One form of application automation, also known as application service automation, refers to the methods used by IT operations teams to automate the service and deployment of applications across the organization. The ability to automate many manual processes reduces the time and costs associated with servicing and managing the organization’s entire inventory of applications. It also eliminates many configuration mistakes that can creep in through human error during the various repeated processes associated with application packaging, deployment, updates, troubleshooting, recovery, and auditing. IT service desks also rely on application automation tools to help monitor, analyze, and resolve incidents. This allows them to provide faster help to end users with fewer help-desk engineers.
Another form of application automation is also known as application release automation (ARA). This refers to methods used by software developers to package and deploy an application from development to production. ARA tools provide capabilities like deployment automation, environment management and modeling, and release coordination. ARA tools are a key component of DevOps best practices, because they help achieve the goal of continuous delivery of a large quantity of releases, very quickly.