What is the purpose of an automation in a continuous delivery process?

In a continuous delivery process, the primary purpose of automation is to enhance the efficiency and reliability of the deployment pipeline. By automating various tasks, teams can identify failures in the application or system prior to deployment. This proactive approach ensures that any issues are addressed before reaching production, thereby maintaining high-quality standards.

Automation allows for consistent and repeatable testing, which can include unit tests, integration tests, and system tests. These tests can be run automatically at various stages in the delivery process, providing immediate feedback to developers. This leads to faster identification of defects, which ultimately reduces the risk of deploying faulty code into production. The continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) practices rely heavily on such automated testing to facilitate smooth transitions from development to production environments.

In contrast, identifying user roles, creating backups of previous deployments, and managing user permissions do not directly contribute to automating quality assurance and failure identification in the delivery process. While these aspects are important in software development and deployment management, they do not serve the core purpose of ensuring quality through proactive testing and failure detection that automation provides.