From Infrastructure to Applications — Once You’re Cloud Automated, You’ll Wonder Why You Weren’t Before
About This Document
Unveil the transformative power of cloud automation with this insightful article that delves into streamlining infrastructure management and enhancing application deployment. It details how cloud automation lightens the load of manual processes, facilitating efficient provisioning, configuration, and management across multiple cloud platforms. The article underscores GAP’s expertise in navigating businesses through their cloud automation journeys, illustrating the benefits of using tools like Terraform, Ansible, and Kubernetes to boost operational efficiency. Specific case studies demonstrate GAP’s success in migrating applications from traditional monolithic architectures to more scalable, serverless solutions.
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If you use cloud automation to streamline your infrastructure, you’ll be forgiven for wondering how you ever lived without it. And if you have not already taken the plunge, now is the time to do so!
According to a 2023 “State of IT Automation Report,” cloud automation topped the list of planned automation tool investments, and more enterprises are running permanent product jobs in the cloud than test or ad-hoc development jobs.
Cloud automation can broadly be defined as implementing tools to reduce the effort of manual processes in provisioning, configuring and managing cloud environments, be they public, private, hybrid or multi-cloud. Previously, organizations could only control their infrastructure simply by committing more personnel and money to it, hiring engineers to create live backups and monitor CPU utilization among others.
Cloud infrastructure automation tools take various forms. It can include everything from using Chef, Puppet or Ansible for configuration management — installing and managing software on existing servers — to AWS CloudFormation and Terraform, which are primarily provisioning tools, focused on provisioning the servers, as well as other infrastructure. Yet that is not all.
Kubernetes is another example of a technology that focuses on automating the deployment, scaling and management of containerized applications. Also, serverless technologies, from AWS Lambda to Microsoft Azure Functions, have degrees of automation through their event-driven models, helping run scheduled jobs to clean up infrastructure or other repetitive tasks.
In various examples, you can see how more than one tool can be used. For instance, you can use Terraform for deploying all the underlying infrastructure, and Ansible to deploy applications on top of that infrastructure. You define the resources you want to create, from VMs, to networks, to security, with Terraform code — otherwise known as infrastructure as code (IaC) — before running Ansible playbooks, to manage the configuration of your infrastructure, on the resources.
Key Insight
The benefits of cloud automation are evident if utilized correctly, from faster deployment, to clearer control over your IT processes and policies, and lower costs. Yet whether you are an Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure organization, the varied possibilities need an element of nuance to avoid going down the wrong path.
- What is your use case?
- Do you want to automate workloads, the infrastructure itself, or both?
- Where do you want your code to execute?
- Do you need to bake in an abstraction layer?
To best answer these questions, you will find benefits from working with a trusted partner like GAP.
Many organizations will understand a simple “lift and shift” for their monolithic application will not be the most effective or economical. GAP experts can help with both the consulting — what can be containerized, what can be moved into a serverless architecture, etc. — and the deployment. We can recommend what efficiencies can be brought about through automation for a client’s application or website.
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