What is DevOps Automation? Best Practices & Benefits

DevOps automation is the practice of using tools and technologies to reduce or eliminate manual processes in software development, deployment, and operations. It is a fundamental aspect of the DevOps methodology, enabling faster release cycles, improved software quality, and seamless collaboration between development and operations teams.

DevOps automation is all about automating processes. In the context of DevOps practices, these processes often involve moving a source code change from inception to running in production.

Developers write code to implement a feature in an application, and then they commit this code to a version control system. Artifacts are built from the source code and tested from various angles to make sure they meet the quality standards of your organization. If all the quality gates are successfully passed, the new artifact is deployed into production. As much as possible of this journey should be automated.

The actualization of DevOps automation is often seen as the continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline. However, as we will learn later there are a few different common automation tools apart from the CI/CD pipeline.

What DevOps processes can be automated?

Automation should address common tasks and processes that follow rules that can be codified into scripts, programming code, or pipelines. Tasks that require human creativity are difficult to automate. However, with the advent of generative AI, this could likely change in the future.

Many systems that are built today are built using an API-first philosophy. This philosophy is about exposing all features of the system through APIs. These types of systems are great candidates for automation.

Common tasks and processes that can be automated include:

• Build: Building artifacts (e.g., binaries or Docker containers) should be automated. This includes running security scanning of the resulting artifacts and uploading them to an artifact repository.
• Testing: Automated testing includes unit tests, integration tests, end-to-end tests, security tests, and more. While much software testing can be automated, the majority of all testing should consist of automated tests. However, this does not eliminate the importance of manual testing.
• Cloud infrastructure provisioning: Creating cloud infrastructure environments for your applications and services should be automated using infrastructure as code (IaC).
• Environment configuration: Some cloud resource configuration management is better automated using a configuration management tool instead of IaC tools. This type of automation allows you to easily configure large numbers of targets.
• Monitoring and alerts: Continuously monitoring your cloud infrastructure and applications is difficult. Your environments should be monitored and alerted, and even some actions that should happen due to alerts can be automated.
• Deployment: Deploying a new version of an application or provisioning a change to your cloud infrastructure should be automated.
• Backup and recovery: Taking regular backups of your data and system configurations should be automated. You should automate restoring these backups.

When your organization takes the first steps to automate development processes, a few common steps are often followed:

1. Shell scripts
2. Programming language scripting
3. Infrastructure as code
4. Configuration management tools
5. CI/CD pipelines
6. Platforms

This starts with raw scripts that perform specific tasks. The next step is the CI/CD pipeline which consists of many steps that happen one after the other, often moving a code change from commit to deployment. Finally, your organization might adopt one or more automation platforms and tools.

1. Shell scripts

Shell scripts are commonly the first step in automation. Although they can be very powerful, their simplicity should not be underestimated.

Common shell scripting is done using Bash on Linux or Powershell on Windows. Together with built-in commands, you can install additional tools and use them in automation. For instance, you can install the AWS CLI to manage resources and automate operations on AWS using a script.

With scripts you can automate small to large tasks that you can perform by launching the script. These scripts can form the basis of a CI/CD pipeline (see below).

2. Programming language scripting

The next step after shell scripts is scripting using a programming language.

Python has traditionally been heavily used in this type of DevOps automation. Python is an excellent automation language because it is easy to learn, and it has packages and SDKs for a large number of external platforms and tools you want to interact with.

Python is not the only alternative. Ruby, Go, and even Haskell can be used for this type of automation. What language fits best in your environment is mostly determined by two questions:

1. What experience and skills do you currently possess?
2. What is the target platform or task you are automating? Is there an SDK or similar available for this platform in a specific language?

3. Infrastructure as code (IaC)

You can create cloud infrastructure using shell scripts or programming language SDKs, as described in the previous two sections. However, the primary option for automating the setup of cloud infrastructure is using a dedicated tool for infrastructure as code.

IaC allows you to declaratively express the infrastructure you want to create, and you let the tool take care of provisioning the infrastructure.

Common tools for declarative IaC include Terraform, OpenTofu, and AWS CloudFormation.

There is also a school of imperative IaC with tools such as Pulumi and AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK). This is closely related to using a programming language for automation but specifically geared towards provisioning infrastructure in some target providers.

4. Configuration management tools

Some types of infrastructure configuration are not well suited for traditional IaC. One example is to update a given installed package on a large fleet of servers.

These types of processes should be automated using a configuration management tool (e.g., Ansible). With configuration management tools, you create playbooks (the terminology varies between tools) that are similar in spirit to scripts. You apply the playbooks to a number of targets (e.g., virtual machines).

5. CI/CD pipelines

The CI/CD pipeline is the most important entity in DevOps automation.

In practice, there will be more than one CI/CD pipeline for a given application. You might have a dedicated CI pipeline for testing your code and building an artifact. You might also have a dedicated pipeline for creating your cloud infrastructure and yet another dedicated CD pipeline for the application.

A CI/CD pipeline consists of several steps, some of which run one after the other and some in parallel. The idea behind a CI/CD pipeline is that for each step that is successfully completed, higher trust and quality are achieved in the change.

6. Platforms

There are a number of platforms available that can help you automate parts or all of your DevOps processes.

Examples of platforms in this space are:

• GitHub is a platform for more than just storing your source code. You can build automation around code, pull requests, issues, project planning, and more.
• Spacelift is a platform for managing your IaC environments at scale. It provides added value through integrated policy as code with OPA and more.
• Jira is a tool for automating work planning. It integrates with other platforms, so you can automate how work items in a board are automatically updated based on events in these other platforms.
• Cloud providers offer automation capabilities that could complement other platforms. Examples include AWS CodePipeline for CI/CD and AWS StepFunctions for workflow automation.

There are many best practices for DevOps automation. In this section, we will review some of these and explain why they are important.

Start small

When you are starting out automating processes in your environment you should start small.

The first step is to automate tedious and repetitive work that does not add value to your organization. An example could be formatting your source code as a pre-commit hook in Git. This allows you to enforce a given code standard in your repository.

At a larger scale, you should choose one organizational DevOps process and work on automating it. An example of this is how to scan Docker images for vulnerabilities. Automating this process involves creating a strategy for where your Docker images should be stored, what tool you want to use for scanning images, how often you should scan images, and how any vulnerability findings should be handled.

Starting small allows you to successively improve your DevOps automation without being overwhelmed by the work.

Use infrastructure as code for provisioning

Use IaC for provisioning cloud resources and other types of resources. IaC is the optimal approach to provisioning cloud resources across many providers. This is difficult to achieve reliably using other types of automation approaches.

IaC also gives you documentation of the infrastructure your applications require. Keeping your IaC in version control gives you an audit log of all the changes that have been applied to your infrastructure.

Shift security left

Security is important, and you should shift security left. This means that security testing and verification should come early in your CI/CD pipeline. If your Docker image contains a large number of critical vulnerabilities, it is pointless to continue testing it from other perspectives because that container should not be deployed into production.

Shifting security left also means adopting a security mindset for any type of change you implement. Start by conducting a security assessment exercise to analyze what attack vectors the current change introduces into your environment and what you can do about them.

Standardize on automation tools

You should standardize on a set of tools that your organization supports. For instance:

• Use one type of container registry for your Docker images (e.g., Docker Hub).
• Use one tool for IaC (e.g., Terraform)
• Use one security scanning tool (e.g., Snyk)

If a team requires specific features of a tool that is not officially supported, you can still allow this, but make sure the team is aware of their responsibility to configure this tool correctly.

The benefit of using a set of standardized tools is that you can build templates around how they should be used. All your development teams can use these templates to get started quickly and be sure that they follow your organizational standards. 

Read more: 21 Most Useful DevOps Automation Tools

Use deployment strategies (blue/green, canary)

A big benefit of DevOps automation in deployments is the ability to automatically test the change using a deployment strategy. Common examples are blue/green deployments and canary deployments.

For instance, using a canary deployment, you can release your change to a small subset of your customers. You can monitor how the change behaves, and if a threshold of errors occurs, you can automatically roll back the change to the previous version. This is difficult to perform successfully without the use of automation.

Use the best tool at hand

There is no shortage of DevOps automation tools. You should select the right tool for the job. It is surprising how often a Bash script can solve a problem fast and at no cost.

The right tool might not be the latest and greatest. You should consider your organization’s experience and knowledge. If you have extensive knowledge of scripting with Python, you should choose Python over Bash.

Consider installing and upgrading tools on a fleet of virtual machines. This can be done using IaC, e.g., Terraform. However, if you perform this operation often, a configuration management tool such as Ansible might be a better choice.

Applying automation to your DevOps processes will provide you with several benefits. In this section, we will discuss a few of these benefits and why they are important.

Consistency and reliability

Manually performing a given operation many times often leads to inconsistent or even erroneous results. Automating a process increases consistency, reliability, and confidence in the result.

The initial effort in automating a process can seem like a big cost. However, this is paid back many times over in the long run.

Speed and efficiency

Use automation to eliminate manual and repetitive tasks. This reduces the time required to move a change from inception to production. With increased speed and efficiency, you can release more features, fix issues faster, and keep your customers happy.

Transparency

Automating a process through scripts, IaC, or some other means allows it to exist in a documented format. Manual processes tend not to be documented. Or if documentation exists, it fails to be updated when required.

Your automation scripts, IaC, and CI/CD pipelines are always up to date and reflect how your organization currently automates a process. This allows everyone to see how something is done and contributes to the evolution of automated processes.

Scalability

Great automation scales with your environments. Put another way, your environments can scale through automation. Achieving scale through a manual approach is difficult or even impossible.

A successful DevOps implementation requires capable tools that automate your processes, including for CI/CD, IaC, and infrastructure management. These fields can be tricky to get right, but dedicated platforms make it easy to control your infrastructure resources—saving valuable time that can be returned to your business.

Spacelift is an IaC management platform that helps you implement DevOps best practices. Spacelift provides a dependable CI/CD layer for infrastructure tools including OpenTofu, Terraform, Pulumi, Kubernetes, Ansible, and more, letting you automate your IaC delivery workflows.

Spacelift is designed for your whole team. Everyone works in the same space, supported by robust policies that enforce access controls, security guardrails, and compliance standards. You can manage your DevOps infrastructure much more efficiently, without compromising on safety.

With Spacelift, you get:

• Policies to control what kind of resources engineers can create, what parameters they can have, how many approvals you need for a run, what kind of task you execute, what happens when a pull request is open, and where to send your notifications
• Stack dependencies to build multi-infrastructure automation workflows with dependencies, having the ability to build a workflow that, for example, generates your EC2 instances using Terraform and combines it with Ansible to configure them
• Self-service infrastructure via Blueprints, or Spacelift’s Kubernetes operator, enabling your developers to do what matters – developing application code while not sacrificing control
• Creature comforts such as contexts (reusable containers for your environment variables, files, and hooks), and the ability to run arbitrary code
• Drift detection and optional remediation

If you want to learn more about what you can do with Spacelift, check out this article.

Do you plan to implement DevOps in your organization? Or maybe you are seeking ways to improve your processes? Book a demo with our engineering team to discuss your options in more detail.

Automation in DevOps is about streamlining and delivering value to your customers. This means using automation tools to make your DevOps lifecycle fast, efficient, and free of human error.

Hopefully, this blog post can aid you in taking the initial steps to get started with DevOps automation for your organization.