These days, many businesses and organizations are trying to automate their IT infrastructure to improve the productivity and efficiency of their operations as well as stabilize their entire IT infrastructure. Cloud computing is massive, and it serves to make life a lot easier for these organizations. Consequently, the many cloud providers out there are trying their best to provide the most automated IT infrastructure possible.


At the moment, there’s isn’t a single tool that is able to offer a completely automated package. This, however, does not mean that you cannot automate your infrastructure. In this article, we will talk about how you can automate cloud IT infrastructures, and why it will benefit your organization.


How to automate your IT infrastructure


The process of automation revolves around finding areas of your infrastructure that need improving and can be done automatically instead of needing human involvement. The more things you can automate, the easier it becomes to manage an IT infrastructure. Consequently, you can deploy more resources in different areas of your business, instead of focussing on this.


Before getting into the task of automating your organization’s IT infrastructure, there are two main aspects you should consider regarding cloud automation. The first aspect is automating time-consuming tasks that are usually done by professionals. This is a very popular way of automating your IT infrastructure, as it takes a lot of weight off the shoulders of your employees. It also gets rid of one big potential issue; human error. If humans are constantly managing your IT infrastructure and launching cloud services, then there’s a chance they can make a mistake and cause problems. But, if these tasks are automated, the risks are removed.


The second aspect of infrastructure automation involves automating virtual servers and applications. The whole premise behind this is to make your apps and virtual servers more efficient. They can help themselves if any problems occur that require a change in how they’re run.


Automating Management Functions


A big way that your IT infrastructure can be automated is by looking for certain functions that take up a lot of time and effort. For most, this is largely going to be the core management functions. Instead of having an administration team look at the various parts of your IT infrastructure you can call upon different tools that do it automatically. So much work is now shifted off the shoulders of your admin team and handled very quickly by your automated cloud infrastructure.


Applications/Server Automation


Your cloud IT infrastructure will be built up of various applications that all serve certain roles. You can automate these to avoid any problems occurring when things change. Something could happen that requires a certain server or application to need more resources. When this happens, you want to take action immediately, without taking the time to figure out the best course of action. With application automation, any issues get ironed out as soon as they spring up. They get dealt with automatically, which ensures your applications and cloud servers remain stable and don’t fall victim to any issues.


Conclusion


IT infrastructure automation offer you several benefits including reduced costs and improved efficiency. The market today is filled with several tools and solution providers who help you optimally automate your IT infrastructure. With the right understanding of the essentials, you can derive the maximum benefits of automation.


Several configuration management tools available in the market help you manage and maintain servers easily at one time. Among these, Puppet, Chef, and Ansible are popular.


Originally published , updated September 04 2021

Topic: DevOps