DevOps is highly dependent on automation for deliveries over a period and across platforms. Automation in DevOps harbors speed, greater accuracy, consistency, reliability, and productivity. DevOps Automation removes the chances of errors which are common during manual configurations or deployment in huge clusters. Coming to the difference between AWS DevOps and Azure DevOps, AWS owns 31% of the global cloud computing market and Azure has control over 11%. Both AWS and Azure provide extensive tools to build CI/CD pipelines to automate rapid software development life cycles.  

The practice or discipline of using specialized tools and procedures to automate repetitive manual tasks throughout the software development life cycle is known as DevOps automation. As DevOps is intended to deliver better business value and improved response through frequent and high-quality service delivery, DevOps automation can help you reduce human involvement. It helps you accelerate and scale processes as well as build continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment workflows.   

Why is DevOps automation important?

Automation is the central principle reinforcing all other DevOps principles. It promotes better collaboration and communication by reducing manual workload from routine tasks. Moreover, automation also facilitates observation and improvement through consistent and smooth processes.

DevOps automation tools

Studies have shown that around 35% of global enterprises already use automation tools for their testing procedures and 29% are chalking out the plan to use automation tools for their products. Whether it is code generation, integration, delivery, or continuous testing and monitoring, automation has given DevOps operations new horizons. If automation is the biggest turning point for DevOps, automation tools are the next big thing. Not only do these tools make tasks easier and quicker, but they also reduce errors, save time, and make the process more reliable.

AWS DevOps automation

Automation is among the core philosophies of DevOps. It focuses on setup, configuration, deployment, and support of infrastructure/applications. It is easier to set up standard environments rapidly with the help of AWS DevOps automation. It takes the load off of manual server configuration and application deployment, thus, reducing errors.

AWS relies heavily on automation to provide core features like scalability and elasticity. While manual processes are more error-prone, unreliable, and insufficient for supporting an agile business. DevOps automation with AWS can have the following benefits:

  1. Rapid changes
  2. Improved productivity and elasticity
  3. Reproducible environments
  4. Repeatable configurations
  5. Leveraged elasticity and automatic scaling
  6. Automated testing

Azure DevOps automation

DevOps automation and monitoring can be helpful in managing complex software delivery CI/CD pipelines and builds. This results in better performance and faster turnaround time. Azure DevOps automation has brought about quality continuous delivery, improved monitoring, on-demand testing at each quality gate, and operations.

Azure DevOps automation provides version control, project management, automated builds, testing, and release management capabilities. The various components of the automation pipeline include:

  1. Azure boards
  2. Azure pipelines
  3. GitHub and Azure
  4. Azure test plans
  5. Azure monitor

Difference between AWS and Azure

From the perspective of general DevOps requirements like coding, building, testing, packaging, releasing, configuring, and monitoring with continuous integration and continuous deployment in a collaborative environment are extremely subtle. The major difference lies in their integration with various platforms. Although both tools incorporate the look and feel of their respective cloud platforms, AWS DevOps is easier to get started with while the Azure suite is better integrated between the various tools across the whole tool set. It also has a more comprehensive set of integrations with the Azure marketplace.

Best practices in DevOps automation

It can be difficult to keep track of all the components of a fast-moving DevOps environment manually at scale. Automation tools can help you monitor availability, performance, or security issues and generate alerts based on the required solution. A few practices can help you get through the automation process smoothly. Keeping engineers in the loop and unifying the DevOps tool chain are a few important practices.

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