DevOps Automation

DevOps is revolutionizing the way companies/organizations approach software development. DevOps is not just a tool or a method; it is an approach from development to operation via testing and monitoring. By uniting development and operation teams, companies can get faster innovation in the field of automation, improved deployment quality and automated testing environments.

There are multiple tools associated with the term DevOps which provide an appropriate environment for development, Shipping, testing, Monitoring, Running and deploying a software-product from one platform to another.

Automation

Automation, this terminology is defined as a technology performing a process by means of programming and commands combined with automatic feedback control system to ensure proper execution of instructions. The resulting system is capable of operating without human intervention.

In the present scenario, every industry looks to automate the environment. In the software production industry the one of the important stage is testing, the manual testing of software or code written is the most difficult task (It is difficult to go through the thousand lines of code and find mistakes committed by the coder). The task of testing can be automated through a software tool which will take care of code and software values developed by the developer. Along with that the automation can be introduced anywhere from the development to production side in IT industries.

Over Automation

Any Automation which results non-relative features rather than required, due to linking of too many tools is referred as over automation. As efficiency of the software value product goes down due to over automation. The over automation typically arises when automated process fails. There is a need to set equilibrium between over and under automation.

Under Automation

While doing automation sometimes developer might not be able to automate the product as per client/user requirements, this terminology is called as under automation. That leads DevOps to an unproductive extreme.

The way of prevention from over and under automation is harmony between these terminologies. This is the matter of understanding of the needs and requirements of the clients when it comes to development, testing, and deployment. Also, the tool chosen for the automation should be in proportion to the requirements.

DevOps tools for automation

To achieve faster delivery of software and out compete the competitor’s, right tools must be used. There is no any single tool which will fulfill all your needs alone. Configuration management, automated builds; provisioning, code deployment, testing and monitoring these all cannot be done using one particular tool.

• Tools for infrastructure automation

There are many tools available for infrastructure automation but which tool is to be used is decided by the needs and requirements of the project.

1. Terraform: Terraform is a tool for building, changing and versioning infrastructure safely and efficiently. It is created by Hashicorp and written in Go language.
2. Chef: Chef is a configuration management tool based on Ruby. It deals with machine setup on physical server and virtual machine on cloud.
3. Saltstack: It is an open configuration management tool based on Python. It supports remote execution of commands.
4. Juju: Juju is an orchestration tool based on Python developed by canonical. It has a large user interface for orchestration of an application on cloud environment.

• Tools for testing automation

To improve quality, productivity and services, software development changes are done day by day so that the tools associated with Software testing plays a vital role in achieving these objectives. Every organization/company looks for the automation of testing environment. To achieve automation DevOps provides a long range of tools.

(Source: medium.com)

• Tools for Deployment automation

Deployment is one of the prevailing goals of effective DevOps. Continuous integration, continuous deployment, other tools and process are all in some way related to facilitating the flow of continuous deployment or monitoring as well as managing it after the fact that it feeds back to the beginning of the loop and back to deployment.

(Source: sesc.com)

1. Jenkins: Jenkins is a continuous integration and continuous deployment tool. It is written in Java. It provides many plug-INS that helps to support building, deploying and automating any project.
2. Electric flow: Electric flow offers free community edition which we can run on virtual box. It is a release automation tool.
3. Codar: Codar is continuous deployment solutions from HP. Deployments are triggered using Jenkins.
4. DeployBot: DeployBot connects with any git repository and allows for manual or automatic deployments to multiple environments. DeployBot offers a myriad of integrations including the ability to deploy through Slack.
5. Automic: Automic seeks to apply DevOps principles to some of the back-end apps allowing them to benefit from the same practices that many front-end web-based apps have over the past few years.

• Tools for monitoring automation

To enable faster and precise response from the client/user side DevOps team needs monitoring automation. To provide such automation there are so many tools available in the market.

1. Nagios: Nagios is used for Continuous monitoring of systems, applications, services, and business processes in DevOps. In case of any failure this tool can alert technical staff about the problem, allowing them to begin remediation processes before outages affect business processes, end-users, or customers.
2. Docker: Docker is an open source multi-operation tool. It is gradually changing the world of application/software development. Docker provides a loosely isolated environment (which can be called as container) for development, testing and monitoring.
3. Ansible: Ansible is an open source configuration management and monitoring automation tools. It is very easy to use, Ansible have set of instruction written in playbooks. According to this playbook’s instruction Ansible execute the tasks.

Conclusion

Automation is the first and foremost need of software industries. The organizations   emphasizing their teams to shift  towards DevOps, so that the aim of complete automation can be achieved. DevOps includes dozens of tools from development to production side (via testing and monitoring) to provide an appropriate automation and configuration management of the application/software. These tools take care of every elementary as well as bulky problem and prevent huddles without intervention of human beings.

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