Are you unable to benefit from your cloud infrastructure? Do errors and delays blunt your competitive edge? Unless you invest in cloud infrastructure automation, you cannot optimise your investment.

Enterprises have wisened up to this fact, as evident from the growing investment in cloud infrastructure automation. Gartner predicts a typical organisation to refocus 30% of their IT operations on hyper-automation. 

Typical cloud infrastructure consists of networking equipment, servers, hardware abstraction layer and more. IT teams often manage user and system access and configure the infrastructure manually. But such manual provisioning causes errors and delays. 

Automation encompasses provisioning, managing, and orchestrating the infrastructure. It reduces human error and ensures faster time-to-market. It also enables efficient resource utilisation and optimisation. Speed and efficiency define competitiveness in today’s fast-paced world. The workforce, free of administrative burdens, becomes empowered to focus on higher-value tasks. Administrative costs also reduce, further improving competitiveness. Eliminating errors and human oversight also improves security.

Leveraging these benefits, however, depends on getting the automation process right. 

Generally, cloud infrastructure automation takes place in three broad phases.

Phase 1: Provisioning

A standard cloud infrastructure automation solution co-opts capabilities to:

• Automate tasks and processes performed manually. This may include configuring virtual machines, storage allocation, network set-up, and security settings.
• Manage configurations across multiple machines or nodes.
• Make workload handling seamless. 
• Deploy applications. Automated systems offer a reliable and secure approach to progress from build to test to deployment. 
• Define compliance and risk management policies.

As the first step, define goals and provision the same. For best results, follow a step-by-step methodological approach:

1. Articulate the enterprise goals for cloud infrastructure automation. The goals could be cost optimisation, better flexibility, faster time-to-market, or more. It could even be a combination of multiple objectives.
2. Create the infrastructure provisioning workflow based on the goal. 
3. Develop automation scripts to define and deploy the desired infrastructure configuration.
4. Identify the tools and processes needed to actualise the workflow. Provision for software-defined networks, virtual machines, data centres, storage devices, auto-scaling, load balancing, backup and recovery options, networking components, and other infrastructure elements. 
5. Use APIs to make the workflow extensible and connect infrastructure and developer tools. Ensure visibility to view and search infrastructure across multiple providers.

Use cases differ for different organisations. A comprehensive and robust automation solution syncs with orchestration tools. The orchestration tools arrange and coordinate automated tasks to achieve the best results. 

Phase 2: Standardise the workflow

After provisioning, standardise the workflow. 

Most enterprises continue with a legacy ticket-based approach to infrastructure provisioning. Such controls exist as a lack of checks or tracking leaves the organisation vulnerable to security risks. A free for all approach also creates huge inefficiencies. But a ticketing-based system also creates bottlenecks and limits developer productivity. Developers remain at the mercy of the IT team to get resources. The IT team, with their priorities, may take their own time or even reject the request. 

Overcoming such situations requires a consistent infrastructure provisioning workflow across different clouds and even on-premises data centres. Many IT teams update infrastructure multiple times a day from different sources. They use various workflows involving different clouds or on-premises data centres. Such a set-up creates collaboration issues.

Standardisation ensures all teams use the same tools and processes. Efficiency and security get a boost. To proceed with standardisation:

Define standard operating environments (SOEs) for servers and workstations. An SOE defines the operating system, associated software and hardware configurations. It makes explicit the service packs, common applications and related dependencies. SOEs allow enterprises to develop common standards. It makes the IT infrastructure management process predictable and repeatable. The speed of the process also improves.

Use infrastructure as a code (IaC) to abstract and manage the underlying infrastructure. IaC unifies operations across disparate machines and deployment environments. 

Predefined scripts simplify configuration management. Apply best practices to streamline workflows. 

Create configuration files with standardised formats such as YAML or JSON. These machine-readable files use declarative or imperative commands. It handles policies by referring to automation libraries and centralised templates. Configuring resources and applications become streamlined, more manageable and less prone to errors.

IaC makes infrastructure provisioning consistent and agile. It offers an easy solution to any scalability or availability issues, reduces risk, lower costs and speeds up the process.

Phase 3: Optimise at scale

After standardising the workflow, ensure scalability to meet the business needs. 

Today’s enterprises open in a dynamic environment where the network requirements change often. Leveraging the benefits of automation requires continuous optimisation of the infrastructure. The core component of optimisation is the ability to scale resources quickly. 

Automation tools scale resource capacity across multiple environments. Such scale-up meets business demands and handles workloads. But seamless scale-up requires developing workflows that co-opt guardrails for security and compliance. 

Ensure operational consistency. Must-have elements of such a workflow include:

• The ability to reuse code components of infrastructure validated and approved by the IT team.
• Managing teams with role-based access controls.
• Integration with central IT and operations tools for SSO, notifications, and audit logging.
• Ability to define policies and guardrails as code and validation of such policies and guardrails.
• Automating additional tasks, such as configuration management and monitoring, as needed. Automating configuration management delivers consistent and scalable deployments, simplified system updates, and compliance. Success depends on continuous management and governance.

Select an appropriate tool.

Several tools help enterprises start their cloud infrastructure automation journey. Most of these tools allow using pre-computed content for quick implementation.

Top IaC-based cloud automation tools include 

• Ansible. 
• AWS CloudFormation
• Azure Resource Manager
• Google Cloud Deployment Manager
• Chef
• Crossplane
• Pulumi
• Puppet
• Terraform
• Vagrant, and more.

It teams may use one or more tools, according to what works best for them. Cloud admins may, for instance, provision the infrastructure resources using Terraform. Next, they may run Ansible playbooks to automate configurations, install dependencies, and deploy applications. These tools allow admins to define and manage complex workflows. It also automates scaling on demand, ensures high availability and delivers fault tolerance. 

The phases of cloud infrastructure automation need not be linear. Many enterprises adopt an iterative approach. They refine and improve automation processes across all phases continuously. There is no one-best-method either. Use the three-step process as a general framework and make tweaks based on the specific needs and circumstances surrounding the enterprise. While the approaches can vary, not committing to cloud infrastructure automation can be a big mistake and lead to the enterprise losing out big time on efficiency and competitiveness.