focus more on innovation and less on manual work, in other words, making the job fun and interesting while delivering the boring parts at the same time.

In this article, we’ll explore what DevOps Automation really is, its key components, the benefits it offers, and the best DevOps practices you should follow to get the most out of it.

What is DevOps Automation?

DevOps Automation refers to the use of tools and scripts to automate the different stages of the DevOps lifecycle and many aspects of the software development life cycle. This includes everything from code integration and application deployment to infrastructure management and monitoring.

Automation is one of the key methodologies that help you ensure that these processes are, in the end, efficient, consistent, and reliable.

Key DevOps Processes to Automate

The following key DevOps processes are the core of what automation in the DevOps space is:

• Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD): Automates the process of integrating code changes and deploying them to production.
• Infrastructure Management: Uses code to manage and provision infrastructure, ensuring consistency across environments.
• Monitoring: Automatically tracks system performance and alerts DevOps teams to any issues.

Components of DevOps Automation

DevOps Automation isn’t just a single tool or process—it’s a collection of various components that work together to streamline and enhance your development and operations workflows. Let’s dive deeper into these key components to understand how they contribute to a robust DevOps strategy.

1. Continuous Integration (CI)

Continuous Integration (CI) is all about integrating code changes into a shared repository frequently, often multiple times a day. This practice helps detect issues early in the development cycle, making it easier to address them before they become bigger problems.

• How It Works: Developers commit their code changes to a central repository. Automated tools then build the application and run a suite of tests (like unit tests and integration tests) to ensure that the new code doesn’t break existing functionality.
• Benefits:
  • Early Detection of Bugs: By integrating and testing code regularly, teams can identify and fix bugs quickly.
  • Reduced Integration Problems: Frequent integrations minimize the complexity and effort required to merge changes from different developers.
  • Improved Code Quality: Automated testing ensures that code meets quality standards before it’s merged.

2. Continuous Deployment (CD)

Continuous Deployment (CD) takes CI a step further by automatically deploying code changes to production once they pass all the necessary tests.

• How It Works: After the CI process successfully builds and tests the code, the CD pipeline automatically deploys the changes to the live environment without manual intervention.
• Benefits:
  • Faster Time-to-Market: With the automation in place, you significantly reduce the time it takes to deploy changes into production, thus keeping your product competitive.
  • Reduced Risk of Deployments: Automated deployments minimize human errors, ensuring that deployments are consistent and reliable.
  • Continuous Feedback: Rapid deployments allow for quicker feedback from users, enabling faster iterations and improvements.

3. Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is the practice of managing and provisioning your IT infrastructure through machine-readable code rather than manual processes.

• How It Works: Automation tools like Terraform, Ansible, or AWS CloudFormation allow you to define your infrastructure (servers, databases, networks, etc.) in code. This code can be stored in version control systems, reviewed, and reused across different environments.
• Benefits:
  • Consistency Across Environments: Ensures that development, testing, and production environments are identical, reducing the so-called “it works on my machine” syndrome.
  • Versioning your infrastructure: Changes to infrastructure can be tracked, reviewed, and rolled back if necessary, just like application code.
  • Scalability: Easily scale your infrastructure up or down by modifying the code, making it adaptable to changing needs.

4. Automated Testing

Automated testing involves using software tools to run tests on your code automatically. This ensures that your application behaves as expected and maintains high quality as it evolves.

• How It Works: Automated tests (such as unit tests, integration tests, and end-to-end tests) are written alongside your code. These tests are executed automatically during the CI/CD pipeline to verify that new changes don’t introduce bugs or regressions.
• Benefits:
  • Enhanced Code Quality: Regular automated testing catches bugs early, ensuring that only reliable code reaches production.
  • Faster Feedback: Developers receive immediate feedback on their code changes, allowing for quicker iterations and improvements.
  • Efficiency: Automating repetitive testing tasks saves time and allows teams to focus on more complex testing scenarios and feature development.

5. Monitoring and Logging

Monitoring and logging are essential for maintaining the health and performance of your applications and infrastructure. They provide real-time insights and historical data that help you troubleshoot issues and optimize performance.

• How It Works: Monitoring tools continuously track various metrics (like CPU usage, memory consumption, and response times) and logs from your applications and infrastructure. These tools can alert teams to potential issues and even trigger automated responses to certain conditions.
• Benefits:
  • Proactive Issue Detection: Real-time monitoring helps identify and address problems before they impact users.
  • Automated Responses: Triggering automated actions (like scaling resources during traffic spikes or restarting services after a crash) ensures that your systems remain resilient and performant without manual intervention.

Benefits of DevOps Automation

DevOps automation provides many benefits, including as already mentioned, the side effect of removing humans from almost the entire DevOps workflow, thus reducing the chances of human error and granting DevOps operators more time to focus on more interesting activities.

However, there are more benefits than just reduced chance of errors. In fact, the following list covers some of the most relevant ones:

• Increased Speed and Efficiency: Automated processes run faster and on time, every time, allowing for faster development and deployment cycles.
• Enhanced Collaboration Between Teams: Streamlines workflows, making it easier for development and operations teams to work together. This is, in fact, one of the core principles of the DevOps practice.
• Faster Time-to-Market: Everything covered so far helps accelerate the delivery of features and updates, keeping your products competitive.

Best Practices for DevOps Automation

Start with Clear Objectives

Automation for the sake of automation makes no sense. Before diving into automation, it’s essential that you define your goals.

What are you looking to achieve? Whether it’s reducing deployment times, improving code quality, or enhancing collaboration, having clear objectives will guide the rest of your automation strategies and ensure they align with your business goals.

Automate Repetitive and Time-Consuming Tasks

Identifying the repetitive and manual tasks (especially the ones that take a long time to complete) is a crucial next step to understanding what can and should be automated. In fact, these tasks should be the first set of candidates to be automated, as they are directly consuming the time of your teammates with activities that can obviously be done by a machine.

By automating these tasks, you are effectively freeing up your team to focus on more strategic and creative work, enhancing overall productivity.

Implement Continuous Integration and Deployment

Whenever possible, code changes and the corresponding production deployment should be something that happens automatically with the least amount of human intervention possible.

This is because it’s such a critical task for any product, that it needs to be 100% reliable and efficient. In other words, it should always work, whether you do it once a week or 5 times on the same day, and it should always be performed as fast as possible.

This not only speeds up the development process but also ensures that any issues are detected and addressed promptly. CI tools usually offer the option of a rollback, in case something goes wrong. This is another key best practice, as errors will undoubtedly reach production, no matter how much we plan to avoid it, so it’s better to be prepared than to ignore the possibility and then have to manually perform rollbacks, or even worse, apply fixes directly in production.

Use Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

Managing your infrastructure can be a daunting task for projects that have a complex architecture.

With IaC DevOps operators can manage the infra through code ensuring consistency across all environments.

Thanks to the “code” part of IaC, you can version control your infrastructure, making it easier to reproduce environments and roll back changes if needed.

Ensure Proper Monitoring and Logging

Implement comprehensive monitoring solutions to keep an eye on your applications and infrastructure is a key DevOps automation practice.

After all, if you plan to improve, you need to measure, right?

In the same train of thought, effective logging helps you gain valuable insights and troubleshoot issues in your platform, ensuring your systems run smoothly for as long as possible.

Foster a Culture of Collaboration and Continuous Improvement

Break with the idea that developers and operations should not work together side-by-side, and instead encourage open communication between both teams.

Promote a culture of continuous learning and adaptation, where teams regularly review and improve their processes based on feedback and new insights.

Integrate Security into the Automation Process (DevSecOps)

Security should be an integral part of your DevOps pipeline and adding automation tools into the mix should not affect that.

Make sure to embed security practices within your DevOps automation processes and automate security testing and compliance checks to ensure that your applications are secure from the ground up.

Address and Eliminate Toil

Toil refers to repetitive, manual tasks that do not provide lasting value, for instance: performing manual deployments after each sprint.

Imagine your development team needs to deploy a new version of your web application every week. Each deployment involves several repetitive steps, like logging into the server, copying the files, configuring the server, restarting all services and checking if everything went right.

While you might consider production deployments to be very valuable, the truth is that if you have to do it every week, then the lasting value is non-existent.

Try to identify sources of toil in your workflows and continuously work to reduce or eliminate them through automation.

Choose your DevOps automation tools

Once you’ve incorporated these best practices into your DevOps activities, the next immediate action is to decide what your top automation tools will be. These tools should allow you to:

• Comply with the best practices already covered.
• Empower your team to accomplish their tasks without getting in their way.
• Actually provide the automation level you require.

Regardless of the automation tools you decide to go with, some of the recommended categories that you should tackle are:

• Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD): these will help you reduce your time-to-market and increase the confidence on every new deployment.
• Configuration Management tools: incredibly useful when you have to manage large infrastructures.
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): they allow you to version your infrastructure and collaborate on it through simple text files, speeding up resource deployment & environment setups.
• Test automation tools: they will help you ensure quality by automating the testing of many aspects of your application (i.e automatically running UI tests as part of your deployment process).

Conclusion

DevOps automation is a powerful approach to streamline your software development and IT operations interactions.

By automating key portions of your software development process like CI/CD, infrastructure management, and monitoring, you can achieve better speed, consistency, and overall improvement in collaboration within your teams.

Implementing best practices will ensure your automation efforts are successful and aligned with your business goals.

If you’re looking for more details on how to get started as a DevOps or you’d like to learn more about this practice, check out the full DevOps roadmap here.