- Cloud automation is the implementation of tools and processes that reduce or eliminate human effort.
- The appeal of cloud computing is that it gives organisations the flexibility to access the resources they need on demand.
Like other automation solutions, cloud automation has the distinct advantage of reducing manual work and redundant workloads for IT teams. Cloud automation can be used to streamline processes, eliminate wasted resources, and ultimately reduce the time and money spent provisioning and managing cloud-based operations
What is cloud automation
Cloud automation is the implementation of tools and processes that reduce or eliminate the manual work that is associated with provisioning, configuring and managing cloud environments.
Cloud automation tools run on top of virtual environments and can be leveraged in public and private clouds, as well as hybrid and multicloud environments. In fact, automation is often used to standardise processes and policies across complex IT environments.
Cloud automation plays an important role in enabling organisations to take greater advantage of cloud computing’s benefits, like the ability to use cloud resources on demand. It is also a vital component of efficient DevOps workflows.
Like many other automation tools, cloud automation solutions generally automate tasks that are too inefficient or complex to perform manually. In terms of cloud, this includes tasks like provisioning resources for workload deployments and updates, setting up virtual machines (VMs), monitoring performance and more.
Also read: Cloud vs bare-metal servers: Navigate cost and security with IPTP
Why is cloud automation important
Cloud computing’s appeal is that it grants organisations the flexibility to access the resources they need on demand. However, without automation, someone still needs to spin up resources, test them and tear them down in order to use cloud services. In modern workflows with many deployments each day, it’s difficult and laborious to consistently ship high-quality code under such circumstances. Automation helps fix this issue by enabling the automatic provisioning, configuration and optimisation of cloud resources.
Cloud automation mitigates these issues by providing greater control and visibility across cloud environments, facilitating efficient resourcing and management and alleviating the burden of repetitive tasks from IT teams, giving them more time to focus on higher-level innovative work.
Also read: The future of secure cloud computing
Benefits of cloud automation
Reduce errors: Automation enables the creation of predictable and dependable processes, which helps reduce the human error that inevitably accompanies manual cloud management.
Boost security: Organisations can use automation to monitor and log activity across an entire IT environment, configure security controls that scan for vulnerabilities and anomalies and define access levels to applications, data and more.
Centralise governance: A unified automation platform allows organisations to standardise governance across data centers, even in hybrid clouds. With this capability, organisations can improve business continuity, optimise resource and infrastructure usage, maximise performance and enhance compliance and security.
Increase innovation: When your IT operations teams are not busy with mundane manual work, they have more time for the valuable, higher-level innovations that propel your business.
Cloud automation use cases
Establishing infrastructure as code (IaC): Infrastructure as code is the process of provisioning and managing IT infrastructure automatically using code and templates rather than the manual configuration of hardware components. With IaC, IT infrastructure is defined in configuration files and automatically initiated in accordance with the codified configuration.
Workload management and autoscaling: Cloud automation tools can be used to track cloud resources in use and automatically scale resources up or down to match workload demand. Once scaling parameters have been set, resource allocation and load balancing can be automated, which helps both establish availability and performance and reduce waste.
Application development and deployment: To achieve continuous delivery and continuous deployment you need to automate the application deployment pipeline, including the provisioning of realistic development and test environments. Infrastructure as code and the automatic configuration of consistent environments that use cloud resources makes this agile workflow possible.
