How to scale automation in DevOps environments

The telecom giant CenturyLink created a federated program to scale automation efforts, where one dedicated team curated standards and best practices that were then rolled out across the company. CenturyLink -- a facilities-based communications company with 40,000 full-time employees, based out of Monroe, La. -- wanted to achieve automation at scale and blend the best characteristics of application development, scripting, and robotic process automation (RPA) tooling, said Troy Ferrence, senior manager of automation solutions architecture at CenturyLink. For the past several years, Ferrence's team has focused on scripting and application development, but its efforts accelerated when CenturyLink introduced RPA software that used the UiPath platform. CenturyLink expanded its work to more than 19 teams dedicated to this project, referred to as center of excellence teams, in the last year and developed over a thousand different automations. "We have a lot of legacy applications where we don't have any type of interface or availability for enhancement which are perfect candidates for RPA," Ferrence said.