DevOps has become an integral part of the software product release cycle. The main reason is that today’s customers have many options, which greatly reduces the time to market. It’s about bringing best-in-class products to market faster.
However, a shorter time to market does not mean any compromise in product quality. By maximizing the benefits of continuous testing and DevOps pipelines, fast, high-quality delivery is possible. One of the many ways to improve pipeline efficiency is to integrate automated testing into your pipeline.
Although test automation is only part of the DevOps lifecycle, it is essential for fast, high-quality delivery. Continuous testing can be done through independent software testing services. This is an important part of delivering high-quality software quickly and a major factor in productivity, cost, and risk reduction. DevOps Automated Testing ensures that automated tests are triggered whenever source code changes. This will eventually minimize bugs in the stage build.
What is DevOps Automation?
DevOps automation is the art of automating repetitive, manual DevOps tasks without human intervention. Automation can be applied to the entire DevOps lifecycle. The goal of DevOps automation is to simplify the DevOps lifecycle by reducing manual tasks. This automation offers several important improvements.
- A large team is not necessary.
- Significantly reduces human error.
- Increase team productivity
- Create a fast-evolving DevOps lifecycle
- Automation mainly relies on software tools and the configuration of presets to automate the necessary processes and tasks.
Why automate testing in the DevOps lifecycle?
If you’ve read the “Why Test Automation Matters in DevOps” blog post, you should already have some insight into why test automation plays such an important role in DevOps. If you haven’t done so yet, here’s a review.
DevOps is closely related to agile and CI/CD practices. One thing that all of these concepts have in common is that they are designed to increase flexibility and speed, improve flow in the release pipeline, reduce bottlenecks, and speed up the feedback loop. is to do overall, this approach is designed to deliver high-quality product releases and updates, but it’s much faster than traditional models like Waterfall.
Best practices to start automating your tests include:
- Build automated step-by-step processes and expand coverage over time. It starts with a process that is inherently predictable, repeatable, and easy to automate. For the most part, you’ll find this to be a relatively simple and highly iterative process that takes up the majority of your testing time so far.
- Start by testing one at a time. Limiting the complexity of a single test stream makes it easy to detect when a test case has had no effect when it fails. This is a best practice in general, not just for beginners. Rather than grouping multiple tests into a single test case, it is better to use test automation tools to create reusable components. This makes it easier to reuse logic contained in other test cases, reducing the time needed to create new test cases.
- Build self-contained, automated, automated test cases: Although you can reuse flow structures in test cases, it’s a good idea to decouple your tests. This way they can all be scheduled to run in parallel at all times, i.e. in different environments.
DevOps automation software
Regarding automation, there is plenty of software to choose from. End-to-end automation of DevOps pipelines is possible in open source and licensed tools. The CI/CD tool is the most common type of tool. Puppet and Chef are robust cross-platform configuration management tools. These tools manage infrastructure management and automate infrastructure configuration, deployment, and management.
Jenkins, TeamCity, and Bamboo are CI/CD software that automates tasks from development pipelines to deployments. In addition to this, dedicated software and tools focus on a single function which is an important part of the DevOps pipeline, such as:
- Containerized applications: Docker, Kubernetes
- Infrastructure setup: Ansible, Terraform, Vagrant
- Source control: Git, CVS, Subversion
- Infrastructure/application monitoring: Nagios, QuerySurge, OverOps
- Security Monitoring: Snort, Splunk, Suricata
- Log Management: Splunk, Datadog, SolarWinds Log Analyzer
These tools can be combined to create a complete and automated DevOps lifecycle.
Another growing trend is leveraging the power of cloud platforms to migrate DevOps and automation tasks to cloud platforms. The two market leaders, AWS and Azure, offer a complete set of DevOps services that cover all aspects of the DevOps lifecycle.
- Amazon Web Services: AWS CodePipeline, AWS CodeBuild, AWS CodeDeploy, and AWS CodeStar
- Microsoft Azure: Azure Pipelines, Azure Repositories, Azure Test Plans, Azure Artifacts, Azure Boards
Automation that supports DevOps.
Automation is not just replacing human interaction. Instead, think of automation as a tool that facilitates more efficient workflows in the DevOps lifecycle. Automation should target tasks and processes that can significantly improve performance or efficiency. Otherwise, automation of routine tasks is wasted and revenue is reduced relative to the resources allocated to the automated task. On the other hand, the combination of automation with good DevOps workflows results in high-quality software and frequent releases with no negative impact on the organization or end-users.
Author BIO
Kamal Singh working in Devstringx Technologies, a top automation testing company in India as a Marketing Manager for the last 03+ years. He has great experience and deep knowledge in the IT domain. He shared his experience and knowledge through his blog. Explore him through his ideas on a number of domains and as a part-time author of this blog.
