Tag Archives: automation

The Role of Automation in Modern Software Development

July 6, 2024Techautomation, cicd, cloud, devops, paas, saas, sdlc, software, sysadmin, sysops, techopsHarout

Automation in the software development industry refers to the use of tools, scripts, and processes to perform repetitive tasks with minimal human intervention. It streamlines the software development lifecycle, including activities like code integration, testing, deployment, and monitoring. Automation helps to increase efficiency, reduce errors, and ensure consistency across all stages of development, ultimately leading to faster delivery of high-quality software. In this context, it becomes an integral part of modern development methodologies like DevOps and Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD).

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Containers & Orchestration

March 10, 2024Techautomation, cloud, cloudcomputing, containers, devops, docker, migration, orchestration, saas, services, sysadminHarout

Container orchestration refers to the automated management of containerized applications across clusters of machines. It involves processes like deployment, scaling, load balancing, and networking, ensuring that containers run efficiently in distributed environments. The goal is to abstract away the complexities of handling multiple containers and their interdependencies, enabling seamless deployment and operation at scale.

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Back Up and Running in Cloud Native

February 20, 2023Techautomation, aws, cloud, cloudcomputing, cloudfront, cloudnative, cybersecurity, devops, devsecops, lightsail, networksecurity, S3, secops, security, sysadminHarout

Finally had the time to rebuild and refresh the blog site. gotsudo.com in now full Cloud Native running in AWS (has always been, however in a more traditional server-based installation).

The recent migration included an AWS Lightsail service that provides various bundles of OS/applications, which in my case is WordPress running on Linux. Various tiers are also available to fit every budget out there.

I decided to take things a step further, and serve the public facing version of the website in a static configuration, leveraging AWS S3 to host the site files, with AWS CloudFront caching layer sitting upfront for the parent gotsudo.com address.

This allows me to limit access to the actual WordPress site running in Lightsail, transforming it to a true authoring and publishing site, rather than a public front-facing one.

Various WordPress plugins are available that can easily produce a static version of the website, and can also integrate with AWS services (or any other CSP) to auto publish files into S3 or any other repository of choice. While these make things much easier and more integrated, I decided to air-gap the systems, allowing me to selectively produce the published files and upload them to S3 using other means of tailored automation.

Later on, I may add some more integrations to the site, however at this point I’m quite happy with how far it came over a busy weekend’s time.

Automate all the things?

February 17, 2022Techautomateallthethings, automation, automationengineer, cloud, cloudcomputing, complexity, devops, techopsHarout

Look… we get it; it’s easy to get carried away with the “let’s automate this, let’s automate that, let’s automate everything!” enthusiasm.

Before you go ahead and commit your team to a ton of automation work spanning the foreseeable sprints, it is best to have a sit down with your leads and establish an outline of all domains in which automation makes sense, prioritize those where repetitive high-frequency tasks reside, reduce hours consumed by your in-house skill overwhelmed by running routine tasks, and work your way down that list.

The last thing any directive would want is for their team spending months on an automation build-out, only to no longer be needed due to product life-cycle deprecation.

The goal of automation is to simplify and streamline workflow, reduce overhead, and allow skill to be leveraged where it is needed most… and that is not, in troubleshooting automation complexity issues.