5 operations each cloud architect ought to automate

The cloud presents many advantages to an organization’s trendy utility growth course of. One of the important advantages is the power to automate essential actions that historically have required guide steps.

Automation is probably the one most important benefit of utilizing the cloud. Cloud architects thrive of their roles by benefiting from automation wherever possible.

What are a few of the frequent cloud automation methods which are central to a cloud architect’s job? Listed below are 5 operations that each cloud architect ought to try to automate when designing, constructing, and deploying cloud-hosted purposes.

Automation #1. Scaling

Automated scaling is essentially the most basic and important to utilizing the cloud. Whether or not we’re speaking about auto-scaling server sources or the elastic scaling constructed into cloud-native companies similar to Amazon S3 and DynamoDB, scaling is an important a part of the cloud. Constructing a scalable infrastructure is without doubt one of the core explanation why folks transfer to the cloud within the first place.

However a lot of this automated scalability requires launching new server situations shortly and painlessly, which leads us to the following automation.

Automation #2. Server provisioning

Within the pre-cloud days, provisioning a brand new server might take days or perhaps weeks. Cloud automation permits the provisioning of a totally useful and operational server occasion, with all required software program and companies put in and operating, in a matter of minutes. Automated server provisioning will not be solely key to auto-scaling, but in addition to self-healing infrastructures (one other type of cloud automation). Terminating a failing or compromised server occasion and letting automation change it with a contemporary server occasion adjustments how drawback decision occurs within the cloud. This functionality is central to bettering MTTR (imply time to decision) of many courses of issues and errors.

Automated server provisioning works a lot the identical whether or not you’re launching new digital machine situations in a compute service like Amazon EC2 or new container situations in a Kubernetes setting like Google Kubernetes Engine. In both case, automation improves each pace and reliability when launching, scaling, and repairing server situations, which is key to most cloud-enabled purposes.

One other advantage of automated server provisioning is improved availability. Automating provisioning signifies that a smaller variety of bigger servers will be simply changed with a bigger variety of smaller servers. Such a mannequin can dramatically enhance the supply of an utility, decreasing the affect of failures.

However automated server provisioning works provided that the remainder of the infrastructure wanted to function the servers will also be arrange shortly and simply. This leads us to the following automation.

Automation #3. Infrastructure creation

Mechanically provisioning your servers will not be, in itself, adequate to get your cloud utility up and operating and serving customers. You have to additionally provision your load balancers, firewalls, community segments, databases, and another companies your utility depends on, similar to queues and caches. All supporting infrastructure should be arrange, configured, and linked to your utility earlier than will probably be totally useful.

All of this provisioning will be fairly time consuming if finished manually. If you happen to have been deploying in an on-premises information middle, it would take days or longer to arrange all the required elements. Within the cloud, nonetheless, an automation method generally known as infrastructure as code (IaC) means that you can provision your utility infrastructure utilizing calls to APIs.

IaC means that you can specify how you need your infrastructure arrange in supply code, usually a JSON or YAML file, that may be managed utilizing conventional software program model management methods (similar to Git). Then, you are taking the codified infrastructure configuration and move it by way of a instrument that can mechanically provision, configure, and join your infrastructure elements right into a working community.

There are lots of instruments accessible that carry out this stage of cloud infrastructure automation. Two widespread instruments are HashiCorp’s Terraform and AWS’s CloudFormation.

Infrastructure as code offers distinctive advantages to your infrastructure provisioning course of, together with change management and approval, change monitoring, and infrastructure code reuse. Infrastructure as code is barely attainable in a cloud or cloud-like information middle, the place infrastructure APIs permit automated infrastructure creation.

Cloud architects ought to leverage IaC instruments to create dependable, safe, and repeatable cloud patterns for infrastructure provisioning. The advantages are tough to overstate.

Automated infrastructure setup primarily based on code administration results in our subsequent automation.

Automation #4. Code deployment

Automated code deployment pipelines will not be distinctive to the cloud. However given the heavy use of different kinds of automation, automated code deployments are a pure extension for cloud-enabled purposes, and they’re closely relied on by cloud architects.

One of the widespread strategies of automated code deployment is the CI/CD pipeline. CI/CD, or steady integration/steady supply, is a mannequin that permits code deployments to be mechanically utilized to manufacturing purposes primarily based on code checked right into a software program model management system (once more, similar to Git). Relying on the appliance and firm insurance policies, automated deployments could also be scheduled (similar to each day or hourly) or triggered each time a change is made to the code base and made accessible for deployment.

Many instruments can be found to allow automated code deployments. The record contains instruments similar to Jenkins, Bamboo, GitLab, CircleCI, and AWS CodeDeploy. Every of those operates otherwise, and the cloud architect should choose the correct automation technique to fulfill the wants of the event group and enterprise. But, nearly all refined, cloud-architected purposes use some type of automated code deployment. Yours ought to too.

Automation #5. Native cloud companies

Usually neglected as a kind of automation is the automated dynamic scaling that’s constructed into many cloud companies. Cloud queuing companies (similar to Amazon Easy Queue Service), cloud information storage (similar to Amazon S3), and cloud databases (similar to Amazon DynamoDB) rely closely on automation to handle the scaling wants of the dynamic purposes that make the most of them.

Cloud architects usually favor to make use of a knowledge retailer similar to S3 versus creating their very own information retailer from native drive storage on compute situations (for instance) as a result of it’s easy, secure, dependable, straightforward to combine, and computerized in its performance. The identical will be stated for a lot of different companies the general public clouds present. By utilizing them, you benefit from highly effective automation that takes place within the background.

Cloud means automation

Automation is without doubt one of the defining traits of the cloud. It’s one of many components that distinguishes the cloud from the normal information middle. After all you may run your utility within the cloud with out benefiting from automation, and lots of do, however they’re lacking out. As a result of automation is the trail to larger consistency, reliability, safety, scalability, and responsiveness to the wants of your corporation.

Lifting and shifting an on-premises utility to the cloud “as is” is a comparatively easy and easy migration, and usually doesn’t want a educated cloud architect to implement. However such an utility misses out on most of some great benefits of operating in a cloud. Constructing a really cloud-enabled utility does require a cloud architect, however it’s going to benefit from every part the cloud has to supply. And nearly any cloud-architected utility will make heavy use of automation. 

An excellent cloud architect will allow, broaden, assist, and encourage using automation in all cloud-based purposes. Put merely, cloud architect will automate as a lot as attainable. They’re pushed by the ability of automation accessible within the cloud, and so they get pleasure from utilizing these automations in distinctive and attention-grabbing methods. It’s what essentially the most profitable utility deployments are made from.