DevOps and Automation
The nice part of this time off season is that you will get time to read and research. You can take a step back and try to update your knowledge without the interruption of operational issues.
And in my posts about DevOps I have covered Culture, so the next topic in line should be based on CA(L)MS, Automation.
When I look at DASA (DevOps Agile Skills Association) states that you should automate everything you can. An interesting statement, but in the glossary automation is not described. If you look into more detail of the principle DASA gives two major automation areas:
· The software development process
· The infrastructure landscape.
The nice part is that this is in line with the following article from Lwakatare and others. They work with DevOps dimensions and deliver practices for those patterns. In the article they describe Infrastructure and deployment process automation.
Another article about DevOps that actually helped me towards a better understanding of automation and the use was the following article, Toward unified DevOps model. The nice part is that this article tries to set a model for DevOps. The do not state dimensions and their practices but model DevOps in three sub-models:
· Application and data model, the what
· Workflow execution model, the how
· Infrastructure model, the where.
And in their workflow execution model they incorporate continuous delivery, so the automation of software development. In their infrastructure model the struck me with the reuse of the infrastructure optimization model. And the nice part is that they added a 6th maturity level which links back to infrastructure as code. And with all of the information already created on the infrastructure optimization model, we have a lot of material available to guide us in maturing the use of infrastructure.
This information in combination with all of the publications on continuous delivery can help us in automate everything, and therefore support one the pillars/dimensions of DevOps.
Used articles:
DASA: Automate everything you can
an exploratory study of DevOps extending the dimensions of DevOps with practices
