What role does automation play in DevOps?

First things first—automation is one of the key principles for accelerating with DevOps. As noted in my last blog post, it enables consistency, reliability, and efficiency within the organization, making it easier for teams to discover and troubleshoot problems.

However, as we’ve worked with organizations, we’ve found not everyone knows where to get started, or which processes can and should be automated. In this post, we’ll discuss a few best practices and insights to get teams moving in the right direction.

A few helpful guidelines

The path to DevOps automation is continually evolving. Before we dive into best practices, there are a few common guidelines to keep in mind as you’re deciding what and how you automate.

• Choose open standards. Your contributors and team may change, but that doesn’t mean your tooling has to. By maintaining tooling that follows common, open standards, you can simplify onboarding and save time on specialized training. Community-driven standards for packaging, runtime, configuration, and even networking and storage—like those found in Kubernetes—also become even more important as DevOps and deployments move toward the cloud.
• Use dynamic variables. Prioritizing reusable code will reduce the amount of rework and duplication you have, both now and in the future. Whether in scripts or specialized tools, securely using externally-defined variables is an easy way to apply your automation to different environments without needing to change the code itself.
• Use flexible tooling you can take with you. It’s not always possible to find a tool that fits every situation, but using a DevOps tool that allows you to change technologies also helps reduce rework when companies change direction. By choosing a solution with a wide ecosystem of partner integrations that works with any cloud, you’ll be able to define your unique set of best practices and reach your goals—without being restricted by your toolchain.

#engineering #automation #best practices #devops