What Is Deployment Automation, and Why Should You Care?

Deployment automation is an approach that allows organizations to increase their velocity by automating build processes, testing, and deployment workflows for developers. This enables them to release new features faster and more frequently. Deployment automation focuses on deploying software automatically to different environments, running checks against the software, and pushing the software build to production with limited or no human intervention. It helps detect bugs much faster, saves time due to a faster feedback model, and improves accuracy by automating tasks such as environment setup, testing, and database provisioning. Key best practices include continuous testing, configuration management for environments, and monitoring and logging. Benefits of deployment automation include reduced lead time, faster bug detection, avoidance of repetitive tasks, and increased accuracy. Deployment automation can be combined with continuous delivery or continuous deployment to further enhance the release process.