As a system gets complex, there are more chances of human error, which can lead to additional effort being needed, increased cost, and reduced quality. Automation is the best way to avoid failure and improve overall system efficiency. Now automation is not an optional choice—if you want to be agile and move faster, automation is a must.
Automation can be applied anywhere, whether it is testing and deploying applications, spinning up infrastructure, and even ensuring security. Automation plays a critical role, and a DevOps architect automates everything everywhere. DevOps is a combination of practices and tools that assist in delivering an application at a faster pace.
It allows the organization to serve its customers better and stay ahead of the competition. In DevOps, the development team and operational team work together in sync. For a software application, a DevOps architect defines continuous integration and continuous deployment(CI/CD). In CI, automated builds and test runs happen before the development team merges its code changes into a central repository. CD expands upon CI by deploying all code changes to a production environment after the build and test stage.
The DevOps architect automates infrastructure deployment, known as Infrastructure as Code, which is highly prevalent in the cloud environment. DevOps can utilize tools such as Chef and Puppet for instructed automation or use cloud-native tools if the workload is in a cloud environment. Infrastructure automation provides excellent flexibility for the development team for experimentation and enables the operations team to create replica environments.
For smooth operation, a DevOps architect plans monitoring and alerting with automated communication in the event of issues or any significant changes. Any security incidents, deployment failures, or infrastructure failures can be monitored automatically, and alerts can be sent via mobile or email to the respective team when required.
The DevOps architect also plans for disaster recovery different deployment methods. Organizational Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is the volume of data loss that an organization can tolerate. Recovery Time Objective (RTO) suggests how much time the application can take to recover and start functioning again. You will learn more about DevOps in Chapter 12, DevOps and Solution Architecture Framework.