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Four Ways to Successfully Automate Your End-to-End DevOps Processes

Anna Murray

January 27, 2023

As an IT leader, you are under constant pressure to adopt new processes, applications and platforms to ensure the continuous delivery of value to your customers. Your DevOps ecosystem is becoming increasingly complex, and management and oversight may become impossible without modernization plans in place. When I talk about DevOps automation to clients, I constantly hear some variation of these challenges:

“It’s becoming challenging to manage multiple environments, applications and processes across teams—and get my teams on board with our modernization goals.”

“Our workloads are growing at exponential rates.”

“More touchpoints create more risk. We need to ensure we’re complying with regulations and can produce evidence easily through reports.”

“Things are constantly shifting in a digital economy. We need to be agile and nimble enough to support change.”

Change is inevitable. Customer and business demands will always impact development and operational flows. It’s up to you as an IT leader to implement a scalable and flexible foundation that equips you and your teams with the DevOps tools to implement modernized practices—like continuous integration continuous delivery (CI/CD)—and the functionality to streamline application lifecycle management processes to ensure continued growth.

As an IT leader, your DevOps strategy should empower you to:

  1. Stay agile across your entire DevOps ecosystem. Your customers will always demand value, requiring continuous changes to your DevOps strategy. It’s important to have a solid foundation in place for change.
  2. Deliver value to your customers ahead of the competition. This enables you to meet your profitability goals.
  3. scale quickly while maintaining maximum quality, reliability and compliance.

But how do you get there? Where do you start?

Here are four ways to successfully automate your end-to-end DevOps processes

1. Automate key aspects of your end-to-end development and operational processes.

To meet growing customer demands, you need to implement automation in your end-to-end DevOps flows. Your automation efforts should connect the dots between applications, systems and platforms you already use (e.g., Kubernetes, Jira, Selenium, your mainframe), rid process gaps, simplify regulatory compliance and speed time-to-market. But automation should also answer detailed questions about your DevOps processes, such as:

  • When should the task run?
  • Are there variables affecting when the task should run?
  • What files need to exist?
  • Should other tasks be completed first?
  • Does this task take up resources that would prevent other tasks from running?

2. Gain a centralized view of every process and task running across your environments, applications and teams.

Do you have complete visibility into your DevOps pipeline? IT leaders with a centralized view of their end-to-end DevOps flows can identify and remove gaps preventing continuous development and continuous delivery to their customers.

3. Connect and integrate processes between the platforms, applications and tools you already use every day.

IT leaders are prioritizing solutions that empower them to leverage their existing tools. Your solution must be sophisticated enough to address the technical intricacies at the task level, as well as the high-level view of value-generating processes spanning multiple technology stacks. And it must offer the automation, visibility and DevOps toolchain coordination needed to deliver greater value faster than your competitors.

4. Create a solid, extensible foundation to promote agility.

Implementing new processes—like CI/CD—and applications to meet business demands should be quick and painless. Taking steps to ensure DevOps agility and simplify your modernization journey is crucial when trying to maximize agility across your entire DevOps ecosystem.

To learn more about how and where to get started with DevOps automation, watch the Rocket Software webinar, How to Automate Your DevOps Processes End-to-End. In this webinar, I will teach you:

  1. What makes a strong DevOps strategy?
  2. What should the top 3 components of focus be for your DevOps strategy?
  3. Where does automation come into play, and what are the right steps to get there?
  4. What is the immediate value you can expect to gain from making these changes?

Watch the webinar here.