✅ DevOps and SRE
✅ Automation Importance
✅ Challenges
✅ Botprise S.M.A.R.T. automation enabler
✅ SRE and DevOps Smartbots
✅ Automated Load and functional test of Web Application.
What is DevOps and SRE?
DevOps is about combining software engineering, operations philosophies and practices to amalgamate software development and software in-life management. The primary objective of DevOps is to integrate automation and monitoring at all steps of the software development cycle. DevOps aims to improve deployment frequencies, shorten release cycles and focus on the quality and performance of releases, albeit in close alignment with business objectives.
Site reliability engineering (SRE) on the other hand, is emerging as one of the most critical roles in operations. The demand for consistent user experiences and the advent of complex cloud architectures has shifted the operational focus from just keeping the lights on, to performance and consistency. Applications have to work well, the experience has to be great, and the infrastructure needs continual monitoring. When imbibing the SRE culture teams take a software engineering approach to operations, thereby changing the goal to manage a larger volume of changes, faster, and accept the risk of doing more changes into the infrastructure. That is why DevOps and SRE approaches work well together, and that’s why SRE is often considered an extension to DevOps.
Automations - Why are they important?
Today’s enterprises are embarrassing the cloud and reaping the benefits of the cost advantage and “pay for what is used only” characteristics associated with cloud solutions. Furthermore, with the ease of deployment options, ability to move workloads at the click of a button and to turn down infrastructure when not needed, deploying infrastructure as code is driving more and more applications of these enterprises to be migrated to the cloud. No eyebrow is raised when one hears of enterprises having hundreds or thousands of applications and cloud services today. Managing these applications and their underlying infrastructure can be a very daunting task and this is where automations play a very key role. Standards and template based approaches to integration, testing, releasing, deployment and infrastructure management are enablers to automations in both the DevOps and SRE areas.
DevOps automation is the practice of automating repetitive and manual tasks to be carried out without or low human touch. Automations can be applied across the DevOps lifecycle, which include:
- Design and development
- Deployment and release
- Performance and monitoring
Challenges
DevOps engineers are not developers nor do they need to have the skills to write code. They have access to a whole lot of tools today and they work just fine with these tools. The typical challenges that engineers face today are:
- A plethora of tools are available and most of them do specific tasks well. This means the Devops engineers really need to deal with a lot of tools to manage the entire DevOps cycle.
- As the infrastructure and services grow, reliance on humans to perform tasks is going to be costly, error prone, toil filled and monotonous. The repetitive nature of the tasks in DevOps can leave engineers extremely burnt out and unmotivated.
- The greater the number of applications and infrastructure that has to be managed the greater the challenge in managing them. Things break and sometimes break all at the same time making it challenging for humans to handle the situation.
SRE on the other hand are skilled engineers and their very job calls to automate everything. Here the challenges are different and entail incident management, prioritizing incidents, root cause analysis and communication. They too have access to a wide variety of tools to enable them to do their jobs. There is no doubt that an automation solution will go a long way in enabling them to do their jobs better.
Botprise as your automation enabler
Botprise can automate the entire DevOps pipeline that includes continuous integration, continuous testing, and continuous deployment, including application performance monitoring. Botprise, with its integrations with market leading DevOps and SRE centric tools and by working with the data from them, is able to derive intelligence and use them in the execution of the workflows. SRE areas in which our bots can be used include availability & performance monitoring, incident response, toil reduction, alert fatigue reduction, SLO & error budget tracking.
Botprise features that ease out automation
Integrations: Integrating Botprise with most technologies and related infrastructure is easy. Botprise offers extensive off-the-shelf integrations and an API-first architecture enables simple interoperability with your existing DevOps and SRE tool chain. With its technology partnerships with most of today’s leading tools and service providers Botprise is able to offer off0the-shelf integrations thereby enabling a large landscape of automation possibilities.
Smart Studio: Botprise’s Smart Studio offers a work area for DevOps/SRE professionals and the citizen automator alike to design their automations as workflows by merely dragging and dropping automation blocks (Automation Units). Together with the integration capabilities of Botprise, the Smart Studio presents the best way to quickly turn up your automations and deploy them as Smartbots.
Event Hub: Botprise’s EventHub is the event subsystem that works closely with your Smartbots. Botprise enables users to create triggers (Trigger Units) that can be modelled on a cluster of events or a specific event or type of event on the EventHub that can eventually invoke your automations. Imagine the power of enabling your DevOps Application Deployment Smartbotsthat automatically spins off an automation workflow that releases, tests, validates (monitors) and deploys into production based on business specific outcomes or KPIs.
Decision Studio: The AI/ML studio of Botprise helps create and manage datasets and AI/ML models that can be used along with automation units in workflows to make them intelligent and to learn over time. Create models (Decision units) based on data from your environment to identify anomalous behavior from KPIs of previous deployment in testing and performance monitoring cycles to identify potential problems even before rollout to production environments.
SRE and DevOps Smartbots
Intelligence infused automated deployment
A Botprise DevOps Smartbot modelled and called to action when a new build gets deployed and is able to automatically execute performance test functional test scripts, execute code compliance checks, evaluate SLIs against SLOs, use AI/ML techniques to compare performance with previous successful releases and predict whether a build can be considered production ready or not. The smartbot integrates into tools such as GitHub/Bitbuket, Jenkins, SonarQube, NewRelic/Appdynamics/Datadog and Jira
Figure: Sample workflow performing software code checking, testing and validate deployment
Automated Load and functional test of Web Application.
A Botprise Smartbot modelled and called to action at specific frequencies to check and validate a web applications availability and perform tests (load and functional) and take action based on outcome of test results. The smartbot integrates into tools such as selenium, locust, jmeter and perfecto.
Figure: Sample Smartbot performing software testing (functional and load)
Botprise – Your trusted partner
Botprise is one of the leading hyperautomation players in the market today. The Botprise core team has considerable expertise in the AI/ML and has years of experience.
Intelligence
One of the areas of initial and continued focus is deploying AI/ML intelligence in all aspects of product use. From deploying intelligence to speed integration/adoption of customized service management applications, to correctly automatically assigning actions from incidents and choosing the correct action to take based on historical data, the Botprise decision engine uses ML models to automate its efforts.
88% of enterprises use AI/ML but only 4% have reached the minimal level of success.
Botprise proposes a number of solutions to work with ML Ops. It will boost the already existing experience, make it easier to adopt new AI/ML solutions and bring a completely new level of scaling.
Completeness
For ITOPS and related use cases, Botprise offers one of the most complete solutions through its out of the box and easily modifiable workflows. With a large set of automation objects (Bots), customers find Botprise a complete solution compared to competitive products and solutions. All models are Botprise Decision Units which can be used on Botprise S.M.A.R.T. Design Studio.
Economic value
Automation is a journey that each customer approaches differently where the steps between the start and end are often biased and changed based on real-life experience and benefits garnered along its path. Given no two paths will be the same, we made a conscious effort to align our business success with our customers’ automation success. In that regard, we have an easily understood subscription-based pricing model (by automation) with a reasonable entry cost that encourages adoption and grows exponentially as customer value is achieved.