What is DevOps Automation and How is it Helpful?

DevOps is an amalgamation of various tools, working methodologies, and practices designed to enhance the efficiency of the software development lifecycle.

DevOps Automation improves the efficiency of DevOps by employing software tools to make repetitive processes in DevOps more efficient. It helps to optimize further and expedite the software development lifecycle.

This guide describes DevOps Automation, its benefits, how to perform it, and why a DevOps tool should be integrated with a testing tool.

What is DevOps Automation?

DevOps Automation refers to the use of tools and technology to automate repetitive, time-consuming, and manual tasks within the DevOps lifecycle. It streamlines software development, testing, deployment, and infrastructure management. DevOps automation enables teams to deliver high-quality software faster and with greater consistency.

The main benefits of DevOps automation are:

• Faster Delivery: Automation accelerates workflows, reducing delays caused by manual processes.
• Consistency: Eliminates human error, ensuring repeatable and reliable processes.
• Scalability: Automates infrastructure and deployment processes to handle growing demands efficiently.

Why is DevOps Automation needed?

Automation acts as a support to reinforce all other DevOps methodologies and allows for teams to automate any tedious manual routine or repetitive tasks. This allows teams to refocus their energy on other aspects such as improving designs, planning new features, and carrying out better collaboration. 

Essentially automation facilitates smooth and consistent DevOps processes to enable teams to make frequent updates and deliveries over a short period of time. Automation can be helpful in various stages of building, testing, deploying, and enhancing Software and it aids DevOps teams to foster greater consistency, accuracy, and speed.

Where human error is highly common when performing a repetitive task, automation allows users to perform tasks in a consistent, predictable manner. Automation also makes deployment and integration faster since automation tools can work in a focused manner, and have powerful processing power. They can work  24/7 without any breaks, additionally, tasks can be performed parallelly with automation to further expedite the SDLC.

Automation helps businesses scale up their software production, and allows teams to quickly and reliably release new code in various environments with different OS and settings while dealing with multiple software projects.

How to perform DevOps Automation

DevOps encompasses various processes and not all of them can be automated. It’s essential to choose the appropriate processes to automate at the beginning of any software project.

Following are some of the processes that an be best optimized through automation:

1. Planning Phase

It’s imperative to establish a requirements document, and sketch out a plan for the development of the software. This phase is the time DevOps teams use to ideate and decide the features and functions of the software they plan to build, make decisions such as choosing performance metrics, and lastly take feedback from all stakeholders.

At this phase tools such as GitLab, Atlassian, Jira, GitHub, and Azure DevOps can be used to automate certain tasks such as:

• Gathering Stakeholder Feedback
• Issue tracking
• Organizing Information and Prioritizing actions
• Visualizing Progress with Dashboards.

2. Coding Phase

This phase involves the creation and design of software code to fulfill the requirements decided upon during the planning phase.

During this phase it’s imperative to use a source code repository to collaborate and keep track of all code, to review code, and to perform corrections as needed.

At this phase tools such as GitHub, BitBucket, and GitLab can be used to automate certain tasks such as:

• Repetitive manual tasks in code development.
• Code review.

3. Build Phase

In this phase code submitted to the source code repository is compiled and built into artifacts which are executable in different environments. Following this automated unit and regressions tests are run to ensure the code is functional and suitable to be deployed. 

The decided performance metrics are used to measure the quality of the code, its performance, its functionality, and other traits prior to release. 

At this phase tools such as GitLab, GitHub, Docker, Puppet, Gradle, and CFEngine are employed to automate tasks such as:

• Building the code into executable artifacts.
• Generating statistics.
• Containerized environment creation.
• Generating demo web pages and documentation.
• Automating the iterative testing and review process.

4. Test Phase

This phase involves continuous testing to detect any bugs or defects, validate the code, and ensure that its acceptable according to the requirements document. Quality assurance is also carried out at this stage to verify and approve the code for integration and deployment.

At this phase tools such as Selenium, Cucumber, JUnit, and TestNG are employed to automate tasks such as:

• Automating unit tests and acceptance and regression testing, security and vulnerability analysis, configuration testing, and performance measurement. 
• Prioritization and allocation of errors found.

5. Release and Deployment Phase 

Once the software or updated feature has passed the Testing Phase and all requirements have been met it can then be deployed. In the case that a new or updated feature is being released the teams will often ensure that back-ups are available in case something goes wrong and then deploy the feature.

During this Phase staging of the release is carried out as well. This step is penultimate to the deployment of the new features/live website. This staging environment is a replica of the live website and the last step where the DevOps team and other stakeholders can test the quality in a production-like environment prior to deployment. 

At this phase tools such as Jenkins, AWS CodePipeline, Ansible, Chef, Kubernetes, CircleCI, Docker, and Jira are employed to automate tasks such as:

• Managing, scheduling, and coordinating various feature releases into the live website.
• Network, Data storage, and general configuration management to optimize performance.

6. Operations and Monitoring Phase

Once the software/feature has been deployed it is important to monitor the server and performance of the software to understand the impression it has on its users and to flag incidents early. Continuous feedback from users is also taken in order to continuously improve the application and keep it relevant.

At this phase tools such as Slack, Splunk, Wireshark, Sumo Logic, pendo, and pingdom are employed to automate tasks such as:

• Automation tools that can monitor availability, performance, or security problems and generate alerts based on them help solve this challenge. 
• Application monitoring
• Security monitoring
• Alert generation for any incidents or errors
• Monitoring the availability of the software
• Collecting user metrics and feedback
• Creating Visuals for User and Performance Metrics

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How Automation Testing fits into DevOps?

Automation testing plays an important role in the DevOps lifecycle, bridging the gap between development and operations by ensuring rapid, reliable, and continuous testing of software. Here is how it fits into DevOps:

• Supports CI/CD Pipelines: Automation testing integrates seamlessly into Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, allowing for automatic execution of test cases whenever new code is committed or deployed, ensuring that issues are identified early and resolved quickly without slowing down the pipeline.
• Enables Shift-Left Testing: DevOps emphasizes early testing in the development cycle (Shift-Left Testing). Automation testing empowers teams to test code as it’s written, ensuring that defects are caught early reducing the cost and effort required to fix them.
• Accelerates Feedback Loops: Automation testing provides immediate feedback to developers and operations teams about the quality of the code. Faster feedback loops improve collaboration, help detect issues in real-time, and support rapid decision-making.
• Maximizes Test Coverage and Consistency: Automated test suites can run across multiple environments, platforms, and configurations in parallel. This ensures thorough test coverage, minimizes human error, and maintains consistency in results.
• Facilitates Continuous Testing: In DevOps, testing is not a one-time activity but a continuous process. Automation testing ensures continuous validation of code changes throughout the lifecycle, from development to production.
• Integrates with Monitoring and Reporting: Automation testing tools often integrate with monitoring and reporting platforms to provide actionable insights. These insights help teams track progress, identify bottlenecks, and measure test effectiveness.

Why integrate DevOps Automation tool with Testing Tool?

Integrating DevOps automation tools with testing tools streamlines workflows, ensuring efficient validation of builds and deployments in CI/CD pipelines. Automated tests can be triggered at every stage, enabling early defect detection and reducing the time and cost of fixing issues. Continuous testing becomes achievable, allowing quality checks to run throughout the development lifecycle.

Providing real-time test results and insights helps create faster feedback loops and ensures alignment among all stakeholders.

BrowserStack simplifies this integration with its comprehensive suite of testing tools. It enables DevOps teams to implement continuous testing for web and mobile applications. With features like cross-browser testing, real device cloud access, and test management tools, BrowserStack supports DevOps teams in delivering reliable, high-quality software faster.

BrowserStack’s unified reporting and monitoring through integrated platforms provide actionable insights, enabling teams to optimize workflows and make data-driven decisions.

Useful Resources for DevOps

Understanding DevOps:

• What is DevOps
• DevOps Shift Left Testing: A Detailed Guide
• What is the ultimate goal of DevOps?
• Benefits of DevOps
• What is DevOps Configuration Management?
• What is Continuous Delivery in DevOps?
• What is a DevOps Pipeline? How to Build One
• What is DevOps Observability (Importance & Best Practices)
• DevOps Testing Strategy
• How to improve DevOps Feedback Loop
• Python For DevOps: An Ultimate Guide
• What is DevOps Automation and How is it Helpful?
• Importance of DevOps Team Structure
• The Role of QA in DevOps
• Top Challenges in DevOps and How to Solve Them
• Top 21 Monitoring Tools in DevOps for 2024

Know the difference:

• DevOps vs Scrum: Key Differences
• Breaking Down MLOps vs DevOps: Similarities and Differences
• DevOps vs SysOps: What are the major differences
• DataOps vs DevOps: Key Differences
• TechOps, DevOps, and NoOps: Which one is right for you?
• DevOps vs CloudOps: How are they different
• DevOps Engineer vs Full Stack Developer: Differences
• Synchronize Business Analysis, DevOps, and QA with Cloud Testing

Conclusion

Automated DevOps is essential for achieving speed, agility, and reliability. Organizations can accelerate delivery cycles, improve software quality, and adapt quickly to changing requirements by automating repetitive tasks and integrating testing into the DevOps pipeline.

Automated testing is the foundation for achieving an overall automated DevOps pipeline. It ensures that quality checks are integrated into every phase of the software development lifecycle.

Therefore, integrating DevOps tools with automation testing tools like BrowserStack Automate and App Automate is recommended. BrowserStack’s Cloud Selenium Grid simplifies testing by enabling parallel automation tests on 3500+ real device/browser/OS combinations. This speeds up the testing processes and ensures consistent user experiences across all releases.

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