DevOps Automation

I frequently remind the DevOps team about automation to enable standardization, speed and consistency. Manual operations will never scale, so we have to do more and more automations in DevOps work. 

First, automated monitoring and reporting for early warnings. Rapid changes means it is nearly impossible to keep track components and changes. Automation helps by enabling the DevOps team to create automated monitoring rules and generate alerts to keep track of Infrastructure availability, performance, security issues etc. Automation will help with TTD, TTM and TTR.

• Time to detect (TTD): When performance or other issues arise, rich diagnostic data about the issues are fed back to development teams via automated monitoring.
• Time to mitigate (TTM): DevOps teams act on the information to mitigate issues as quickly as possible so that users are no longer affected.
• Time to remediate (TTR): Resolution times are measured, and teams work to improve over time. After mitigation, teams work on how to remediate problems at root cause so that they don't recur.

When we talk about service availability, MTTR (mean time to repair) is also critical during an outage, with automation and observability, DevOps engineers can quickly act on mitigation to bring back the service. Monitoring tools collect and analyze system data and translate it into actionable insights. Observability uses the data and insights that monitoring produces to provide a holistic understanding of your system, including its health and performance. 

Log management can also be automated. Logs are paramount in identifying issues in an application. An application might generate a large number of logs. Through automation and the aggregation and analysis of these logs using log management tools, you’ll be able to easily pinpoint issues in software.

Apart from monitoring and log management, there are other areas need automation:

• Continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD)
• Infrastructure management
• Software testing

Automation, automation, automation. The more we invest in automation, the better Standardization, Flexibility, Consistency, Speed, and Scalability.