DocOps Automation

Within an enterprise documentation system, the DocOps automation layer embodies the set of DocOps automation tasks that help realize DocOps principles and key documentation system tenets.

The DocOps automation layer should not be seen as an orthogonal ‘platform’. Not all documentation automation use cases call for an implementation based around a central CI/CD server.

A DocOps Task may be implemented in one or more of environments such as:

• The main documentation platform itself using its provided SDK.
• As a cloud function in reaction to an event (e.g., a document upload to an Amazon S3 bucket).
• As an extension of an existing application running under a prescribed application server (e.g., Microsoft IIS, J2EE, etc.).
• As a shell script in a traditional CI/CD server like Jenkins.
• A Docker image-backed environment in a modern CI/CD environment such as GitHub Actions.

Most importantly, DocOps engineering is concerned with change reactivity. In other words, the detection of change so that the DocOps task can be triggered. This requires different strategies depending on the nature of the canonical information source. For example, a Microsoft Word file that is often updated on a shared drive will require a file system monitoring triggering process, based on continuously checking the file’s timestamp or checksum, in the absence of low-level file change notification callback APIs.