What is AI-driven DevOps?

We all know that DevOps is a set of practices that compliments Agile and focuses on collaborative teams, optimized processes and integrated tools. Over the past decade, DevOps has evolved by intersecting with areas in the product lifecycle like security and compliance. In my earlier blogs which were published in 2023, I mentioned trends in DevOps that integrated with Security principles (DevSecOps) and how organizations should embrace the new change. This 2024, many organizations are now looking towards AI-driven DevOps. It is the next level of evolution in DevOps that is over and beyond just simple automation and assisted by AI tools. Today, we have dozens of AI-tools that are enabling our teams to work better. To be more specific, am referring to the new era of Gen AI tools that provides additional power to product teams to speed up product lifecycle activities.

There are dozens of use cases where Gen AI tools can be beneficial for teams to increase product velocity. While such tools enable developers to a very large extent like helping them generate code, review code, check out for security vulnerabilities; but they also help other team members to leverage other benefits. Thus, AI-driven DevOps is helping everyone in the product team. Use cases like auto-generation of regression test cases, creation of templates for building infra as code, auto-remediating system issues; the list is growing. Gen AI tools like GitHub Copilot, IBM WatsonX Assistant, etc are helping product teams to work smartly. There are few companies who have pioneered the art of using Gen AI tools, but there are many more who have just started. The latter set is focusing on evaluations, educating teams on prompt engineering (this refers to the communication with AI systems, click here to know more) and targeting to deliver value in less time.

AI-driven DevOps is becoming the new buzzword and can be considered as the next step of automation maturity in the lifecycle. Gen AI tools will definitely help organizations elevate DevOps to the next level helping product teams improve productivity. Few use cases where organizations are leveraging the Gen-AI feature are-

So, AI-driven DevOps is an approach that refers to embedding AI practices in the DevOps framework. This approach is useful for product teams who need to establish consistent and quick releases to maintain competitive edge. Once the use cases are identified, the next logical step is to identify the AI tool that needs to be integrated with IDEs, automation tools, etc and will partner with team members to speed up on their day-to-day activities. For example, if developers were able to code “x” of lines of code; now with a Gen-AI tool they can deliver “x+10” lines of code or may be more. QA leads can benefit from Gen AI tools by generating test cases, test data, and lot more. Release engineers can leverage Gen AI tools to build and remediate CD pipelines. And of course, DevOps engineers who focus on automation, now can further expedite and embed intelligence in the system. Well, this is an evolving space and lot more is to be experimented, leveraged and realized!!