How to increase the level of automation

2022-06-08
IDP Platform
René Weseler

Our cloud services business led us to implement a fully automated build and test pipeline to get new code into production quickly.

Developing and deploying software in small DevOps teams poses new challenges in terms of stability, performance and accountability for everyone involved for faster delivery cycles. To achieve these goals, you need to think about leaner processes. Manual testing and deployments are no longer enough to ensure fast, continuous integration and continuous delivery to achieve true agility.

One of the main goals of such an automated continuous integration and delivery process is to enable teams to develop new functions with very short release cycles, lower costs and risks, and to introduce them quickly into production.

Typical CI/CD pipeline structures

The development, test and operations teams must work closely together to create a lean and standardized release process.

Automation is the key

After the developer has finished the work and transferred the changes to the version control system, the automated build pipeline starts creating the binary files to produce the results. The new features are immediately tested through unit tests. This is the most direct feedback cycle that informs the development team about the quality of their software code.

Tests should cover all aspects of software development, such as performance, edge cases, errors, security and stability. Manual testing activities should be kept to a minimum. What can be automated should be automated.

Testing & Deployment

Once the tests have been successfully completed, the deployment of the new function is started immediately. If you trust your test cases, there is no reason not to automatically deploy the new feature to production. If you are running a scalable infrastructure based on a container management component such as Kubernetes for Docker or AMI images from Amazon Web Services, you should be able to deploy your new features without any downtime of your services.

With this level of automation, the aim is for your development team to bring new features into production quickly and reliably. Every single feature must be tested before it is released for rollout.

If you manage larger teams that develop new features at a higher frequency, you may receive production versions several times a day. In such cases, it is highly recommended to set up an automated information process that informs everyone involved about changes in each phase. We use Slack with multiple channels to inform the different people in a timely manner.