People are good at creative tasks like reasoning, deduction, and complex problem-solving. Compared to computers, we’re terrible at mundane, repetitive tasks, such as clicking “Next” on an installation wizard or preparing an application build for deployment. Software delivery benefits from automation for the same reasons car manufacturing does. Computers and robots are very good at performing the same task, precisely the same way, over and over for days, weeks, and years at a time. It’s about time the IT industry applied that to automating software delivery.
Software delivery without DevOps is fraught with challenges. Developers build and deploy software from their workstations. Due to configuration differences, applications that function properly on one developer workstation fail on other workstations and servers. Deployment of software is a manual process of gathering files, copying them by hand to servers, and running tests. Fixes are performed by reaching out to those servers and making changes there, rather than fixing defects in a controlled environment and then deploying those changes in a consistent way. Manual operation of the software delivery lifecycle is slow, prone to error, and risky.
Development, testing, deployment, and all other software delivery tasks can and must be automated to ensure quality and reliability. Both commercial and open-source tools are available to automate every step of a delivery pipeline.
This course will provide an introduction to three of the tools that have made the greatest impact on DevOps software delivery automation.
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