Article Automation: Infrastructure Deployment
Get more from the cloud through automation.
By Andrew Conner / 17 Jun 2020
By Andrew Conner / 17 Jun 2020
Many of today’s IT organizations are using cloud technologies.
84% of them have a multicloud strategy and 58% have a hybrid strategy.
Furthermore, most IT organizations prioritize a healthy mix of public and private clouds, according to the RightScale 2019 State of the Cloud Report. This is good news, considering a hybrid cloud strategy seems to be an indicator of faster IT transformation.
But does this really matter if business outcomes aren’t being realized? Cloud spend and governance remain key challenges for organizations, and this is indicative of the gap between an IT infrastructure strategy and the subsequent need for successful execution.
To achieve agility and speed — what every business needs to compete effectively — IT organizations must start by using modernized approaches for infrastructure and application deployment. Operation leaders should consider simplifying processes and embracing intelligent automation for low-value, repetitive tasks.
The manual stand-up of networking, storage, compute, firewall and load-balancing can be a lengthy, error-prone and generally difficult process. In numerous scenarios, dollars and time are wasted, and silos are created that have long-lasting impacts.
Automating initial deployments can bring substantial Return on Investment (ROI) through quicker provisioning and recovery, simpler updates and changes, and fewer remediations.
Similarly, IT process/runbook automation can deliver value throughout implementation and support cloud migration. A closely related topic to infrastructure automation is ongoing configuration management, which is essentially a way to automate validation and control configuration drift.
In the whitepaper, “Automation: The Key to a Successful Hybrid Cloud,” we describe how layered automation can help take a hybrid cloud strategy from design through implementation and initial/ongoing configuration. But while many automation tool sets now exist to automate infrastructure deployment and configuration (e.g. AWS CloudFormation, Ansible, Terraform) these standalone offerings often fall short.
Standalone tools are good in that they aim to solve specific problems, but implementation often only masks bigger problems. What’s the answer? You must use automation skillfully and decisively.
Seeking the help of experts can ensure you ask the right questions upfront and avoid pitfalls later on.
Solutions Engineer, Cloud+ Data Center Transformation, Insight
An IT leader who specializes in automation, Andrew Conner uses his more than 25 years of experience to help clients achieve their transformation goals. Through his consultative approach and expertise, he designs and architects solutions to help organizations achieve agility and speed — what every business needs today to compete effectively — by using modernized approaches for infrastructure and application deployment.
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