Praveen Kumar, Vice President for Asia Pacific, Rocket Software, says layered automation offers more than just accelerated product launches – it’s about creating enough agility should a major market push arise.
If there is one area of digitalisation that has fundamentally reshaped the world and unlocked new possibilities across industries, it is automation.
Automation is not only enabling machines to perform sometimes boring, repetitive and even dangerous tasks that have long been endured by humans but also helping business leaders make more informed decisions and improve their organisations’ overall agility.
Over the years, one of the most significant impacts of automation has been felt in the realm of software development. In fact, a recent survey highlighted how DevOps has gone mainstream, with three-quarters of leaders admitting to having adopted DevOps into their operations – and it looks like there’s no turning back.
The global DevOps market, which was valued at US$10.9 billion last year, is expected to grow nearly sixfold by 2032, reaching US$ 63.4 billion. While North America, Europe and the Middle East dominate the DevOps market today, the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region is forecasted to experience the highest growth rate, driven primarily by increased investments and rapid digital transformation initiatives.
The Pitfalls of Piecemeal Automation
Based on the soaring growth of DevOps practices, the emphasis on fostering better collaboration and synchronisation between developers and operations teams, as well as reducing software development and maintenance time are a worldwide priority.
However, while automation can undoubtedly make employees and businesses more productive, managing it throughout the entire DevOps cycle – from building and testing to deployment and monitoring – can be rather complex. In their pursuit of rapid improvement, many organisations fail to consider that piecemeal automation creates more problems than it solves. To give a few examples, a disjointed approach to automation can hinder critical functions like maintaining compliance and makes it difficult for operations to effectively scale and adapt to changing market demands.
Considering how enterprises are increasingly adopting hybrid cloud infrastructure, which further adds to the complexity, having complete visibility and control over the end-to-end processes within the DevOps toolchain will be key in addressing these challenges. However, attaining such control requires embracing a layered approach to automation.
Collaboration at the Core of DevOps
The DevOps stack itself is made up of multiple layers, each playing a specific role and managing distinct stages of the development lifecycle. Bringing automation into the pipeline can potentially ensure that each phase of the lifecycle is optimised for speed and reliability.
However, automation should not be implemented blindly across the layers of the DevOps stack.
Organisations need to be mindful of the potential challenges and prepare a well-planned approach to implementation. This is because when automation functions do not work together well, there are bound to be complications, inefficiencies, and blind spots in the broader ecosystem.
A good analogy would be to imagine a factory assembly line. Instead of automating a single machine on the line in isolation, taking a layered approach is like automating the entire line in a coordinated fashion. It enables a smoother flow of materials and more efficient overall production.
Similarly, a holistic, layered automation approach means that every stage of the DevOps toolchain becomes interconnected – able to manage its designated workloads effectively and expose any gaps within the environment. In addition, since layering automation provides granular visibility into each phase of development, it allows for clear audit trails so organisations can adhere more effectively to regulatory requirements.
Layered Automation for Continuous Delivery and Continuous Improvement
Ultimately, layered automation offers business leaders more than just accelerated product launches. It’s about creating enough agility so that should a major market push arise, the DevOps processes are ready and able to support a rapid shift in development.
Having the right tools is essential to make it all happen. Organisations should look for solutions that can truly deliver the crucial integration required, reduce complexity, and harmonise operations across mainframe and cloud environments, without disruption. Only then can they ensure automation is both effective and empowers developers and operations teams to meet all their continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) goals.
Remember, layered automation in DevOps is an ongoing process. The goal is to continuously improve the entire development process, and not just automate individual tasks. As development needs evolve, new layers of automation can be added, or existing ones can be improved upon.
