Millions of businesses worldwide rely on cloud resources to run their operations, which puts everyone on equal ground. However, applying some cloud automation techniques gives you an upper hand over your competition. It speeds up your internal processes, makes your resource utilization more efficient, and reduces the workload for your engineers.
However, these positives will only take effect if you follow all the cloud automation techniques and understand these processes in depth. That’s why JetBase will use our decade-plus of experience to share everything there is to know about cloud automation. We’ll talk about its benefits, share some use cases, and give you examples of tools to use.
Now that you know what to expect, let’s not stall and get to learning all about cloud automation.
What is Cloud Automation?
Even though using the cloud makes some things easier, it still leaves a lot of work to be done. Your engineers have to run multitudes of virtual machines and keep all of them interconnected. And all of that while juggling available resources and the system’s performance. Seems a lot, doesn’t it? Well, these are all prime cloud automation use cases.
That’s when you can use special software and practices to automate parts of the engineer’s job, making the system more autonomous. Anything that reduces the need for manual input and constant control helps make your cloud a bit easier to manage. The full effect appears when you apply more and more optimizing practices, creating a snowball effect.
One cloud automation example would be setting up a tool that controls resource use and automatically scales up and down. Instead of relying on the cloud provider’s systems, you can take control of scalability, all with minimal manual input. Sounds good, right? Well, there are more benefits to get from cloud automation. That’s exactly what we’ll talk about next.
Cloud Automation Benefits You Need to Know
There’s a lot you can get from cloud automation techniques, and there are many small factors that improve your business and end up changing your workflow completely. Right now, we’ll share the biggest advantages of automating your cloud processes. This way, you’ll see its major upsides and decide what you want to get out of this transformation.
Our list will include:
Let’s dive in and discuss these subjects.
Lower Expenses
Automation means you’ll save time and money on manual cloud management, focusing your team’s work on other areas. This will eventually impact costs, as you won’t need extra staff for cloud management. Moreover, cloud automation techniques will provide better resource utilization and, therefore, save money on your cloud bill.
With less human input required, the possibility of human error will decrease. Moreover, time-consuming processes such as debug runs will be streamlined and sped up substantially.
Continuous Deployment
CD stands out as one of the cloud automation use cases as it hinges on automatically pushing updates, eliminating the need to send them in manually and speeding up your system’s evolution. Thus, CD keeps your solution ready for use with the latest code. Establishing a fast and efficient pipeline will be easy and effective, benefitting your DevOps team.
Improved Infrastructure Management
This affects all areas of your cloud use. From establishing protocols for regular backups and data transfers to verifying your security protocols are intact, automation can do it all. As a result, your team will focus on work while the cloud practically runs itself. Your data will remain safe and up to date, while things like the cloud config will get updated on a regular basis.
Cloud Automation vs Cloud Orchestration
If you’re here learning about cloud automation techniques, you’ve likely also heard the term “cloud orchestration.” While the two are often repeated next to one another, for good reason, they are decidedly not the same.
We’ve talked about what cloud automation is earlier - a set of practices that serves to optimize your work with the cloud. Now, orchestration is a step above that or, if you will, a step further. Orchestration is the process of taking everything you’ve automated and establishing connections and integrations between them.
Put simply, it’s taking your cloud automation techniques and weaving a complex, self-sustaining system out of them. It’s a requirement if you want your automation practices to benefit you to the highest degree. Orchestration ties together every single process related to your cloud - deployment, backups, scaling, maintenance, etc.
If done right, orchestration ensures the order of operations and guarantees that they’re all “communicating.” This means that things will be done the right way, and data will be updated across all parts of the system with no discrepancies or errors. It structures deployment sequentially and applies error scans at specific times, ensuring that no process is disrupted.
So, in short, automation can apply to just one process, whereas orchestration is what follows after you’ve covered multiple cloud automation use cases.
Popular Tools for Cloud Automation
Accomplishing your goals with automation is downright impossible without the right cloud automation tools.
AWS CloudFormation
We’ll say this just once, but it applies to each of the following three tools: these are solutions intended chiefly for a specific cloud. In this case, AWS and CloudFormation open up quite a bit of functionality. For example, this software allows you to manage EC2 instances across multiple systems or create a Virtual Private Cloud.
It might be the most famous among cloud automation tools simply because it is paired with AWS. Still, the popularity is quite justified, as you can easily work with code using Amazon’s S3 bucket, push updates, and automate a good chunk of your infrastructure.
Azure Automation
Now for the Microsoft-made management software. This tool enables orchestration with ease, as any of the automated processes can be integrated with each other right away. The focus here is on management tasks, from operations to your cloud config to files. It also enables easy group work, as the software manages change tracking and inventory.
Scaling up is also quite easy with this cloud automation tool, using the software’s shared resource systems. You can schedule operations at scale and create virtual “compartments” to keep parts of the system independent.
Google Cloud Deployment Manager
Google’s answer to other cloud automation tools is great for automated continuous deployment. Its chief focus is infrastructure as code, making resource management easier and herding all VMs and their power under one umbrella.
CDM also allows scheduling and, more interestingly, setting up triggers. This way you can automate deployment, updates, and config changes based on certain conditions being met. As a result, there’s no need to manually activate processes, the cloud will do it all for you.
Cloud Automation Use Cases You Should Know
Before we round off our automation coverage, we want to showcase a few ideas for what you can achieve with it. These aren’t the full extent of what automation delivers, but they are prominent examples. Here’s what we want to talk about:
Connect Your Clouds
Using cloud automation techniques, you can connect processes across different clouds and create an expertly interwoven system where everything is synced. Cloud orchestration will help you scale up from managing resources on a microlevel and take control of all your resources.
Set Up Data Access
Navigating data movement, access, and backups can be tricky, especially when you want to keep some information in your own infrastructure and others on your cloud provider’s servers. Thankfully, automation allows you to configure access easily and prevent conflicts between environments.
Simplify Infrastructure Management
You can use special tools, as well as cloud automation techniques, to visualize your processes and make it easier for your DevOps to navigate management. This allows staff to closely monitor the environment and make changes as necessary. Plus, it makes work with the cloud easier and more accessible.
Set Up IAAS
IAAS, or Infrastructure-as-a-Service, lets you take the load of hardware that’s on the company premises and shift it to the cloud. This expands your abilities and lets you scale easily. As a result, more resource-intensive functionality is available. Plus, your DevOps team will have a more intricate ecosystem to work with.
Migrate Easier
Tools for cloud automation make it possible to move between different clouds without losing your data or your automated setups. This means you can switch practically on the go with no disruptions to your scheduled processes or delays in the workflow.
Work with Containers
The last of our cloud automation use cases is about making work with containers easier to structure. You can automate their deployment, set up conditional connections between them, and establish automatic container closure. The same applies to microservices, which can be set to execute in containers to keep the range of their effect limited.
In fact, automation tools pair greatly with container software, such as Kubernetes, and allow one to establish a specific order of operations easily.
Optimize Your Cloud Operations with JetBase
We’ve discussed the process in length and provided some cloud automation examples, but nothing beats real-life experience. JetBase has plenty of it, having spent more than a decade delivering custom solutions and outsourcing help. We’d be glad to help you optimize your cloud processes and achieve a whole new efficiency level for your business.
Our team has skilled DevOps members and knows a lot about setting up cloud environments, as well as keeping them running like a Swiss watch. So, do you want to avoid any challenges or errors and establish an intricate cloud-based system that pushes you above the competition? Then you know which company is the right fit for you. Contact us today, and let’s get started.
