How to Set Up the Goals of Your DevOps Automation

How to Set Up the Goals of Your DevOps Automation

DevOps automation is an integral part of the DevOps process. It is an operational tool that helps to automate and manage the production environment. DevOps automation aims to make software delivery quicker and more efficient. You should think about investing in DevOps automation if you haven't yet.

Here is a guide on how to go about setting up the goals of your DevOps automation. 

1. Assess your needs

The first step in setting up the goals of your DevOps automation is to define what you want to achieve. It would be best if you came up with several specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound goals. These should be in line with your company's strategic objectives.
It would help if you also tried to break down these goals into small, incremental steps that can be accomplished within a short timeframe. The goal should not be too big that it cannot be achieved or too small that it cannot provide any value. Common DevOps automation goals are;

• Simplifying operations: Cut down the number of manual tasks and tools that support robotic automation and continuous integration.
• We are reducing operational costs.
• Speeding up the software development process
• Improving the quality of code
• Increasing the speed of deployments

2. Identify the areas of improvement

DevOps aims to make applications' development, testing, deployment, and maintenance more accessible. To do this, it is essential to identify the bottlenecks in your DevOps process. The following are some common bottlenecks that might be preventing you from achieving your goals.

• Lack of automation
• Lack of integration
• Lack of knowledge on how to use tools or lack of skillset
• Too many manual tasks
• Poor quality software

3. Evaluate the return on investment

The return on investment for DevOps automation can be measured in terms of cost savings, time savings, improved customer satisfaction, and increased revenue. Set an amount of income the automation should help generate, record revenues regularly, and track the success.

4. Work out how to measure the impact.

There are a few key ways to measure the impact of DevOps automation. The first is to look at the speed of your development process. This means looking at how long it takes to go from committing a code change to having it in production. Another critical measure is the time between saving code and testing it. Can your team now develop more features in less time?

5. Put up a detailed plan.

This is a living document that will continuously evolve-This is an exhaustive process, but it will be a solid start for you. You can work towards achieving your goals by creating a plan and defining your goals for DevOps automation. Getting there will not be accessible if you are not clear about where you are headed.

What are the Critical Components of DevOps Automation

DevOps aims to improve the flow of information between development and operations, shorten development cycles, and improve the quality of products and services. The critical components of DevOps should be in your fingerprints, as you must know them. 

Here are the essential components of DevOps automation

1. Automation

Automating is a vital component of the DevOps approach. It can foster communication between development and operations and help improve software quality by running regression tests at regular intervals to ensure that they do not fail or checking if the code is stable before it is set live. Improve efficiency and effectiveness by automating everything possible at the integration stage.

2. A culture shift

DevOps represents a cultural shift from a culture that values processes and features to values people and interactions. DevOps is not a feature but a culture that all team members must embrace. DevOps aims to improve the flow of information between development and operations, shorten development cycles, and improve the quality of products and services.

3. Collaboration

There needs to be a high interaction between development and operations engineers. Collaboration between development and operations staff allows for better design and quicker identification of issues.

4. Measurement

Measure the key performance indicators (KPIs) and parameters in the software delivery cycle and deliver measured-based value. To ensure its success, it is crucial to know how much time it saves daily.

5. A unified and simplified toolchain

This is one of the primary things to achieve the goals of DevOps. One of the main things on this front is to have a single version of the toolchain that all DevOps use. This can be achieved in many ways, like using a single version of a tool like Jenkins and Chrome for all projects.

6. Improved communication

The first step in all DevOps implementations is to improve communication between the development and operations teams. It is not enough to make sure everyone can reach each other via email and that everyone has a phone number to call in case of a problem. Are the two teams talking to each other daily? Do the development managers sit in the same room as the operations engineers? Is it easy for developers to get some time on an operations server for testing and vice versa?

7. Continuous Integration

This is the practice of regularly integrating code into a repository and building the entire system regularly. This requires that all developers commit their code and that all code is tested often. The goal is to reduce any integration problems to zero. Continuous Testing - This is the practice of running automated tests every time a commit is made. The goal is to reduce the number of defects to zero.

8. Change Management 

The process cannot be altered successfully if people do not want to change. Operations and development teams must collaborate to promote a changing culture and try innovative ideas.

9. Agile methods for development and operations.

This is where collaboration and communication between development and operations teams become easier. Focus on the outcome of products instead of the process and tools.  

10. Insight

Through DevOps automation, you gain real-time insights into the values to change the way of software delivery. This allows enterprises to reduce the number of errors in a production environment and improve customer satisfaction by increasing product quality.

Characteristics of DevOps Automation

DevOps facilitates collaboration between product development, IT development resources, and operations staff throughout all software lifecycle stages. From small start-ups to large enterprises, teams are embracing DevOps to push their applications forward. Here are the four main DevOps characteristics:

Conclusion

DevOps automation has been a boon for the IT world. It has helped create an environment of continuous delivery, a pillar of the DevOps methodology. The automation process helps achieve ongoing delivery goals by automating various tasks that would otherwise have to be carried out manually. Thus, it is advisable for businesses in today's world who want to reap the advantages it offers. You can reach out to Guru solutions for all your DevOps automation services.