Define and automate processes

The Define and automate processes pillar helps you establish repeatable, scalable workflows that reduce manual effort and human error while enabling teams to deliver infrastructure and applications consistently. This pillar helps you build teams and culture, develop and deploy applications, and establish operations and monitoring practices that create a foundation for all other pillars.

When you successfully implement this pillar, you transform from manual, error-prone processes to automated, reliable workflows. This transformation helps you deliver faster, more consistently, and with higher quality while building the foundation for sustainable growth and scalability. You can respond to changing demands more effectively and allocate human resources to high-value activities rather than repetitive tasks.

Topics in this pillar

This pillar covers five main areas that work together to create a comprehensive process automation strategy. Start with the process automation workflow to understand the complete workflow for both applications and infrastructure.

• Build your team culture creates the human foundation for successful automation through high-performing teams, collaboration practices, and workflow-first thinking.

• Define your processes establishes the foundation by mapping current workflows, defining systems and tools, and standardizing processes before automation.

• Automate your workflows covers strategies for automating both infrastructure and application processes, including CI/CD implementation, testing automation, and deployment processes.

• Deploy with confidence implements atomic deployments and zero-downtime deployment strategies including blue-green, canary, and rolling deployments for safe, reliable deployments.

• Process automation provides the high-level workflow overview and automation maturity model for understanding your current automation level and progressing from manual to fully automated deployments.

• Monitor and operate ensures your automated systems are properly monitored and operated efficiently through comprehensive monitoring and alerting.

Why this matters

Process automation gives you immediate efficiency gains and long-term strategic benefits. From a technical perspective, automation eliminates manual errors and improves consistency through repeatable, version-controlled processes. You can achieve higher throughput with the same human resources, or maintain current delivery levels while reducing operational overhead.

The business impact goes far beyond direct efficiency gains. Automated processes help you respond more quickly to market demands and competitive pressures. When processes are automated and reliable, you can launch new features and services faster, handle increased development velocity without quality degradation, and maintain consistent delivery during growth periods.

Automation also creates a foundation for data-driven decision making. When you implement comprehensive process automation and monitoring, you gain insights into actual delivery patterns and performance characteristics. This data helps you make more informed decisions about capacity planning, technology investments, and process improvements.

Who needs this

Platform engineers and infrastructure architects will find this pillar essential for designing automated infrastructure platforms that can scale efficiently. These professionals need to understand how to balance automation requirements with operational constraints while building systems that can adapt to changing demands.

DevOps engineers and site reliability engineers are the primary implementers who will use this guidance to build automation systems, implement CI/CD pipelines, and establish monitoring practices. They need practical guidance on implementing specific automation practices and integrating them with existing infrastructure and applications.

Development teams and application engineers will find value in understanding how to implement automated development workflows and integrate with deployment processes. These teams need to work closely with operations teams to ensure that automation supports development velocity without compromising reliability requirements.

Team leads and engineering managers will benefit from understanding how to build high-performing teams and establish collaborative culture. These professionals need guidance on implementing team practices, communication strategies, and cultural foundations that support automation and continuous improvement.

When to focus on this pillar

Focus on this pillar when your organization experiences manual errors, inconsistent delivery, or inefficient processes. This pillar is most valuable when you have growing development needs, when manual processes are becoming a bottleneck, or when you need to improve delivery speed and quality.

Organizations that are just starting their automation journey will find this pillar particularly valuable, as it provides the foundational practices necessary for all other optimization efforts. It is also essential for organizations scaling their operations or transitioning to cloud-native architectures.

How this fits with the framework

The Define and Automate Processes pillar provides the foundational automation layer that enables all other pillars. It creates the consistency and reliability necessary for effective optimization, resilience, and security. Without automation, you risk inconsistent delivery, manual errors, and inefficient resource utilization.

This pillar establishes the team culture and collaborative practices that support all other technical implementations. When teams work effectively together and have clear communication channels, they can implement complex automation, optimization, and security practices more successfully.

The automation practices established in this pillar directly support the Secure Systems pillar by ensuring that security controls are implemented consistently and automatically. When processes are automated, you can systematically apply security policies and maintain compliance without manual intervention.

The Optimize Systems and Design Resilient Systems pillars rely on the automation foundation to implement monitoring, scaling, and failover mechanisms effectively. Automated processes create the consistency and reliability necessary for effective optimization and resilience practices.