What is cloud automation? Cloud automation is the activity or discipline of automating part or all of the manual processes associated with maintaining and operating cloud-based IT infrastructure using specific software tools and techniques. Cloud automation can help IT companies and software development teams decrease administrative overhead and accomplish workflow goals like continuous integration and deployment in public, private, and hybrid cloud environments. Cloud automation software solutions may be set up to control the installation, setup, and maintenance of cloud computing systems automatically, allowing organizations to get the most out of their cloud resources. The significance of cloud automation as a time-saver and enabler of efficient cloud management practices will become more evident in IT organizations as companies continue to rely on the cloud for essential applications and services.
Today, IT companies employ cloud orchestration and cloud automation technologies to automate repetitive processes like provisioning virtual resources, defining common configuration items, and creating infrastructure as code in a virtualized environment. Developers may use cloud orchestration software solutions to codify the process of workload deployment and management so that it can be simply reproduced in the future. Cloud automation software solutions take those scripted actions and execute them on their own, with little or no interaction from IT staff.
Nobody is quite ready to retrain their operations team just yet, but improvements in root-cause diagnostics and self-healing procedures, business continuity and disaster recovery, and other services that make up a cloudops engineer’s everyday job can all be automated to be more dependable than people. We’re now dealing with instruments that can learn, develop as they go through operations, and eventually operate better than a person. Cloudops automation is similar to driving automation. Even though we know that technology can drive the automobile as well as humans can, the prospect is nevertheless frightening. Although cloudops automation is far more complicated than driving a car, it will face many of the same challenges. The end result is a series of automated procedures that may lead to a much more efficient cloud, as well as a more proactive security system that improves over time.
In my experience with new technology, it takes three to four years from the time it is competent to the time it is widely used. Given that most businesses have taken ten years to migrate merely 20% to 30% of their workloads to public clouds, this may take longer than we anticipate. The ability of cloudops and secops automation to deliver much better outcomes than traditional techniques, i.e. people, will be a crucial success element. I believe that a few bold upstarts will be the first to go hands-off, and that if they succeed, others will follow. For a company, effective automation will be a genuine force multiplier. Automated operations procedures can grow in complexity and effectiveness over time. The frightening thing is that if humans regained control for whatever reason, they would almost certainly be less successful than AI-powered automated operations processes.
