Deployment automation is the software deployment approach that helps organizations enhance their velocity by automating developers’ build processes, testing, and deployment workflows. Additionally, we can say that it allows organizations to launch new features frequently and at a much faster speed.
Organizations should adjust to the consistently speeding up at which software gets developed. Technological innovations have further developed how we build, test, and ship software. To acquire an upper hand, you want your systems, development process, and company culture to adjust and work as effectively as expected. Deployment automation is a critical innovation that can push your association’s speed to develop new ideas and features.
The concept of deployment automation revolves around deploying software automatically at different stages; running checks against your software and pushing the software build to production with limited or no human intervention.
Deployment automation is a powerful concept, enabling you to create a fully automated pipeline to verify if your software works as intended when you deploy it to an environment.
Why Choose Deployment Automation?
Deployment automation is helpful to test the features of your new application to check whether they are working as expected or not through integration tests. It is also beneficial to deploy the application and observe its performance when communicating with your tools and dependencies.
Therefore, deployment automation helps developers find bugs that are hard to detect using “regular” testing methods, such as unit or integration testing. For instance, you might find a memory leak in your application through stress-testing your application.
In this way, Deployment automation is highly beneficial for the developers to find bugs that are difficult to detect using “regular” testing methods like unit or integration testing.
Without deployment automation, designers need to sit tight for application criticism when the group captain chooses to label another delivery and move it to the QA stage. Really at that time, you could at any point accumulate these sorts of knowledge. You can quickly identify and save time because of the faster feedback model.
Most importantly, Deployment automation improves accuracy. In a few organizations, developers must manually set testing conditions, copy commands from Word files, and execute them individually. Not just that, they additionally need to arrange test databases and any remaining tools that interface with your application. This requires some investment and presents more opportunities for human error. Deployment automation tackles this issue by automating these tasks, including database creation and provisioning. It eradicates manual cycles.
Three Best Practices for Deployment Automation
Here are some of the three essential best practices for deployment automation.
1. Continuous testing
Always remember to include automated testing in your deployment automation pipeline. All companies desire to deliver software to their clients as soon as possible. So, they require testing through automated tests to get proper feedback. You can also include checks to roll back to a previously working code change when tests fail.
Types of tests you can include:
- End-to-end (E2E) testing simulates users interacting with your application.
- Performance testing helps you to detect choke points or memory leaks.
- Exploratory testing is a random testing method to find unexpected behavior.
In short, software testing helps you ensure your code’s quality.
2. Configuration management for environments
Implementing a version control system to store and bring changes against your environment’s configuration is critical. Creating a configuration repository for storing environment-specific structures will let your deployment automation tool pull in the required configuration per environment.
Moreover, configuration changes will help you get more visibility into how your configuration has changed, and ultimately, it becomes simple to audit configuration issues.
3. Monitoring and logging
Monitoring and logging help to reveal massive data about your application’s condition. With a monitoring tool, you can set notifications to detect issues with your application. The whole idea is to automate as much as possible. There’s no worth in sending your application automatically and looking through your logs to track issues. Instead, try to automate this part, too, utilizing a monitoring tool that can warn you when an application deployment comes up short.
What are Some of the Benefits of Deployment Automation?
Faster and more efficient
Faster and more efficiency is one of the significant benefits of deployment automation. Deployment automation increases efficiency for a business. Automated software deployment is performed in short order, and approval can be unattended – decreasing deployment from a manual half-day process to a task you scarcely need to think about.
Anyone in the team can deploy software
This is another benefit of deployment automation. With the help of an automated deployment process, the knowledge of how to release your software is captured in the system, not in an individual’s brain.
Performing manual or partially-automated deployments are often the obligations of a small subset of individuals in an association. It’s normal for this duty to tumble to a solitary individual in a given project team. Delivering can become a bad dream, assuming that the individual is off sick or inaccessible at short notice. Anyone who approaches the “Deploy” button can start a delivery.
Engineers invest their time creating programming.
In many cases, performing and approving a manual deployment process is a tedious, difficult task. This occupation can fall to developers and testers in a development team who might somehow be investing their energy in creating the following set of great features and improvements to the software.
The time taken to start a completely automated deployment is included in a flash. Approval of those deployments occurs in the background, and colleagues may have to invest further energy on a sending if something has turned out badly. Accordingly, the team can invest more time doing what they appreciate and have been gathered to do; make special software.
Conclusion Software Deployments frequently demand time as you need to set up another environment, provision databases, and set up observing tools or different conditions. Deployment automation assists you with those tasks and further develops the execution precision so you can focus on coding instead of rehashing DevOps tasks.
