Rethinking DevOps and automation with a layered approach

Automation is at the heart of what makes digital transformation effective and essential to carving out a meaningful competitive edge in the market, regardless of industry. Automation is also at the heart of what enables business leaders to make more informed decisions and increase overall agility within their organization.

Despite the talk about how automation can make employees and businesses more productive, managing it across the entire DevOps chain is a complex task. Between all the different components of the DevOps toolchain—from build to test to deployment and monitoring—trying to integrate and then manage a swath of automation through all these processes can get complicated quickly. Operating automation in pockets serves to make that complication worse, hampering critical functions like compliance. A disjointed approach to automation also causes problems as operations need to scale to keep pace with market changes.

Especially as companies increasingly adopt hybrid cloud infrastructure, addressing the growing complexity in the DevOps toolchain requires total visibility and control of end-to-end processes. Achieving that control means adopting a layered approach to automation. While this concept isn’t new to IT leaders, they’re still grappling with the implementation of layered automation. But how do we implement this approach? And what tools are needed to support it?

Automation doesn’t happen on an island

The DevOps stack is composed of a multitude of layers, all handling different points in the development lifecycle from start to finish. Each of those parts comes with its own set of tools and technologies to fulfill a specific role in the end-to-end DevOps processes—all of which are important to better handling expanding workloads, reducing the amount of human involvement, and boosting productivity. With the focus of DevOps software centered around continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), bringing automation into pipeline builds or authorization controls lets developers take full advantage of new tools and technologies to innovate.

For all its benefits, automation is not something that can just be implemented blindly across the layers of the DevOps stack. If those functions aren’t working together, the automation in each layer only adds more complication, creating inefficiencies and blind spots in the broader ecosystem. Ensuring scalability, boosting agility, and maintaining compliance with data governance policies requires a holistic, layered approach to automation. Layering automation ensures that every step of the DevOps toolchain is connected and handling the right workloads while shining a spotlight on gaps that may exist in a given environment. The visibility that comes with a layered approach also provides a boost to compliance, enabling business leaders to trust that workloads are being handled appropriately and in line with necessary standards.

Building a holistic view of end-to-end DevOps processes

While it is a factor, the holistic view that layered automation provides business leaders is about more than just getting products or solutions to market faster. 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. Ensuring automation is effective and able to help achieve CI/CD goals set out by development teams requires the right tools. Solutions like Rocket® Enterprise Orchestrator deliver crucial integration, seamlessly bringing together processes stretching from the mainframe to the cloud. With automation spread across multiple environments and layers in the DevOps toolchain, solutions like this give IT leaders visibility and connectivity that reduces complexity by providing a single console to control processes.

Automation, on its face, may sound like a tool that’s meant to support the developers or quality assurance teams, but the reality is much more far-reaching than that. The automation underpinning DevOps processes also fuels greater visibility and awareness for business leaders, helping inform decision-making at an organizational level. Adopting a layered approach to automation breaks through the growing complexity of managing, and scaling, a DevOps environment end-to-end.

Learn more about how Rocket Software can help simplify your DevOps automation.