Azure Landing Zone – Role of Platform Automation and DevOps5 min read

Automation is critical for DevOps methods, and automating everything is a core DevOps philosophy. Automation begins with code creation on the developer’s computer and continues until the code is pushed to the code repository, at which point it is used to monitor the application and system in production.

Automating infrastructure provisioning and setup, as well as software deployment, is a primary goal of the DevOps methodology. DevOps technique is reliant on automation to produce in a few hours and to provide often across platforms.

Automation improves speed, consistency, accuracy, and dependability, as well as the quantity of delivery, in DevOps. Automation in DevOps encompasses the entire development, deployment, and monitoring process.

Planning for DevOps Approach

DevOps is not a product; it is a practise.

DevOps is a reorganisation technique that focuses on automating environments, provisioning, and process optimization in order to reduce cycle time by eliminating bottlenecks. It is also a cultural change that fosters silos and minimises hand-offs. While this may appear straightforward on paper, it is not without significant organisational backing.

Create a cross-functional DevOps platform team to help you build, manage, and maintain an enterprise-scale architecture. This team should comprise representatives from your enterprise’s central IT department, security, compliance, and business divisions to ensure that a cross-section of your enterprise’s operations is represented. The following is a suggested set of DevOps responsibilities for a central platform team:

PlatformOps: PlatformOps can be described as the process of allocating development resources to the purpose of enhancing the capabilities of shared self-service platforms. Internally packaged and promoted, these capabilities are intended for consumption by developers and other relevant business owners.

To implement Platform Ops, you must establish a dedicated team that maintains a self-service platform for application development teams that includes everything necessary to build an automated DevOps value stream, allowing developers to focus on development rather than infrastructure and operations tooling.

SecOps: It is a methodology that IT managers use to improve the connection, collaboration, and communication between their IT security and IT operations teams, thereby ensuring that the IT organisation as a whole can meet its application and network security objectives without sacrificing application performance. SecOps is a misnomer for security and operations. SecOps may also be referred to as DevSecOps when a company seeks to reduce information and activity silos inside IT by integrating development, security, and operations teams.

NetOps: The term “NetOps” is broadened to mean “Network Operations.” Historically, companies did not place a high value on NetOps, but with the recent advent of cloud technology, NetOps has gained prominence. NetOps is divided into two distinct categories: NetOps 1.0 and NetOps 2.0.

After the delivery of the tested application by the DevOps team, the NetOps team begins work on it. They plan the network connections and infrastructure and assure the application’s responsiveness and scalability. NetOps 1.0 is a more conventional method in which the majority of activities are performed manually and delivery is delayed.

Thus, NetOps 2.0 incorporated key DevOps features like as automation, virtualization, and orchestration, and others… This improved the speed and accessibility of Networking Operations.

AppDevOps: Provide application owners with the ability to develop and manage application resources using a DevOps paradigm. It establishes a central application DevOps role to assist apps that lack DevOps capabilities or a business justification for establishing them.

DevOps’s Critical Business Values

The days of IT being viewed as a cost centre are long gone. In recent years, information technology has taken centre stage, playing a considerably larger role. It has the potential to create income, innovation, and a competitive edge through a measurable business outcome:

• Reduced cycle times and increased deployment rates.
• Increased automation removes effort, resulting in considerable labour cost savings.
• Increased stability: Because all modifications can be evaluated against the complete canonical software system, they are more stable.
• Frequent Releases: Deliver features on a more frequent basis. By automating the process, the operational limitation is removed.
• Production ready code: Software distribution does not need additional work. The latest version is always available for download.
• Predictability: Provides a much-reduced chance of new release failure.
• Reproducible: Make sure that everything is versioned so that a previous version may be restored at any moment.
• Maintainability: Effortless method for restoring the current system in the case of a new release crashing or disabling it.

Integration and automation of DevOps process flows

Integrating DevOps principles with automation is a novel concept for the majority of businesses. Too many technological and cultural changes in IT have created their own set of problems for infrastructure and application teams. They are expected to react quickly and efficiently to these changes while meeting business needs through the introduction of new build, packaging, and verification procedures. Reliance on automation to do the following tasks:

• Ensure consistency across development, test, and production environments.
• Deploy and manage cloud resources efficiently.
• Eliminate time-consuming and error-prone manual tasks.
• Cooperation between development and operations should be improved.
• Automate your release pipelines.

Conclusion

A successful DevOps journey begins with culture; tools, methods, and procedures alone will not get you there. DevOps demands strategic backing, and the entire organisation must be on board. Anything else is background noise. According to our experience, the primary problem that businesses face is their culture. Culture overcomes all limitations!
A DevOps process must take into account the customer experience (CX). If this is not done, the adoption will have no lasting impact on the culture.

The success of DevOps is due to the fact that business and IT are united as one, collaborating in real-time to accomplish a shared purpose, “A raison d’être”.

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