A bit of feedback I received from last week’s post is that I didn’t provide any background, I just jumped right in with examples. So let’s take a step back and talk about the bigger picture.
It is always a surprise to me when I talk to enterprise friends and associates and hear that automation has not taken over their DevOps processes. Yes, we still (and might always) want the ability to have a person review what is being done and make course corrections if the automation has something wrong, but most of the automation that is available for DevOps is no longer new and should be a no-brainer.
The ability for a build to block based upon any given criteria and notify Jira or ServiceNow—or whatever issue tracking system you use—while alerting the people responsible for the build is simply obvious … and yet, some organizations aren’t even that far yet. The ability to stop a build, create a ticket, assign it to the appropriate person and give it a priority is built into most of these products. It should be looked at to see if it’s suitable to the organization.
This goes on and on. We’re now to the point where everything in the toolchain can be automated. IaC and GitOps are tackling the broad operations end, and if the application is 100% public cloud-based, CloudOps simply solves the problem. Automation from check-in to production is possible, with very few places where intervention from humans is needed.
Given that most of this technology is mature—even though some of it has not been around as long but has broad enough adoption that it can be considered mature (Flux and Argo come to mind here)—it is time for enterprises to start another round of automation. Just like AI won’t eliminate most development jobs this year, automation won’t eliminate jobs, either. But we’ve been so strapped for time for so long that this may be a surprise. Automation might reduce the need to scramble for new team members while asking current employees to give a bit more … over and over.
So get started. The math that made DevOps appealing in the first place—streamlining to reduce time to market and free up IT hours—is the same math that applies to the current round of automation. The more that can be automated, the more time team members will have to perform more productive work.
Having mentioned AI in passing, I’ll use that as a segue to include AI in the “automation” discussion. At this time, nearly all of the tools we call AI are simply advanced automation tools and should be considered in the process of increasing IT automation. The ability for an app to run, learn your systems and improve them (be that improvement in development, security or ops) is just advanced automation. In the places where it works well in a given environment, it should be adopted. It is highly unlikely that AI will get worse over time, so even marginally acceptable AI results make it worth implementing, counting on technology advancements and continued training to improve that benefit moving forward.
So, start automating now. Free your time, take a holiday at the beach, do the same job in less time or, to quote a previous generation, “Work smarter, not harder.” You’re doing the job that keeps the servers humming and users coming, now do it with less effort. And keep rocking it.
