A fully automated deployment process is essential for every software development team. Unfortunately, only a few software deployment teams have invested in fully automatic deployment processes. There is a perception that the overhead of creating and configuring an automatic deployment process is not worth the expected benefits. Over time, this perception has become an obstacle for the software deployment teams. One of the ways to overcome this is identifying the objectives of automation. The question of what is continuous deployment lingers in the mind of every software deployment manager. Below are five benefits of automating your software deployment process.

Avoid Human Errors

Manual deployment is often prone to human errors. You can easily miss important steps, purchase incorrect versions of software, or fail to spot faults that occur during the release. However, automated deployments are not prone to variability. Once you have configured a process, it will remain the same every time you initiate a new release. If the software works the first time you deploy it, it will work consistently and will not suffer from variability.

Time Management

Configuring and validating a manual deployment process often consumes a lot of time. Conversely, it takes a few seconds to deploy your software through automated deployment mechanism. In fact, the deployment team validates the processes behind the scenes. They only work on the deployment processes when there is a technical hitch. Consequently, your developers and testers spend much of their time creating impressive features and improving the performance of the software.

User-Friendly

The success of a manual deployment process depends on the knowledge of an individual. An automated deployment process allows you to keep the tools and derive the knowledge of software deployment from the systems. In fact, it requires an organization to assign the duty of performing manual software deployments to an individual or subset of people. Software deployment can become a nightmare if the person in charge of deploying the software is absent or sick.

Easier to Deploy

Automated deployments are configurable and repeatable. While the underlying release process doesn’t change, you can change the target environment and machines. That means you can look for a new test environment if there is a need to redeploy the software. If there is a need create a new client installation, you can neglect the overhead of deploying software to an additional target audience. You only need to configure your existing set-up and use your tested release automation to complete the task.

The Ability to Initiate Frequent Releases

You incur a low overhead to perform an automatic deployment. Again, automated software deployment allows you to initiate releases frequently at low cost. Frequent releases are desirable for reasons such as promoting agile software development. Frequent releases enable deployment teams to enhance customer experience and develop valuable features in incremental steps. Frequent releases also allow a deployment team to gather continuous feedback from the end-users on the effectiveness of the software they are creating. Customer feedback can be the difference between a brand reaching out to its potential customers or missing them entirely. There are many tools that you can integrate into your existing infrastructure to help you reduce the cost of automating your database deployments.