Doing more with less.
This is a goal for every business and one of the cornerstones of DevOps practices. More development, more deployments, more ways to meet the needs of your customers faster.
The key to utilizing DevOps successfully is to rely upon automation as much as possible. The more you can automate, the less time your teams need to spend simply preparing to do their work.
But DevOps automation has benefits beyond accelerating how you develop your products and services. In fact, putting automation to work effectively has the potential to completely transform your organization.
Here are four of the biggest benefits DevOps automation can provide:
1. Elimination of human errors
Mistakes happen, even with the most highly trained individuals. There’s only so much brain power/focus/energy a person has, after all, and when it comes to the hyper-focused nature of development work, errors are always around the corner.
Automation greatly reduces the chance for errors by relieving your teams of the need to conduct mind-numbing and repetitive tasks that are routine in the deployment process.
Tasks like ensuring approval gates are up and running and deployment environments are fully defined before software moves to production.
2. Cut down on waste
Moving quickly can come with costs, among them, overpaying for necessary infrastructure.
With automation, it is much easier for your organization to avoid common issues such as overprovisioning environments as you try to accelerate your process or spending unnecessarily on unused development and testing environments.
3. Reduced administration
In a traditional “waterfall” development process, developers write the code and IT handles the infrastructure that code is deployed in. This, while ultimately effective, creates what are essentially pockets of time where one side of the process is waiting upon the other.
Since DevOps automation allows developers to create environments on-demand and deploy applications as needed, the time spent waiting is all but eliminated.
This also frees up a substantial amount of time for IT to work with developers on products and monitor the overall health of deployment environments.
4. Improved security
Compared to traditional development, DevOps automation allows for security measures to be applied much earlier in the development process. These measures can include:
- Code analysis tools that flag and enforce fixes
- Continual testing of the production environment for potential weaknesses
- Automated deliberate attacks against pre-production code
In today’s business, customers are increasingly smarter, more technically savvy, and better informed of their options.
That means keeping competitive requires an environment that encourages speed and flexibility—an environment DevOps provides.
By relentlessly focusing on automation, one of the backbones of DevOps, your organization can greatly accelerate your entire development process without sacrificing security.
To learn more about DevOps, download our free resource The Full Guide to Enterprise DevOps.
