What is DevOps automation?

DevOps automation is an upgraded form of DevOps technology that performs tasks with limited human intervention, helping you deliver solutions faster. It helps development and operations teams work together by minimizing complexity, controlling costs, and ensuring compliance across the software development lifecycle.

Automate DevOps with these best practices

DevOps

DevOps is an approach to culture, automation, and platform design intended to increase business value and responsiveness through rapid, high-quality service delivery. DevOps practices unite development and operations team members into a single DevOps team. This moves ideas and projects from development to production faster and more efficiently. DevOps involves more frequent changes to code and more dynamic infrastructure use compared to traditional, manual management strategies.

IT automation

IT automation is the use of technology that speeds up repetitive tasks and processes with reduced human assistance. It saves production time by cutting down on manual effort while boosting efficiency across IT teams. IT automation also helps you scale environments as well as build continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) workflows. 

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DevOps environments encompass a variety of technologies including servers, virtual machines, cloud services, and networking elements. Setting up these environments and deploying them typically required several manual processes, which can be automated to improve efficiency and speed. 

Provisioning

Provisioning—setting up IT environments—and deploying changes to these complex environments can be time consuming and labor intensive, and they require expert knowledge for each component. Applying Infrastructure as Code (IaC) approaches with automation lets developers configure and manage infrastructure through code. Codifying your infrastructure makes it possible to provision and manage system components with little manual effort.

Read more about provisioning

Development

Software developers need IT resources to create, continually test, and deploy new applications and services. Manual IT operations―such as setting up IT environments, deploying code, or configuring testing infrastructure―can delay resources and complicate the service-delivery pipeline. They can also impede proof-of-concept performance, ultimately resulting in slower development. 

By combining application programming interface (API)-centric design with automation, IT teams can deliver resources faster while supporting rapid proofs of concept, development, testing, and deployment—which are essential for consistent workflows. Test-automation open source projects like Jenkins help automate development and provide insights into performance analytics.

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Configuration management

IT teams manage a wide range of applications and systems—including clouds, networks, storage, servers, and edge devices. Setting up these systems correctly prevents security mishaps and system delays. Automating configuration management maintains a system's desired state while ensuring it performs consistently throughout its lifecycle and reduces automation drift. Depending on your organization's needs, IT teams can also use configuration management tools to detect issues early by monitoring and logging system metrics, compliance, and backup recovery processes to maintain system health and data protection.

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CI/CD

CI/CD comprises 2 processes used to accelerate software development lifecycles: 

• Continuous integration (CI) integrates code changes into a shared code repository.
• Continuous delivery (CD) automates the release, testing, and delivery of those code changes. 

Together, these processes are referred to as CI/CD pipelines. 

This automation practice avoids code failures while improving software delivery throughout the software development lifecycle. Other key components of CI/CD include rollbacks and automated testing, which ensure code reliability and stability. Projects like GitHub Actions automates all required CI software workflows for your repository. For CD workflows, Argo from The Linux® Foundation is a reliable solution for Kubernetes-based environments.

Read about CI/CD pipelines

Monitoring and logging

Log management monitors security status. It’s a valuable source for investigating and improving the security of an environment and providing real-time detection and response. Security monitoring generates logs that show when and how an attack or intrusion took place. Projects like Prometheus offer a simple and scalable monitoring and logging toolkit. 

Several metrics can help you track and report on DevOps automation performance, providing measurable insights into both delivery performance and software stability. 

These metrics are identified by the DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) team:

• Deployment frequency (DF) measures how long it takes to deliver code changes or how often customers deploy changes to production.
• Delivery lead time (DLT) is a period from when code is created and deployed to production.
• Mean time to restore (MTTR) measures the amount of time required to recover your product or service after an outage.
• Change failure rate (CFR) tracks the number of deployments that fail in production, reflecting the overall health of the pipeline and identifying errors earlier in the process.
• Rework rate―tested in 2024―tracks the number of unplanned deployments performed within a specific time frame that address user-facing bugs in the application.

DevOps automation is at the core of Red Hat’s software development model. This is the same model that directly contributes to the Linux, Kubernetes, and automation projects we develop and release as enterprise open source software products. 

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

Red Hat® Ansible® Automation Platform excels at helping you implement DevOps practices by automating IT tasks across the entire development lifecycle, from provisioning infrastructure to deploying and configuring applications. With Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, you can facilitate DevOps by automating key stages of the CI/CD pipeline and orchestrating DevOps workflows using automation controller. Automating with Red Hat promotes continuous delivery, deployment, and collaboration across departments through role-based access controls and human-readable automation language with Ansible Playbooks. You can use the same automation content for everyday operations as well as your CI/CD pipeline. And because Ansible Automation Platform works with nearly all aspects of your IT infrastructure, you can easily and quickly deploy consistent development, test, and production environments, making your applications more reliable and resilient.

Red Hat Insights

Red Hat Insights helps oversee your infrastructure through health status checks and system configuration reports. It can also identify and address issues, including infrastructure performance problems, system availability concerns, and security vulnerabilities.

Learn more about automation analytics 

Red Hat OpenShift

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform complements Red Hat OpenShift® in DevOps workflows and is supported by certified content collections for hybrid IT environments. It has built-in CI/CD capabilities for DevOps automation via Red Hat OpenShift Pipelines (powered by Tekton) and Red Hat OpenShift GitOps (powered by Argo CD). 

Combined with Red Hat Developer Hub, Red Hat OpenShift helps teams manage internal developer platforms and build golden paths using tools like Red Hat OpenShift Dev Spaces, Red Hat OpenShift Serverless, Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh, and Red Hat Application Services. You can track performance and insights with monitoring and logging tools serviced by Red Hat OpenShift or Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service. 

These tools are available whether you’re working with a self-managed Kubernetes platform or a cloud version of Red Hat OpenShift like Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS.

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