Important Aspects Of DevOps Automation

By Janet Jackson


Success will not come on a silver platter unless corporations set the foundation for it. In the aggressive competition of grabbing opportunities in the market that defines the business environment today, only the strong and forward thinking ones will survive. Businesses encompass a myriad of IT solutions that ensure a timely product delivery to consumers and streamlining activities. However, there are more effective ways to do this. The Devops Automation subject is addressed to C level managers who are at the top of finance and healthcare to name a few.

It further requires enterprises to facilitate constant communication and collaboration among programmers, testers, and operation staff. The practitioners further need to use specialized tools to unify development, QA, and operations smoothly. At the same time, an enterprise also has to focus specifically on implementing it testing to evaluate the quality of the software from the planning phase to deployment phase of the project. Hence, each enterprise has to focus on many factors to implement testing efficiently.

Chef: This is a configuration management tool that aids in automating configuration, deployment, and management of software applications. It deals with machine setup on the cloud, on servers, and on virtual machines. Configuration management ensures that all the files and software in your computers are configured correctly and are functional. The chef does this by treating the infrastructure of your machines as pieces of code called 'recipes', which is in turn compiled in 'cookbooks.' Puppet: This too is a configuration management tool that works to automate provisioning, configuration, and management of devices. CERN, Oracle, and Reddit are among its noted users.

It necessitates the need for a cultural shift among the stakeholders to work for a common goal and encourages Dev and Ops to function as a single team focused on delivering value across the IT value chain. Thus enterprises should mark a cultural shift in their style of functioning.

Strategic Role of QA in DevOps: Under the mode, both developers and testers play equally important role and typically the Quality Analyst (QA) ties together Dev and Ops teams. It further enables teams to collaborate to have the software and applications up and running. Both the developer and the tester work in close coordination in its environment. But it has been observed that organizations without a strong and definite QA and testing strategy in faces troubles in meeting their goals for an accelerated speed of delivery.

Three Accelerators for this Process i. E. People, Process and Tools: In addition to the culture change the three accelerators includes people, a proper process to be in place and there is need for automation tools that may consist of the open source or licensed tools. In addition, it substantiates a need for a cultural change, a figurative environment set-up, configuration, monitoring, automation techniques for deployment and continuous testing that helps achieve collaborative development and ensures faster time to market.

This list is only the tip of an enormous iceberg. Countless other open source tools are scattered across the landscape. Choose a tool that best fits your immediate needs. None of these tools might fit all your requirements. The trick lies in choosing the best set for you.

Production Environment Monitoring- A single cycle covers all software development activities - coding, testing, and operations. Hence, the practitioner needs to get the software testers throughout the development and deployment process. In addition to performing the required tests, the QA professionals also need to monitor the production environment continuously. The constant monitoring of the production environment will help the testers to identify the bugs before making the software crash.




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