What is DevOps Automation: Overview and Tips To Get Started

IT teams are on the front lines when it comes to balancing business expectations, customer expectations, stakeholder demands and the need to deliver software quickly and reliably. With a 74% increase in demand for IT services expected in the coming months, teams must keep pace.

DevOps automation can enhance collaboration between development and operations teams, allowing them to respond to evolving demands quickly. Simply put, DevOps automation smoothes out the development process, improves software quality and ensures your DevOps pipeline is efficient, error-free and resilient.

DevOps automation is the process of using tools and scripts to automate repetitive tasks in the software development lifecycle.

It boosts efficiency and reliability, allowing DevOps teams to build, test and release software faster and with fewer errors. The right DevOps platform will often handle the majority of this automation and monitoring.

One of the most significant benefits of DevOps automation is improved team collaboration and communication. By automating repetitive tasks, teams can dedicate more time to strategic planning and building an efficient workflow, leading to smoother processes and stronger cooperation across departments.

DevOps automation also speeds up software development and deployment cycles. Automated testing, building and deployment reduce the time required to release new features and updates, allowing organisations to stay competitive and quickly adapt to customer feedback and market changes.

You don’t have to sacrifice reliability as your initiatives expand, either. Automation ensures that applications and software can expand with your company and customer base. With automated infrastructure management — often powered by AI — applications can handle fluctuating demands while maintaining performance, creating a more resilient and dependable system.

Automation in DevOps covers a wide range of processes, each aimed at making workflows more reliable. Consider the key areas where automation can make a difference:

Planning, coding, building and testing are fundamental building blocks in every software project. Automated planning tools enhance project management efficiency, while automated coding practices maintain consistent code quality.

And when it comes to building, automated builds compile your code efficiently, while test automation makes sure every change is tested thoroughly. This means catching issues early and keeping high-quality standards.

Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines are at the heart of DevOps automation. With CI, code changes automatically merge into a shared repository and undergo testing to catch issues quickly.

CD takes it a step further by deploying tested code to production environments automatically. This reduces manual work, minimises errors and helps release new features quickly.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) uses code to manage and provision infrastructure. Tools like Terraform and AWS CloudFormation handle the creation, updating and deletion of infrastructure in a consistent and automated way. This approach helps maintain configurations, scales easily and improves disaster recovery.

Automated software testing helps with comprehensive and consistent test coverage. You can run automated tests frequently and at scale, catching bugs early in the development process.

DevOps tools like Selenium, JUnit and Jenkins automate various types of testing — such as functional, performance and regression — providing quick feedback and maintaining high software quality.

Automated DevOps monitoring and logging tools help you to keep an eye on your application’s performance and system health around the clock.

Tools including Prometheus and the ELK Stack collect and analyse data automatically, providing valuable metrics and alerting teams to any issues. This proactive approach helps resolve problems before they affect users and app performance.

With tools such as Ansible, Puppet and Chef, configuration management becomes a breeze. These tools automate the deployment, configuration and more, so you achieve consistency across all environments for application lifecycle management (ALM). This reduces the risk of manual errors and reinforces system reliability.

Automating technical documentation with tools like Javadoc and Sphinx keeps your documentation up to date with the current state of your software. This automation saves time and ensures accuracy, helping developers stay productive without the burden of manual documentation updates.

Automated network provisioning tools configure resources like firewalls, load balancers and virtual private networks (VPNs) based on predefined templates and policies. This makes sure that network configurations are consistent and secure, cutting down on deployment times and reducing human errors.

When diving into DevOps automation, here are a few best practices and considerations to set teams up for success. Keep in mind:

An important aspect of DevOps automation is fostering close collaboration between development and operations teams. This involves identifying and prioritising tasks most suitable for automation, a process that requires teamwork.

Regular meetings, shared goals and open communication channels are essential to bridge gaps and promote a culture of collaboration. When everyone is on the same page, automation efforts are more likely to succeed and deliver the desired results.

Automation doesn’t mean setting up a process and forgetting it. Constant monitoring is key to ensuring that these processes run smoothly and effectively.

Implementing automated monitoring tools helps track the performance of your applications and systems, often providing immediate visibility. This allows you to detect and resolve issues before they escalate, maintaining the reliability and stability of your software.

Flexibility is also important when automating DevOps tasks. Using dynamic variables and flexible tools allows your automation processes to adapt to changing requirements and environments. Dynamic variables help customise scripts and configurations based on different parameters, making your automation more versatile.

For more insights, explore the DevOps Guide to learn how to implement best practices, drive agility in a trusted way and support fast and safe delivery from your teams.

DevOps automation offers features that simplify the software development lifecycle for teams. Here are some key features and their benefits for businesses:

Continuous delivery (CD) optimises the deployment of applications by automatically releasing code changes to production environments once they pass all necessary tests. This reduces manual intervention and deployment errors, while speeding up the release of new features. CD pipelines often include automated rollback mechanisms to revert changes if issues are detected post-deployment.

Take streaming platforms for example, which use an open-source, multi-cloud, continuous delivery platform to automate their deployment process. The impact includes faster release cycles, reduced downtime and the ability to quickly roll back problematic deployments. As a result, they can deploy hundreds of times a day while maintaining a seamless user experience.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) allows teams to manage and provision infrastructure through code, making it possible to automate the set-up, configuration and management of resources. This automation reduces configuration drift, enhances scalability and simplifies disaster recovery processes.

Cloud computing web services use IaC to automate infrastructure management. This allows them to create, update and manage infrastructure consistently and efficiently across its cloud platform. The outcome results in reduced manual errors, increased operational efficiency and the ability to quickly scale infrastructure in response to customer demand.

Automated testing involves using tools and scripts to run tests on software applications. This allows for comprehensive test coverage and rapid feedback on code changes. Automated testing can include unit tests, integration tests and end-to-end tests, helping catch bugs early and maintain high software quality.

Search engines integrate automated testing into their development process using tools that help with browser automation and unit testing. This gives them the means to run thousands of tests in parallel across different environments. This yields a significant reduction in time-to-market for new features, improved software reliability and fewer post-release defects.

Continuous integration (CI) speeds up and improves quality control by automating the merging of code changes from multiple contributors into a shared repository. Automated tests run with each integration to catch issues early, ensuring that code changes are continuously validated. This promotes better collaboration and faster development cycles.

For example, social media platforms use robust CI systems to manage frequent code changes. These systems handle thousands of code integrations daily, ensuring smooth and conflict-free updates. As a result, teams benefit from faster integration of new features, improved code quality and greater collaboration among developers.

DevOps and automation go hand-in-hand. By automating routine tasks like testing, integration and deployment, you can make your development cycles run like a well-oiled machine — and maintain your high-quality standards.

Salesforce DevOps Centre helps you to deliver code faster and with agility - check out this expert resource guide to get the most out of the platform.