yayabobiAutomation has become a way of life. From the little scripts used to shave a couple of seconds of running commands to the pipelines that take code to production, automation can turn a few seconds into hours and even days saved when done correctly.
The intelligent business process automation industry continues to grow by 16% every year, and automation will contribute a huge $15.7 trillion to the economy by 2030.
A common challenge we hear from engineers looking to adopt workflow automation is how they can get started and what small changes they can incrementally adopt to help save time and streamline existing processes. The following workflow automation examples are just a few starting points when it comes to endless automation possibilities.
The Lowdown on Workflow Automation
Workflow automation takes the benefits of automation a step further by allowing you to take a series of repeatable tasks and coordinate them into a single, self-sustaining unit known as a workflow.
The nature of workflow automation allows it to be applicable in many areas; for example, a business can streamline the HR process of onboarding a new partner after a stripe payment is processed. The company can use email integration to send contracts and track new partners in a spreadsheet. These individual steps are manageable manually at a smaller scale, however, when onboarding is done frequently you might want to consider automation to ensure these actions are repeatable.
Why Workflow Automation Makes Your Life Easier
If you're still on the fence as to whether workflow automation can help your team or organization, here are some reasons to consider:
Pipelines That Bring QA into the Dev Loop
Automated testing pipelines can get Quality Assurance (QA) teams involved much earlier. Instead of tossing code over the wall and hoping for the best, developers can set up automated tests that run with every commit and ping certain members on Slack when a release is created.
Breaking Down Silos
Workflow automation acts as a bridge between teams, facilitating seamless communication and information sharing. By integrating collaboration tools directly into automated workflows, you can ensure that important updates and news are automatically distributed to the right people at the right time. For instance, when a new feature is ready for release, the automated workflow could trigger a notification in a shared Slack channel, ensuring that marketing and other relevant teams are informed of the new updates.
Time Savings That Actually Matter
Humans are prone to mistakes, especially when doing repetitive tasks. Whether it's provisioning new environments, deploying code, or running security scans, automated workflows do it the same way every time. Automation means fewer "I sent that out last week" moments and more reliable processes.
Consistency
Humans are prone to mistakes, especially when doing repetitive tasks. Whether it's provisioning new environments, deploying code, or running security scans, automated workflows do it the same way every time. Automation means fewer "I sent that out last week" moments and more reliable processes.
Time Savings That Actually Matter
We're not just talking about saving a few seconds here and there. Good workflow automation can save hours or even days on complex processes. Imagine cutting your deployment time from a day to an hour, or reducing the time to set up a new dev environment from hours to minutes. That's time you can spend on enjoyable or business-critical tasks.
6 Workflow Automation Examples You Can Create in Minutes
We've discussed enough about the why of workflow automation. Here are some useful automations you can integrate into your environment:
1. Announce Cloud Provider Health Events in Slack
You probably already leverage a major cloud provider for your services. Consider creating a workflow to deliver relevant events or metrics to Slack or any other communication tooling you use. This can reduce the mean time to awareness (MTTA) for critical infrastructure issues and ensure the right people are notified quickly.
You can set up an AWS Lambda function (or equivalent) to periodically query the health status of AWS APIs and use the Slack API to post messages to the appropriate channels. Check this example for more concrete steps to achieve this with AWS.
2. AI-Driven Support
You could also consider a Slack bot that uses AI to route support requests to the right team members based on the content of the request. It's not about using AI to respond to your users but getting the context to the right people in a timely manner, which is just one example of AI's positive contribution to better business and cybersecurity outcomes.
This use case can reduce support request response time and ensure queries are routed to the right people. To set this up, integrate with Google's Gemini AI for natural language processing. Use a workflow engine (like AutoKitteh) to manage the request lifecycle and set up reminders using the Slack API if requests are not picked up. Check out our implementation tips over here.
3. Room Reservations
This one is pretty simple---and extremely helpful. An automated system for managing meeting room bookings using Google Calendar resources will prevent double bookings and reduce scheduling conflicts while providing a centralized view of room availability. Explore a complete implementation of this automation here.
4. GitHub Pull Request to Slack Workflow
We've all been there, reminding to review pr #235. It can feel like you're taking time out of their day. To this end, we created the Pull Request Review Reminder or, as we like to call it, "Purrr." This system shows off some of AutoKitteh's bidirectional integration with GitHub and greatly helps cut down the turnaround time for reviewing and merging pull requests. It's just one of many efficient and secure GitHub best practices that will make your life easier.
5. Data Pipeline Workflow
Data pipelines remain a great use case for workflow automation. However, coordinating these workflows across multiple services becomes tricky. AutoKitteh's durable execution ensures your workflows are fault-tolerant and seamlessly recover from server failures. Here is an example of a data pipeline workflow that is triggered by a new GPX (GPS Exchange Format) file on an S3 bucket.
6. On-call Automation
Developers can benefit from workflow automation by implementing solutions or tools that help assign specific tasks to the current team or member on call. One such process is assigning Jira issues based on a shared Google Calendar. The workflow verifies who is on call from the Google Calendar and assigns newly created Jira issues to them. You could take this a step further and use the health reports example we discussed earlier to assign issues.
Challenges of Implementing These Workflow Automation Examples
Challenge 1: Complexity of Creating Durable Workflows
Writing reliable and long-running workflow execution is extremely complex and time-consuming, requiring a high skill level---a lot has to happen under the hood. For developers, this means spending countless hours dealing with edge cases, error handling, and state management.
Challenge 2: Limitations of No-code/Low-code Tools
Some low-code workflow automation tools, like Zapier, are good options for straightforward automation without coding, but their parameters limit the automation possibilities. For developers and DevOps engineers alike, using some low- and no-code automation tools can feel like working with one hand tied behind your back.
You might find yourself creating convoluted workarounds or maintaining multiple tools just to achieve what should be a simple workflow. And, when you need to integrate with internal systems or implement complex business logic, you're stuck either compromising functionality or maintaining a patchwork of automation tools alongside your custom code.
Challenge 3: Unreliability of Event-driven Workflows
Event-driven workflows are difficult to build reliably, and a node can crash, or a latency spike could cause a network failure. It means constant anxiety about system and data integrity for developers and DevOps engineers.
What happens if a critical event gets lost in the ether during a server hiccup or cold start? Or worse, you're constantly putting out fires because your workflows keep breaking mid-execution. The amount of boilerplate code needed to handle retries, state management, and error recovery can quickly make your codebase unmanageable.
The Solution: AutoKitteh for Limitless Automation Possibilities
Durability and reliability challenges often stand in the way of implementing workflow automation examples like those we discussed above. Therefore, it's essential to choose a solution that can create fault-tolerant processes and the flexibility to build any workflow automation---without the limitations that low-code software usually presents.
With AutoKitteh, you can build durable workflows with just a few lines of code. With AutoKitteh, you just have to think about the business logic. AutoKitteh takes care of secrets management, authentication, logging, structural integrity, and more, enabling developers to build reliable, durable, and long-running workflows that resume after failures.
AutoKitteh is built to tackle durability, reliability, and flexibility challenges head-on, letting you create durable workflows without needing a PhD in distributed systems. The examples we discussed are just the start of what you can do with AutoKitteh, and the best part is that you can get started with minimal coding knowledge.
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