BY FRANK OHLHORST – Automation is taking the market by storm. Research firm Gartner predicts that by 2020, more than 40% of data science tasks will be automated, and that is just the tip of the iceberg. Businesses are turning to automation to reduce costs, increase productivity and gain a competitive advantage. Add DevOps to the mix and it becomes readily apparent how DevOps teams can benefit by leveraging a little workflow automation. After all, the DevOps process is framed by repeatable workflows, wherein the agile manifesto dictates progress or other frameworks define how change moves through the development and deployment cycles.

“Most development projects are hindered by numerous manual steps and the lack of defined collaborative communications methodologies, leaving far too much room for error,” said Raj Mehta, CEO of Raj Technologies. “Defining a workflow and bringing automation into the picture could go a long way toward reducing errors.”

The DevOps community has come to rely on many manual processes and numerous tools to keep the pace of rapid application delivery and change management. Those solutions often have points of failure, where important tasks can slip through the cracks. Even so, many developers are resistant to change and embrace the processes they have already established. Yet, intertwining manual processes with automation and management tools has been demonstrated as rather inefficient, slowing the perception that workflow automation can actually achieve the productivity promises claimed. Read more: