19 Aug Why is Automation Important in DevOps?
Kirby Wadsworth
Kirby has more than two decades of marketing leadership in both publicly traded large enterprises and emerging startups. As a founder and early venture executive with several successful exits, Kirby helped pioneer the cloud storage, continuous data protection, and file virtualization industries.
The goal of DevOps is to advance the value stream from conception to the end user. Since DevOps champions experimentation, speed, and iteration, the more tasks that can be automated, the better. The reason is simple. Automation tools reduce laborious man-hours and enable developers to spend time in value-add activities.
So how can DevOps teams implement automation practices throughout the CI/CD pipeline? By using the right tools and technology like the ionir Data Services Platform for Kubernetes, DevOps teams can eliminate 99% of wasted data wait time by automating simple and repetitive tasks. Let’s take a look at the types of DevOps systems and processes that you should consider automating.
Which DevOps Systems and Processes Can Be Improved with Automation Tools?
There are two ways to implement automation into your pipeline: deployment automation and infrastructure automation.
Deployment automation is the process of quickly moving data between testing and production environments by using the right automated technology. This process enables you to release new features and apps on a more frequent basis. Additionally, it removes the need for manual input, saving DevOps engineers time and unnecessary effort.
Infrastructure automation is the process of automating repetitive tasks that can be easily automated with zero human interaction. Using tools like cloud-native automation tools boost the efficiency of workloads and accelerate deployments. This helps lower costs by removing unused virtual machines while reallocating storage space.
Automation tools speed up pipelines by way of containers in both deployment and infrastructure automation scenarios. With quick data delivery across all cloud types, innovative technology speeds up the entire deployment pipeline from hours down to seconds. Let’s take a look at how tools, like ionir, use containers to automate these processes.
The right technology will use containers to execute automation throughout the pipeline along with Kubernetes. In fact, Kubernetes is the default container orchestrator for the foreseeable future. Because of this combination with Kubernetes, containers enable DevOps organizations to automate:
- Scheduling and service discovery
- Monitoring of container performance and availability
- Container scaling
- Load balancing
- Application maintenance
- The rollout of updates
Certain tools help automate and manage which containers should be deployed and also monitor the capacity and container discovery (knowing which containers need to access each other). This reduces hours of time DevOps engineers would need to spend manually managing these containers. Since most containers are stateless and replaceable, generating a newer version of containers across a deployment is easier with data mobility of time and place (we will touch on this in the next section).
What is DevOps Automated Testing?
DevOps automated testing is conducted throughout the pipeline to check for bugs and malware. With the ionir Data Services Platform, developers are equipped with the flexibility to perform tests against full, accurate, copies of data throughout the development process. Along with the ability to access data at any point in time, developers are enabled to quickly test patches of data and recover from corruption for a faster and more cost-effective mean time to recovery.
Here’s an example. Let’s say a form of malware got into your most recent data volume. Before the malware can infect any further data, your DevOps team needs to recover the volume to a point in time before the malware became present. With ionir’s automation, you can reinstate a copy of a previous data volume that reflects the block’s last known “good state”, eradicating any malware from the entire data volume — all without manual labor!
Will Automation Tools Replace Developers?
This is most developers’ worst fear and biggest desire. While developers desperately need automation tools to help them manage their workload and speed up their time to release, there is a common misconception of automation replacing developers.
Yet, automation will actually help developers do their jobs faster and more efficiently. According to the World Economic Forum’s The Future of Jobs Report, it’s estimated that 97 million new jobs will be created by 2025 due to advances in automation technology. Basically, leveraging automation tools to simplify time-consuming administrative tasks, enables developers to innovate and program more efficiently. With automation tools, developers will have more time to drive new features and apps to market.
So will automation replace developers? It’s very unlikely for a robot revolution to occur anytime in the near future.
Final Thoughts
In order to stay competitive and bring new innovations to market quickly and securely, DevOps engineers require the help of automation tools. By minimizing the number of hours spent on manual labor, technology like the ionir Data Services Platform for Kubernetes, accelerates the pipeline — up to 500x! Because of automation, DevOps teams are more productive, less frustrated, and able to add value to the business quicker.
If you’re looking for a sign to implement automation solutions into your DevOps, this is it. Reach out to us for a free trial of the ionir platform. Within just a few days, you’ll realize the true value of deployment and infrastructure automation.
