In recent years, organizations across the world have started leveraging DevOps to deliver high-quality products at high speed. Every DevOps team is busy automating everything, with constant discussions about continuous integration, continuous delivery, automated deployments, GitOps, and Infrastructure as Code. Though automation has enabled the business to realize some of the benefits of DevOps, the dozens of non-collaborative tools in their DevOps toolchain made the task of automation a technically complex and arduous task. As DevOps automation reached its limitations, DevOps orchestration has emerged as the logical next step of automation. Let's dig deep and learn the ins and outs of DevOps orchestration.
DevOps orchestration is the process of automating a set of several independent automated tasks to streamline and optimize the entire DevOps workflow. It is the automated coordination and management of your entire DevOps practices and automation tools you have implemented to accelerate the software development life cycle (SDLC). This significantly minimizes production issues, accelerates time to market, improves the efficiency of your automation tools, and increases the ROI of your DevOps investments. DevOps orchestration includes continuous integration, continuous delivery, continuous deployment, containerization, cloud-based services, monitoring, and analytics.
In the DevOps ecosystem, orchestration and automation are used interchangeably quite often. Though both the DevOps concepts are overlapping to some extent, they are different.
DevOps automation is the process of automating a single manual task or a set of related, repeatable tasks. Some of the DevOps processes that can be automated include deploying an application, provisioning and deploying changes to production environments, software testing, infrastructure & log management, and performance monitoring.
On the other hand, DevOps orchestration refers to the process of automatically streamlining and managing multiple automated tasks to create a dynamic DevOps workflow. So, orchestration combines all the automated elements in the DevOps lifecycle such as continuous integration, continuous deployment, continuous delivery, and automated testing.
While automation is simply the process of automating mundane, day-to-day tasks, orchestration involves many dynamic elements and requires advanced logic to:
At its core, orchestration is automating automation. And one cannot orchestrate manual, non-automated tasks. Orchestration comes into the picture when automation reaches its limitations.
DevOps automation is enticing. And why not? It saves time, increases quality, optimizes costs, and nevertheless relieves DevOps teams from mundane tasks. But your organization may fall prey to the automation pitfalls, if the DevOps processes are not automated properly or over-automated. While the right level of DevOps automation improves production efficiency, the over-automation can impede innovation in the DevOps program. Here are some common pitfalls of DevOps automation that organizations need to avoid:
Test automation is a key aspect of the DevOps lifecycle. It enables teams to improve the code quality and move it more quickly from one phase to another in the DevOps lifecycle. However, a rush to automate everything in testing can prove harmful to your DevOps objectives. By automating the testing functions, you may be expecting green CI/CD pipelines, good test coverage, and empowered testing teams. But you may end up gaining the exact opposite – jammed CI/CD pipelines, error slippages, and slow feedback. Your organization can strike the right balance in test automation with simplified testing processes, shorter test iterations, and a quality engineering mindset.
Build automation, when done right, compiles source code into binary code, packages it, conducts automated tests, and merges the build with the main code. However, the problem arises when the team adds multiple tests to the existing set of build workflows. Multiple alerts and notifications for each code check-in make the simple workflow complicated and time-intensive. Also, addressing numerous notifications overwhelms developers, giving scope for missing even the most important alerts. So, one must ensure the right level of automation in build processes. Assess the code check-in frequency, branching strategy, and the team’s capacity to strike the right build automation.
Infrastructure automation is the key component of DevOps automation. However, over-automation of your infrastructure can result in unmanaged environments, IT inefficiencies, and high costs. Ensure that your infrastructure automation decreases downtimes, improves self-service capabilities, and maintains a high uptime.
Seamless deployment is the true outcome of a DevOps methodology. However, overwhelming deployment automation can throw a spanner into your whole release cycle, hampering the release, putting operations on firefighting mode after every release, and making roll-back processes time-taking and tedious. Deployment automation works well when you have daily or weekly releases. Otherwise, hybrid deployment automation (manual + automated) suits well.
Security is integrated within the DevOps pipeline to improve code quality. However, a single automation error can bring catastrophic damage to the company. Though automating routine security checks can be a good practice to prevent potential breach attempts, there are many areas where automation can open doors for more security issues.
Leveraging automation for security systems like Network Firewalls, Intrusion Detection & Prevention Systems, and Patch Management Systems increases the risk of cyber threats. So, it is advised to intervene with human counterparts in critical security automation tasks. Also, validate all the automated changes to improve security stance.
DevOps orchestration can be logically implemented when you are in the process of or have completed implementing automation in your DevOps lifecycle. Start automation for a local solution, and after achieving successful results, then orchestrate the best practices such that they unify continuity into one robust process. This is the ideal moment to implement orchestration because automation can only go to a limited level in maximizing efficiency. So, you need DevOps orchestration to take your releases to the next level. When you feel that automation has reached its limitations, that is when you need to implement DevOps orchestration.
When your DevOps workflow comprises many tools, projects, plugins, and services, your whole team should work in a streamlined process to cover all the DevOps tasks. And when your dev team moves from one tool to another, you may face the potential risk of reinvestment. This is the situation where you need DevOps orchestration solutions, which have the ability to promote DevOps processes and make iteration more speedy. With DevOps orchestration, you can continue running your original process without any changes and just integrate tools, projects, plugins, and services into the orchestration engine. DevOps orchestration can be promoted step by step, making improvements to the DevOps process by gradually adding or replacing the tools, plugins, or projects for a smooth migration.
The present-day DevOps ecosystem is comprised of complex deployment and challenges. DevOps engineers, daily, need to deal with clustered applications, containerized applications, diversified production environments, multiple cloud platforms, and applications with complex dependencies. This is where the DevOps orchestration platform comes in handy to simplify the processes and ensure all the tasks are accomplished in a streamlined manner. With an orchestration platform, you can deploy automation tools and also combine everything into a unified workflow.
With DevOps orchestration, your DevOps team can ensure seamless and speedy delivery of new builds into production as almost all the labor-intensive, repetitive tasks are automated. As a result, the team can divert their focus on business-critical projects rather than spending on building pipelines and repetitive tasks.
The DevOps orchestration platform consolidates all the activities into a single workflow and updates them constantly. This effectively builds seamless collaboration and communication between developers and operations teams, with everyone in sync throughout all the steps.
DevOps orchestration enables your teams to implement continuous quality control activities such as approval checks, scheduling, security testing, and automatic status reporting. This continuous testing ensures that code errors are identified and resolved before they reach the end user and become major issues.
With DevOps orchestration, you can significantly save costs on the IT infrastructure and employees required for DevOps workflow. You can also easily expand the footprint of your cloud services and have control over your cost allocation.
When tasks are siloed and the information is spread across different notes, it becomes challenging to build real-time visibility throughout the project. However, with DevOps orchestration, you can easily coordinate all the DevOps tasks, centralize data of all operations, and give complete visibility of the progress to key stakeholders throughout the software development lifecycle.
DevOps orchestration imbibes optimal automation throughout the DevOps lifecycle and facilitates the automatic movement of code through certain procedures such as testing and on to the next stage of a release pipeline. This way, the product reaches the end-user faster without having to wait for another employee to finish the manual duties. With this high level of automation, your DevOps team can focus on developing more products and pushing them to market more quickly, which consequently results in cost savings and revenue gains.
Developers, security engineers, and the operations team frequently access project information in different ways. So, you need to implement independent access controls, clearly defined by role. Managing and monitoring these controls can be an arduous task. However, with DevOps orchestration platforms, you can easily implement and manage these controls, thereby improving security across the project lifecycle.
DevOps tools have become the key elements of the modern software ecosystem. In the present-day customer-centric world where end-users demand fast, reliable, high-quality software products, these tools enabled organizations to significantly bring down the time between software development and delivery. And DevOps orchestration tools help businesses to implement optimal automation across the software development lifecycle to handle complex, resource-intensive activities like provisioning, load-balancing, scalability, and security. This results in a streamlined, dynamic workflow that significantly reduces overall costs, increases productivity and enhances cross-team collaboration.
However, choosing the DevOps orchestration platforms that best suit your business objectives can be challenging. Your orchestration tool selection depends on a wide variety of considerations such as your current DevOps posture, financial resources, business objectives, and organization size. So, to make it easy for you, we have curated a list of features that you need to consider while you choose your DevOps orchestration platforms:
Some of the best DevOps orchestration tools include:
The focus of the business has shifted from serving internal objectives, such as efficiency and cost savings, to engaging with customers and clients to create new business opportunities. That's why Opsera believes the DevOps automation model must evolve. Instead of solely focusing on streamlining software development processes, businesses must develop new strategies to automate the business itself through orchestration.
At Opsera, we share a vision of next-gen DevOps for efficient software delivery. We envision empowering DevOps teams to deliver software faster, safer, and smarter by providing them with a Continuous Orchestration Platform that enables the choice of any CI/CD tools and no-code DevOps orchestration across the entire SDLC life cycle.
Opsera’s no-code DevOps orchestration platform abstracts the complexity of the DevOps toolchain. It enables your organization to promote from within by equipping all team members with the skills and training to create an end-to-end, well-orchestrated, and completely integrated DevOps pipeline.
Our platform covers every step in the DevOps pipeline including security, quality, and deployment where notifications are sent to the right people, as early in the development process as possible. This significantly improves the speed, agility, communication, and collaboration of the team as well as the quality and security of the application. Apart from these benefits, our no-code DevOps orchestration platform enables you to enjoy the following advantages:
Looking to set up DevOps orchestration with a no-code platform, Opsera can help!
Yes, DevOps orchestration can help you achieve faster test cycles and better code quality. With, Opsera’s orchestration platform, you can gain complete visibility of every step in your DevOps pipeline, including security, quality, and deployment, where teams are notified of any issues as early in the development process as appropriate. This enables you to achieve better code quality.
Some of the best practices for using orchestration with your development team are:
Yes, DevOps orchestration can accelerate the process of releasing new features. For instance, Opsera’s no-code DevOps orchestration platform enables your DevOps team to instantly provision and integrate their choice of CI/CD and DevOps tools, and also build scalable no-code declaratively in minutes for various use cases. As a result, your developers are freed to focus on building and delivering new products and features at a faster time-to-market without worrying about the complexity of managing underlying tools and pipelines.
You can start using orchestration in your development process right away with Opsera. Our DevOps orchestration platform provides self-service toolchain automation, drag-and-drop declarative pipelines, and unified insights. So, your developers can instantly choose the CI/CD tools that best suit your business objectives, while we automatically provision your tooling infrastructure with no coding involved.
