Cloud automation is a term that covers the tools and processes that reduce or eliminate the manual intervention needed to provision or manage services and workloads in the cloud. Such tools can automatically take care of the installation, configuration and management of the resources that provide a cloud service. Organizations can therefore apply infrastructure automation to private, public or hybrid cloud environments in order to achieve goals such as continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD).
Repetitive tasks
Traditional development and operation of enterprise applications and services is often a manual and time-consuming process. It usually includes repetitive tasks such as:
- creating virtual networks and configuring network rules
- scaling, provisioning and configuring resources such as virtual machines (VMs)
- provisioning and sharing storage
- load balancing
- deploying the application or service itself
- monitoring the application and its performance
Cloud infrastructure automation
Whenever any of the tasks above is done manually, errors can occur, and they do. Each one then has to be found, analyzed and eliminated, which costs the organization time and money. Those defects and the hours spent fixing them become an unnecessary part of every adaptive change driven by a customer or operational requirement, and on top of that they disrupt the stability of the development process and compromise availability and security. With cloud infrastructure automation, the risk of such errors is reduced many times over, and the time required to make a change is streamlined as well, because the change happens almost by itself. That is because, typically, the only thing that has to be defined for the automation tool is the desired end state.
Types of cloud automation tasks
- Configurations - infrastructure configurations can be defined using templates and applied automatically. The scope for integration grows with each cloud service you use.
- Development and deployment - continuous application development relies on automating several steps, from code review and versioning through to automated testing and deployment.
- Tagging - resources can be tagged automatically based on specific criteria, context or operating conditions.
- Security - cloud environments can be set up with automated security controls that allow or block access to selected applications or data and scan for security vulnerabilities or unusual performance levels.
- Logging and monitoring - cloud tools can be set up to collect logs of all activity involving services, application logs or network activity in the environment. Monitoring filters (alerts) can be configured to detect unusual events or anomalies. They can also be set to alert when critical thresholds of memory, computing power or remaining storage space are reached.
