Chapter 10. Role of Automation in DevOps Life Cycle

Today's IT industry is embracing scenarios where the continuously churned out code can be built and deployed within minutes and even seconds. Deploying code changes from the source-code repository at defined and set time-intervals is a thing of past. In addition to the pace of deployment, there is also a need to validate and ensure that high quality of code is maintained for end user satisfaction. The challenge for the software development teams, thus, becomes the alignment of velocity and quality. Here, velocity is the speed at which the software is being developed according to the requirements and quality is to ensure that standards are being adhered to. Is there a way that the quality goals are verified and satisfied as soon as the software gets deployed?

Many organizations are transitioning to agile and DevOps practices that will enable them to bridge this gap between code deployment and quality validation and signoff.

In this chapter, we will discuss:

• The importance of automation in DevOps
• Automating during early integration
• Automation as a by default practice
• Deployment automation
• Automation – metrics and measures
• Best practices for early adoption and continuous automation