What is Cloud Automation?

Cloud migrations let organizations IT to scale and adopt at quick speed, innovate, accelerate, improvise business agility, streamlining of operations, operations agility, and lower costs. It helps companies to well prepare for uncertainty and also lead to a sustainable growth. However, cloud migrations pose its own set of challenges.

Cloud adoption by an organization means migration from provisioning and management of static infrastructure (in private space) to dynamic infrastructure (in a public place across a public cloud). Successful shift requires a strong cloud automation which would involve handling operations related to storage and backup automation, security, and compliance management, changing configurations and settings and continuous deployment of improvised code.

Today we look more in detail about how automation in the cloud is instrumental in its success, why do we need cloud automation? its benefits and how it is different from on prem IT infrastructure automation?

Why Cloud Automation?

The movement to cloud and its associated costs are on decline making it a desired alternative to businesses across its versatility. In addition, improved productivity and less errors cloud automation tools are part of cloud migration strategy to achieve extra savings on costs incurred in the shift.

Scaling, provisioning, configuration of cloud resources, establishing or deployment virtual machines, and performance monitoring are some repetitive and error prone tasks which need to be manually carried out to install and operate operations which might impact availability.

Modern technology stacks are constantly changing, enormous and dynamic in nature and it is difficult for system administrators to keep pace with simultaneous detection and implementation of potential improvements, configuring and installing components every time.

Cloud Infrastructure Automation involves operations such as:

automation of storage,
backups,
security and compliance management,
updating configurations and settings,
code delivery etc.

Automation solutions ensure the system and its resources are optimally utilized and increase productivity of IT professionals by removing repetitive tasks from their portfolio. Budget can be maximized by using automation to run workloads in a cloud ecosystem instead of on-prem.

How Cloud Automation differs from on-prem IT Automation?

Automation tools can be utilized for cloud and on-prem at par keeping aside some exceptions (tools meant only for cloud).
Cloud automation tools focus on virtual infrastructure and automate services than physical servers as cloud ecosystems offer multiple access levels to access resources as compared to on-prem environments.
Automation is crucial in the cloud as there are numerous virtual machine types to choose from and it is crucial not to run all of them if not required, which is not the case with local servers hosted in on-prem data centers.
Automation of cloud resource management is essential to maximize the benefit of cloud because cloud environments include varied services which can be scaled up or down on demand.

Benefits of Cloud Automation

Let’s look at some of key benefits of cloud automation:

Saving time – Cloud automation saves time. Teams can focus on activities which demand more complex expertise and are not possible to automate. With the use of an IaaS template tool can setup 100 servers in few minutes, manually doing same task can take up weeks.
Achieve Scalability – A small set of servers or systems can be set up manually but cloud automation becomes crucial when an environment comprising thousands of users, terabytes of data and hundreds of thousands of virtual instances.
Better Backup Mechanism – System backups are created to secure the environment against system errors, unintentional deletion of data, hardware failures and cyber-attacks. Backup process automation helps to maintain consistency in backup procedures.
Better Security & Reduced Chance of Errors – Automation creates a clean deployment of processes and eliminates oversight and chances of human error in repetitive and redundant tasks. Cloud automation helps to configure access to resources in a consistent manner.
Enhanced Management – Centralized management of infrastructure and better control over systems is required when systems are configured manually or as per the need. Better control over infrastructure is imposed using cloud automation tools which enable configuring resources in a consistent and standard manner.
DevOps – DevOps approach is about continuous delivery, feedback and infrastructure delivery as code using cloud automation tools. Cloud automation helps to direct focus on tasks which aid in immediate business benefits, such as creation of new services portfolio or attending to customer requirements. Brings flexibility to quickly deploy and remove cloud resources on demand to support business new projects.

Conclusion

Cloud plays a major role in easing the burden of administration and automation is becoming vital for the critical cloud operations such as provisioning, deprovisioning, resources configuration, creation of clusters and load balancing, deployments, monitoring and infrastructure management.

Quick Tip!

Cloud automation market is expected to grow to USD 480.5 billion by 2030.