In modern software development, DevOps is the most apt methodology for building, testing, and releasing software very efficiently. The principle behind the general concept of DevOps lies in automation, as it essentially forms the core of streamlined processes and maximisation of productivity. This blog attempts to explain fairly how automation fits into DevOps, specifically within Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery/Deployment (CD) pipelines, with an explanation relevant to beginners.
What is DevOps?
Before going into automation, it would be rather helpful first to go back briefly to what DevOps is. DevOps is really an amalgamation of practices, tools and processes that merge the world of development or the developers, with operations or the ops. It aims to integrate the two components for improvement in software delivery life cycles, enhance collaboration among teams, automate manual tasks, and reduce time spent marketing new features or rollouts of updates.
Reason for Automation Being Important in DevOps
DevOps includes automation as one of its core principles. It reduces the instances of human intervention, removing every kind of human error and accelerating the workflow in general. Its highest uses are in the following areas:
Efficiency: The automation of such tasks frees up teams to focus on doing more valuable things, such as coding and improving product features.
Consistency: Automation can repeat the task consistently from one environment to another due to the decrease in chances of human errors.
Speed: The entire process of testing, integration, and deployment could be automated, thus enhancing the speed of feedback and delivery and reducing the software development cycle.
Scalability: Through automation, processes can be scaled to handle larger workloads without the necessity for proportional increases in manual effort.
Automation in DevOps focuses on CI/CD pipelines, which are essential for delivering code from development to production environments.
Understanding CI/CD Pipelines
The CI/CD pipeline is a hallmark of DevOps, which automates the integration and delivery of code changes. Now let’s understand the meaning of these three:
Continuous Integration (CI): CI automatically integrates code changes by different contributors to a shared repository. There is automatic testing involved, which can prevent the breaking of existing functionality with new code.
Continuous Delivery (CD): CD automatically delivers code changes to testing and then to the production environment after each successful build, meaning that it is always ready for release.
Continuous Deployment (CD): Similar to Continuous Delivery DevOps, but different in its capability to push code into production without the cheque-in.
This can, in a single phrase, eliminate the whole human factor in the process of integrating, testing, and deploying all the code so that the final result does not require interaction with human hands.
Key Automation Areas in DevOps
DevOps uses automation in quite a number of critical areas. Some of the major ones that beginners must familiarise themselves with include:
Automated Testing: Automated testing ensures that the code behaves as expected in any new change. In a CI pipeline, tests are automatically run when a developer pushes code to the repository. Some of the tests that may be run include:
- Unit Tests: To test if units of code work as expected.
- Integration Tests: To ensure that the modules or services, whatever they are, work well together.
- End-to-End Tests: To make sure the validation of the entire application workflow is done from the user’s point of view.
Bugs, with automated testing, are caught early on in the development cycle, making them easier to correct before they ever reach production.
Automated Build and Integration: While, in traditional development environments, software building might take long hours due to the manual process, automation in DevOps ensures that whenever the developer pushes code, it automatically compiles, builds, and integrates into the shared repository. This step erases the possibility of broken builds and ensures that the new code will work well with the existing codebase. Jenkins, Travis CI, CircleCI and others have become staples in the use of automated build and integration processes in DevOps.
Automated Deployment: One of the most important areas where automation impacts DevOps is in the deployment part. Automated deployment ensures the delivery of code quickly and without human intervention. What happens is that once the code passes all the tests in the CI pipeline, it automatically gets staged into the production environments. By automating the process of deploying, teams can release new features or bug fixes more frequently and with greater confidence.
Infrastructure Automation: In addition to code, automation in DevOps extends into the provisioning and management of infrastructure. Tools like Terraform, Ansible, and Kubernetes automate the setup, configuration, and scaling of infrastructures to ensure that the correct environments are always available for delivery. Infrastructure automation reduces the possibility of misconfigurations; it replicates the same configuration everywhere, and scaling up applications becomes smooth.
Benefits of Automation in DevOps
Now that we’ve covered some areas where automation is applied let’s move on to the overall benefits:
Speedier Development Cycles: Because of the automated CI/CD pipeline, release cycles are accelerated, and code gets released faster and more frequently. Developers get continuous feedback from automatic tests so they can correct them right away.
Lower Manual Effort: Automation rids manual, time-consuming tasks like testing, code integration and deployment. This shifts the spotlight of developers and operations teams away from doing pedestrian work to innovating rather than just doing it.
Increased Reliability and Consistency: Tasks are executed in exactly the same manner each and every time, yielding fewer errors and consistent results across different environments. This is what prevents bugs or possible failures from happening in productions.
Collaboration becomes stronger: Along with automation, developers and operation teams can now work together better. Automatic processes reduce handoffs and approvals as parallel-based work toward results can be produced much faster by teams.
Getting Started with Automation in DevOps
If you’re new and you’re considering incorporating automation in DevOps, here are some tools and practices to get you started:
Jenkins: This is one of the widely used open-source automation servers where you can have your CI/CD pipeline automated.
GitLab CI/CD: This is an integrated CI/CD pipeline for your repositories at GitLab. It is a simple way to automate builds, tests and deployments.
Docker: This is one of the most popular tools for automating the entire deployment of applications inside containers for consistency across environments.
Kubernetes: This is a container orchestration system that automates containerised application deployment, scaling, and management.
Ansible: It is a tool which helps automate infrastructure provisioning with configuration management.
Conclusion
Automation in the DevOps world is crucial because it uses the CI/CD pipeline, which makes it much more efficient. A career in DevOps is in demand due to this kind of process if you want to learn about DevOps engineering and want to become one. This October, the London School of Emerging Technologies provides guaranteed internship opportunities with their DevOps course. Students can learn about and become DevOps engineers with practical learning and experience. Seats are limited; enrol today and start your journey as a DevOps with LSET.