Automation is a hot topic of discussion for the software development industry. Although it is known for being a useful way to cut costs, improve efficiency, and limit errors, you may find yourself confused about the upcoming steps and wonder what challenges your DevOps team is facing.
This article will explain how you can upgrade your automation and achieve the goal of digital transformation.
What’s restraining your DevOps Teams?
Does a testing team using automation with suitable strategies and toolsets work efficiently? The answer is yes and no.
The lack of connection between the development and operations teams occurs regularly. The development team focuses on designing, building, and testing software codes, while the operations team has to ensure the maintenance of IT infrastructure. Although both teams have equal responsibilities for software deployment and support, siloed functions may affect the final result through minor errors, missing deadlines risk, loss of priorities, and data ownership due to untidy procedures.
In short, adopting automation without having an orchestrated workflow will cause siloed functions among DevOps teams.
DevOps Orchestration – The Following Move after Automation
DevOps orchestration involves automating multiple processes to reduce issues leading to the production date and shorten time to market. On the other hand, automation is used to perform tasks or a series of actions that are repetitive.
DevOps orchestration is not simply putting separated tasks together, but it can do much more than that. DevOps orchestration streamlines the entire workflow by centralizing all tools used across teams, along with their data, to keep track of process and completion status throughout.
Besides, automation can be pretty complicated at scale, although normally it is focused on a specific operation to achieve a goal, such as a server deployment. When automation has reached its limitations, that’s when orchestration plays to its strengths.
Why Invest in DevOps Orchestration?
DevOps teams need an ultimate solution that helps them navigate across departments and pilot their tools smartly. Therefore, it is essential to have a DevOps orchestration solution to merge multiple automated elements from separate DevOps tools.
With DevOps orchestration, you can both deploy automation tools and engage under an overarching umbrella designed to combine everything into a unified workflow.
Investing in DevOps Orchestration helps you:
1. Speed up the automation process
DevOps orchestration helps users deliver new builds into production quickly and seamlessly without putting much effort into these repetitive tasks. As a result, DevOps teams can focus on other critical projects and decision-making.
2. Enhance cross-functional collaboration
DevOps orchestration is a platform that constantly unifies and updates all activities to improve communication between operation and development teams, so every member is in sync in all steps.
3. Release products with higher quality
DevOps orchestration helps teams reduce software errors before reaching the end-user by controlling approvals, scheduling, security testing, automatic status reports.
4. Lower costs for IT infrastructure and human resources
Another benefit of DevOps orchestration is cutting infrastructure investment costs and the number of IT employees. In the long run, businesses can also expand their cloud service footprint and allocate costs flexibly.
5. Build transparency across the SDLC
Siloed tasks and information cause difficulty in creating clarity and openness throughout a project. DevOps orchestration helps businesses coordinate all tasks, centralize all operations’ data, and allow key stakeholders to gain visibility into new updates and progress during the development lifecycle.
6. Improve the release velocity
DevOps orchestration also requires considerable automation and the automated progression of software through testing and releasing pipeline processes. As businesses can reduce the time of finishing manual tasks and deliver the program to the upcoming step in the process, software reaches the end-user more quickly, wait time is turned aside to the next project. With that reason, a higher level of automation helps release products faster, save money and increase profits.
DevOps Orchestration in Practice
DevOps orchestration provides significant changes to the development and operations teams in no time, both vertically and horizontally.
Orchestration in DevOps synchronizes teams through a centralized dashboard to avoid information silos and boost connection and cross-team collaboration. Teams then can solve troubleshooting faster to have robust decision-making, even in the toughest situations. The development team can now shift focus on innovation by encapsulating runnable programs into separate parts for easier testing and faster upgrades. Besides, DevOps orchestration also helps the operations team manage the IT infrastructure and scalability through its predefined configurations and serverless monitoring system.
Check out a Successful DevOps Testing Strategy for your Agile Teams.
Katalon TestOps – A robust Orchestration platform for DevOps teams
Understanding the difficulties of DevOps teams, Katalon TestOps provides an open orchestration platform that centralizes all testing activities, resources, environments, and orchestration tools, so you can manage tests and quality insights effortlessly.
TestOps uplevels your project-automation via:
- Test automation and DevOps enablement
TestOps reports and ensures consistency and accuracy for building through managing test generation, management, planning, and execution.
- Open platforms with codeless setup
TestOps provides seamless integration with common testing frameworks to eliminate the complexities of configurations for your convenience.
- Orchestrate tests and DevOps efficiently
TestOps schedule tests smartly with Smart Scheduling to expand your execution processes faster, enhance test coverage, and shorten the delivery cycle.
- Build quality insights into your CI/CD pipeline
TestOps delivers detailed reports through important metrics about quality, coverage analysis, test flakiness, and dashboards.