Automation is the process of automating operations that control, regulate, and
administrate machines, disparate systems, or software with little or no human
intervention. In simple English, automation means automatic processing with
little or no human involvement.
An automated system is expected to perform a function more reliably, efficiently,
and accurately than a human operator. The automated machine performs a function
at a lower cost with higher efficiency than a human operator, thereby, automation is
becoming more and more widespread across various service industries as well as in
the IT and software industry.
Automation basically helps a business in the following ways:
• It helps to reduce the complexities of processes and sequential steps
• It helps to reduce the possibilities of human error in repeatable tasks
• It helps to consistently and predictably improve the performance of a system
• It helps customers to focus on business rather than how to manage
complexities of their system; hence, it increases the productivity and
scope of innovation in a business
• It improves robustness, the agility of application deployment in different
environments, and reduces the time to market an application
Automation has already helped to solve various engineering problems such as
information gathering, preparation of automatic bills, and reports; with the help
of automation, we get high-quality products and products that save costs.
IT operations are very much dependent on automation. A high degree of automation
in IT operations results in a reduced need for manual work, improved quality of
service, and productivity.
Why automation is needed
Automation has been serving different types of industries such as agriculture, food
and drink, and so on for many years, and its usage is well known; here, we will
concentrate on automation related to the information technology (IT) service and
software industry. Escalation of innovation in information technology has created tremendous opportunities for unbelievable growth in large organizations and small- and
medium-sized businesses. IT automation is the process of automated integration
and management of multifaceted computing resources, middleware, enterprise
applications, and services based on workflow. Obviously, large organizations
with gigantic profits can afford costly IT resources, manpower, and sophisticated
management tools, while for small- and medium-scale organizations, it is not
feasible. In addition to this, huge investments are at stake in all resources, and most
of the time, this resource management is a manual process, which is prone to errors.
Hence, automation in the IT industry can be proved as a boon considering that it
has repeatable and error-prone tasks. Let's drill down the reasons for the need for
automation in more detail:
• Agile methodology: An agile approach to develop an application results
in the frequent deployment of a process. Multiple deployments in a short
interval involve a lot of manual effort and repeatable activities.
• Continuous delivery: A large number of application releases within a short
span of time due to an agile approach of business units or organizations
require speedy and frequent deployment in a production environment.
The development of a delivery process involves development and operation
teams that have different responsibilities for proper delivery of the outcome.
• Non-effective transition between development and production
environment: In a traditional environment, the transition of the latest application
build from development to production lasts over weeks. Execution steps
taken to do this are manual, and hence, it is likely that they will create
problems. The complete process is extremely inefficient. It becomes an
exhaustive process with a lot of manual effort involved.
• Inefficient communication and collaboration between teams: Priorities of
development and IT operations teams are different in different organizations.
A development team is focused on the latest development releases and
considers new feature development, fixing the existing bugs, or development
of innovative concepts; while an operations team cares about the stability
of a production environment. Often, the first deployment takes place in
a production-like environment when a development team completes its
part. An operations team manages the deployment environment for the
application independently, and there is hardly any interaction between both
the teams. More often than not, ineffective or virtually, no collaboration and
communication between the teams causes many problems in the transition
of application package from the deployment environment to the production
environment because of the different roles and responsibilities of the
respective teams.
Cloud computing: The surfacing of cloud computing in the last decade has
changed the perspective of the business stakeholders. Organizations are
attempting to develop and deploy cloud-based applications to keep up their
pace with the current market and technology trends. Cloud computing helps
to manage a complex IT infrastructure that includes physical, consolidated,
virtualized, and cloud resources, as well as it helps to manage the constant
pressure to reduce costs. Infrastructure as a code is an innovative concept
that models the infrastructure as a code to pool resources in an abstract
manner with seamless operations to provision and de-provision for the
infrastructure in a flexible environment of the cloud. Hence, we can consider
that the infrastructure is deployable using configuration management
tools. Such unimaginable agility in resources has provided us with the
best platform to develop innovative applications with an agile methodology
rather than the slow and linear waterfall of the Software Development Life
Cycle (SDLC) model.
Hire DevOps Solution
Comments
Post a Comment