- Cloud automation refers to the processes and tools that reduce the manual work used to provide and manage cloud computing workloads and services.
- With cloud automation, organisations can eliminate these repetitive and manual processes for deploying and managing workloads.
Cloud automation is a transformative approach that enhances the management of cloud resources, making them more efficient, reliable, and cost-effective. By leveraging automated tools and practices, organisations can streamline their operations, improve safety, and focus on innovation rather than routine maintenance. As cloud environments continue to grow and evolve, automation will play an increasingly important role in shaping the future of IT infrastructure.
What is cloud automation
Cloud automation is a broad term that refers to processes and tools that reduce or eliminate the manual work used to supply and manage cloud computing workloads and services. Organisations can apply cloud automation to private cloud, public cloud and hybrid cloud environments.
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Why use cloud automation
The deployment and operation of traditional enterprise workloads is a time-consuming and manual process. This often involves repetitive tasks such as tuning, provisioning, and configuring resources such as virtual machines (VMS); Create VM clusters to implement load balancing. Create a storage logical unit number. Call virtual network; Perform actual deployment and monitor and manage availability and performance.
Although these repetitive and manual processes are effective, they are inefficient and often riddled with errors. These errors can lead to troubleshooting, which delays the availability of workloads. They can also expose security vulnerabilities that put businesses at risk.
With cloud automation, organisations can eliminate these repetitive and manual processes for deploying and managing workloads. To achieve cloud automation, IT teams need orchestration and automation tools that run on top of their virtualised environment.
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Benefits of cloud automation
When implemented properly, cloud automation offers many benefits. It saves the IT team time and money; It is faster, more secure, and more scalable than performing tasks manually; It leads to fewer errors because organisations can build more predictable and reliable workflows. It directly contributes to better IT and corporate governance.
Cloud automation also frees IT teams from repetitive and manual management tasks to focus on advanced work that is more closely related to an organisation’s business needs, such as integrating advanced cloud services or developing new product capabilities.
Cloud automation application
A common use case for cloud automation is setting up infrastructure as code. Cloud platforms typically discover compute resources and organise them into pools. This enables users to add and deploy more resources without having to worry about where those resources are physically located in the data center.
Cloud automation is a core element of workload lifecycle management. Workloads in the cloud are often long-term entities, but some of their individual components, such as scalable containers, can be ephemeral. When they are no longer needed, administrators can use cloud automation to remove them and their configuration items.
Cloud automation can also play a role in hybrid clouds, automating tasks in private cloud environments such as Openstack-based frameworks and driving integration with public clouds such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.
Cloud automation is also critical for busy application developers. Agile development methods, such as continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment, as well as DevOps, rely on rapid resource deployment and scaling to test new software releases. Once testing is complete, these resources are released for reuse. Public clouds excel at this behavior, and cloud automation tools can bring the same capabilities to private clouds.
Finally, cloud automation can provide versioning for workflows, allowing organisations to demonstrate consistent setups that stand up to business and regulatory audits. Businesses can see exactly what resources are currently being used, determine which users or departments use them, predict how resources will be used in the future, and ensure a level of quality of service that cannot be achieved by human processes.
