Why Businesses Need DevOps Automation

Running a business according to the traditional standards is impossible in the current global marketplace. Competition is growing. International corporations are entering markets in other countries, reducing the air to local smaller companies. Technology is also evolving rapidly, setting the direction of competition for decades to come.

Any business innovation aims to provide tangible results that can be counted and measured. Implementing DevOps practices allows you to get ahead of the competition, namely increasing the speed of delivery of goods and services, interacting effectively with the market to understand consumer demand, anticipating regulatory changes, and anticipating and responding to potential risks on time.

Implementation of the latest software is always driving such improvements. This statement is true for any sector, especially the retail industry. The companies with the highest financial results implemented DevOps into their business practices. It means they could deploy code faster, reduce the time from committing to deployment, and reduce the time to recover from downtime.

DevOps automation allows you to develop software for business as a single process without separating development teams, testers, and sysadmins. DevOps is good because it sets up procedures from the beginning and allows you to quickly achieve the optimal alignment of people, processes, and technologies.

Container Orchestration

When DevOps organizes digital products for businesses, they often use containers. These days, almost no project goes without it. Today’s technology makes it possible to move away from manually managing software on servers and move to the cloud. A container is a set of processes isolated from the main operating system. Applications run only inside containers. It increases the security of applications: they can’t accidentally or deliberately harm the main system.

The most popular container system is Docker. You can pack all settings, binaries, environments, and libraries into a Docker container. As a result, it makes the release of new products much faster. However, when a two- or three-digit number of such containers are assembled, you need a system to manage or orchestrate them. Orchestration is a highly automated process for managing related entities, such as groups of virtual machines or containers. The most popular container management system is Kubernetes, Google Cloud Engine, or Amazon Kubernetes Service.

Infrastructure as Code

Infrastructure as Code, or IaC for short, is a method of managing infrastructure using configuration files instead of manual editing. The term is heavily used in DevOps automation concepts when a company wants to automate the provisioning of resources to scale a cloud environment, thereby saving time and money for the business.

A smoother and faster deployment is ensured when network and virtual machine configurations are done through a managed system. In addition, IaC is more of a way to secure development and deployment from disruption during any changes to each cluster.

Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery

It is one more convenient automated practice for building, testing, and fixing code. Such a technique is indispensable when a digital product experiences constant updates and development. CI/CD allows the product to run smoothly even if the update involves a single subject area.

CI enables frequent integration of code changes, while CD automates the process and releases the final build. DevOps services help to find and fix bugs faster and improve software quality.

Serverless App Architecture

Cloud Technologies have now become affordable in terms of use and cost. Therefore, Serverless Architecture solutions are becoming more and more popular. The largest and most elaborate provider of this service is Amazon Web Services. Microservices, or functions that perform a specific task and run on logical containers hidden from public view, form the architecture’s core. Microservices can grow smoothly depending on the number of requests and loads.

As a rule, fees for using a service are based on the time a particular function takes to execute. Such Pay-as-you-go – makes it possible to launch startups or other projects without any initial capital because there is no need to purchase hosting to post the code.

DevSecOps

DevSecOps is the conditional unit of continuous development, integration, delivery, and deployment, but with an emphasis on automating the security of these processes. Security validation is becoming an equally active and continuous part of the processes. Code security now has a direct impact on those areas of the company that is related to profit generation. Financial and reputational risks are driving the adoption of secure development techniques.

The concept can be thought of as integrating information security professionals into all phases of system development. DevOps and DevSecOps are designed to minimize the cost of programmer error and accelerate the development of innovative systems. If there is a flaw in the code, it is very likely to be found during the operational or security testing phase and quickly fixed.

Low Code Solutions

Low code solutions, or as it is now trendy to call it – Zerocoding – is aimed at quick creation and launch, as it implies using platforms with ready-made solutions, drag-and-drop technologies, and basically may not even involve programmers. So how can it be related to DevOps and business automation?

Low-code is meant to be used in small projects where there isn’t much need for teamwork and complex processes. However, this doesn’t preclude DevOps engineers from using such solutions to automate and speed up their work when building large projects. Low-code technology is increasingly being integrated into complex processes of iteration, continuous deployment, and continuous delivery.

Summary

DevOps is a development methodology that helps developers communicate effectively with other IT professionals and improve business. Suppose we’re talking about an industry other than IT, such as retail, banking, or healthcare. In that case, we need to understand that these areas are affected by digitalization in one way or another. The faster they can adapt to digital reality and adopt process automation solutions, the less they will be affected by competition and other changes in the future. Which automation practices do you think have not been addressed in this article? Leave your comments.

About the author:
Janet Polson is a graduate of George Washington University in International business. She is an unspoken expert in the study of science and philosophy. Janet is also a blogger, author of tech articles and she works as business analyst at Computools.