DevOps, Multicloud Complexity Demands, and RPA

Once confined largely to corporate data centers, the IT infrastructures of most medium-sized to large organizations now also span multiple cloud environments. For all of the benefits that cloud computing delivers, this increasingly diverse and distributed digital ecosystem poses a number of challenges.

Among them: an escalation in the demands placed upon DevOps teams charged with creating, deploying, securing, reconfiguring, upgrading, and retiring the applications and services spread across this complex IT landscape.

If reducing development, deployment, and operational complexities had been business and IT leaders’ primary goal, of course, organizations would never have extended IT footprints beyond their own four walls in the first place. They did so despite the impact on DevOps because the resulting IT challenges pale in comparison to the business benefits possible when fully exploiting the cloud.

To minimize the IT challenges and business risks, most organizations initially approached cloud deployments in a measured and limited fashion. They subscribed to a few software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications and perhaps moved a handful of their on-premises applications and data sets to infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and/or platform-as-a-service (PaaS) public cloud platforms.

Aiding in this gradual shift was the fact that each of the major public cloud providers had its own portfolio of development, deployment, and management services. So long as an organization’s cloud adoption was primarily confined to one of the big public clouds, the tasks confronting DevOps professionals were relatively manageable. Add multiple SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS environments to the mix, however, and things get complicated quickly for DevOps teams.

Consider that DevOps teams must:

• Develop for the platforms best suited for different applications and data
• Monitor, patch, reconfigure, scale, and sometimes relocate deployed applications
• Orchestrate the many interactions occurring among distributed services
• Ensure optimal execution, availability, and security across the board

The tasks involved are myriad, and can quickly overwhelm even the most experienced and capable of DevOps pros.

That’s why – as with so many aspects of modern organizations – DevOps processes can benefit from increasing levels of automation. In addition to supporting the tasks listed above, automation can help in many other core DevOps process areas including incident management, service requests, and continuous deployment and delivery. Adding robotic process automation (RPA) to the DevOps tech stack has quickly become the best way for IT departments to succeed in a world where multicloud environments have become the norm.

Further, RPA-based solutions can do much more than simply automate once-manual DevOps processes. For example, when using the UiPath Platform, DevOps teams can continually monitor automations to track their usage, identify problems, and ensure peak process performance and end-to-end governance and security.

Appropriately, UiPath offers much of its own RPA portfolio either for on-premises deployment or as native cloud services via the UiPath Automation Cloud. UiPath also provides deployment recipes and instructions for Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Oracle Cloud, helping DevOps teams quickly build IaaS or PaaS solutions for those public cloud platforms.

The UiPath Automation Platform offers more than 500 pre-built activities that empower customers to automate almost every area of their IT ecosystem—cloud-based and on-premises. It supports automation use cases in areas such as user and infrastructure management, as well as security orchestration and audit functions.

UiPath robots can operate through integrations built on top of different software APIs, so companies can integrate RPA with their existing systems and workflows. These extensive integrations lower the barrier to entry for IT organizations that are rolling out their first RPA initiatives and reduce setup time for teams expanding their program to automate new processes.

Additionally, DevOps teams can take advantage of UiPath’s direct compatibility with Azure DevOps Services and other cloud services to manage projects and facilitate collaboration and communication between developers and operations teams. RPA activities include automating the creation of projects and groups and assigning tasks to specific users and teams. The UiPath Platform supports a broad vision of holistic automation, including UI, testing, IT, APIs, business process management, and other built-in integrations running in the background. 

To learn more about how UiPath can help your DevOps professionals manage a complex multicloud environment, check out UiPath’s website.