So What Should be Automated?

June 12, 2020

As mentioned in the previous blogs, DevOps is a set of “practices” that enable a development lifecycle to respond to and deliver services and applications to the market fast. There are numerous kinds of technologies offered by vertical experts, tech giants as well as many startups to facilitate better DevOps. As an organization leader, what should be considered when designing Devops practices? The following are some of the factors that might be considered.

There are mainly two kinds of tasks that are good candidates for automation:

1. A task that can be done fast and to be performed by large number of people
2. A task that takes long hours of manual work to complete, even by just a few people

Automation for Mass Process

The first kind of task is usually frequent, manual and repetitive. Without automation, those tasks are usually done manually, and it becomes an unsurprising trade-off between human resources and handling time (i.e. more staff, less time; less staff, more time). There are two ways the automation can be in place, depending on the nature of tasks and the importance of the record sequence. The first way is to automate the large number of the same task in parallel, while the second way is to automate the large number of the same task one by one in a particular sequence. Either way, the automated process is serving a large number of people with the same task, without worrying about the increase in human resources when customer’ demands spike.

Automation for Intensive Task

The second kind of task is still manual and repetitive, but can be frequent or infrequent, and can be applied to a small or a large number of users. The task usually requires long hours of manual work, and sometimes specific technical knowledge is required for those particular task performers. Depending on the task or process, the lead time can be shortened significantly with automation in place. Since the task itself is more complex than the first kind of task above, the development cost for the automation can be sizable, but at the same time, the cost saved is remarkable.

At Resolve Technology, we believe automation is a proven strategy for companies to stay competitive in the market. For all of our services from DevOps consulting, cloud solution, information security to FinTech applications, we always have automation in mind to maximize the product outcome for our customers.