![]() ![]() Moving down the line, the next stop along our journey will be Declarative Automation. These tools allow us to describe the infrastructure and objects we want, and the tools themselves will build them. Oftentimes, these tools do not require knowledge of all the steps needed to complete the tasks themselves. Examples of Declarative Automation would be PowerShell Desired State Configuration, F5 Declarative Onboarding, etc. This means making one for a lot of different tasks individually, which doesn’t scale extremely well. (I mentioned these would be familiar!) These tools are good for one-off tasks but are heavily prone to user error. It can also take a long time to develop scripts in this manner and oftentimes requires specific knowledge about the technology. Imperative automation tools all involve the user defining and mapping out all the steps along the process and the task to be executed. Examples of these would be PowerShell scripts, bash scripts, cli commands, etc. Our Automation Journey begins at the first stop, Imperative Automation. Now, let’s get started on our Automation Journey. There are levels and steps along this journey I recommend starting with Imperative Automation tools to begin with, which you probably even already use these! The point of the story is that we must make operational decisions today that will not adversely affect us in the future. Automation efforts must begin by outlining all the objectives, developing processes and standards, and deploying out incrementally along an automation journey. The problem with this is all those users must now be treated differently than the standard users, which leads to all their issues going to the team that performed the acquisition. into one big share, not following the standards of the acquiring organization. They plan to sort things into their infrastructure “later on”. Automation JourneyĪlright, so now you’re ready to get out there and automate your infrastructure in a week and go full DevOps with Infrastructure as Code and CI/DIC Pipelines, right?! Wrong!! As awesome as automation is, just like with anything, it takes time to implement organizational change. As discussed earlier, DevOps is a culture and a mindset, one of the biggest pitfalls I have seen organizations fall into, is just going all out on automation without having a broader strategy or standardization. This leads to the creation of “technical debt” which is defined as the “debt” incurred by IT teams by exploring the more expeditious solution to the problem, without regard to the efforts it will take to maintain the solution in the grand strategy.Īn example of technical debt would be this scenario. At a large organization, they acquire another company. Because the deal signed by the business requires the integration to take place within a 30-day period, the infrastructure team forklifts all their OneDrive data, file shares, users, etc. Let’s unleash our inner DevOps ninja!!! What is DevOps?Īs stated earlier, most people in the IT space are familiar with the term “DevOps” but what does it really mean? DevOps is often defined as the tools that make up its common solution patterns but it is not the tools themselves, but the manner of their use. DevOps is an organization’s cultural mindset and methodology which is achieved by collaboration. I honestly can’t remember the last time I met with a prospective client where they didn’t bring up Automation or the term DevOps in the conversation. Both terms have become the popular buzzwords in the IT Industry over the last 5 years. It doesn’t take long for the technologies that are prevalent in this space to come up such as Ansible or Terraform. Everyone understands the basic definition of automation as having the machines do the process of building or modifying objects. But how can this be applied to an organization successfully? Let’s dive into the Automation and DevOps space and see how Azure DevOps can benefit in this endeavor. ![]()
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