- Infrastructure automation is an alternative to manually configuring and orchestrating infrastructure in cloud and on-premises environments.
- The benefits of infrastructure automation are mainly reliability, repeatability, and reduced cost of evaluating and resolving errors.
The rise of cloud providers has made it easier to provide, configure, and orchestrate infrastructure because you don’t have to buy the underlying hardware components to access it. Infrastructure is provided as a service, so providing and configuring it manually makes it difficult to replicate high availability configurations or prepare disaster recovery mechanisms. This can waste time and increase the likelihood of errors. Infrastructure automation is the answer.
What does infrastructure automation mean
Infrastructure automation is the alternative to manually provisioning, configuring, and orchestrating your infrastructure in both cloud and on-premises environments. Automating these tasks reduces the manual interactions engineers have with IT systems, making the process repeatable, less error-prone, highly available, and capable of easily building disaster-recovery mechanisms.
Also read: Computer Automation: Pioneering solutions in industrial automation
How does infrastructure automation work
Infrastructure is automated in various ways, and it is usually done in several steps.
Step 1: Infrastructure provisioning
The primary consideration is taking care of your infrastructure provisioning. This can be done through CLI automation, scripting through different SDKs, or IaC frameworks — which is the recommended way because it helps with the lifecycle management of your infrastructure resources.
Step 2: Configuration management
Next, as your infrastructure resources grow and if you are using virtual machines in your infrastructure, you need to be able to install and configure software on them. This can be done through scripting or configuration management software, which ensures that the process is reliable and repeatable.
Containers are most useful when they are paired with a container orchestration platform, and sometimes, if you don’t use a managed service from your cloud provider for that, you could still take advantage of configuration management to configure the underlying virtual machines.
Step 3: Continuous integration
Now that you have some basics in place (IaC and configuration management or container orchestration), you need to ensure that your infrastructure components match the guardrails set at the organisation level and that the code is consistent. This is where continuous integration comes into play. Linting, formatting, vulnerability scanning, and policies help you ensure that all the guardrails are in place for your infrastructure.
Step 4: Continuous deployment
You need a way to deploy your infrastructure — enter continuous deployment. Infrastructure changes can be hard to grasp, so usually, before deployment, there is a planning phase that transforms the code into a human-readable output of what will change. Then, after the plan is successfully reviewed by the engineering team, the code changes should be merged and deployed.
Step 5: Continuous monitoring
After your infrastructure is deployed, you need to ensure that your services are always up and running and there are no performance-related issues. You can feed different metrics to specialised monitoring tools and easily perform continuous monitoring of your infrastructure.
Also read: Hyperconvergence: The new frontier in streamlined IT infrastructure
Infrastructure automation benefits
One of the greatest benefits of infrastructure automation is its reliability. Declaring everything as code, from the provisioning to the continuous monitoring point of view, makes your automation reliable, and taking advantage of different environments before reaching production enhances this reliability.
Another benefit of infrastructure automation is its repeatability. Provisioning and configuring 100 virtual machines manually takes a long time and is error-prone. With IaC and configuration management, you have to get it right the first time and then use loops to do it easily, as many times as you need.
Infrastructure automation can also be cost-effective. In the above scenario, provisioning and configuring 100 virtual machines manually takes an engineer a lot of billable time to get it right. Using automation reduces the time required significantly, and costs are lower too. In addition, automation eliminates the cost of assessing and solving errors.
Scaling is difficult without automation. Even with automation, issues can arise, but these can be solved by an infrastructure management platform, which in turn, takes care of your infrastructure automation.
