Cloud Automation Services

Ever-growing consumer demands and changing IT scenario are making ‘automation’ imperative across many organizations of all sizes.

Automation is playing a very key role by automating many manual tasks, easing operational and maintenance burden.

Because of this reason, automation is enjoying a wider presence and relevance almost on all technology platforms. And, Cloud needs no exception!

Though cloud computing services have done their best in easing organizational burden, automation became the need of the hour for many critical cloud operations as enterprises started taking a different approach to cloud computing.

Automation in the cloud environment has come a long way from just being a trend to becoming key in the successful cloud journey for migration and continuous optimization.

Moreover, to meet the changing IT infrastructure landscape, emerging new services and scaling cloud operations, the automated management of cloud resources holds high significance among IT teams.

Defining Cloud Automation

In a broader perspective, Cloud Automation refers to the process of leveraging technology tools and resources to reduce manual burden in provisioning and managing cloud computing workloads.

Cloud Automation is also defined as a software-based solution required to automate installation, configuration, management and other cloud-related tasks and operations.

These can be repetitive tasks such as provisioning and configuring resources like virtual machines, establishing clusters and load balancing, instigating virtual networks, making deployments, monitoring and management performance.

Cloud Automation Use Cases

In general, cloud automation use-cases refer to using dynamic abilities of cloud management tools or of a cloud solution to perform functions with less manual intervention.

For instance,

• Adding new instances part of an auto-scaling scenario with auto scaling groups
• Auto provisioning servers to meet scaling requirements
• Identifying and stopping unused instances
• Taking data backups on pre-set intervals

There are also other specific use cases for cloud automation, which include:

• Infrastructure as Code

  This is the most common use case for cloud automation. Here, cloud automation tools and processes use resource pools to define configurations items such as VMs, containers and virtual networks. Required application components and services re added to these configuration items, which are further assembled to form a complete operational environment for deploying workloads.

• Workload Management

  Considered as a crucial part of the workload lifecycle management, cloud automation helps admins remove unused and unwanted long-term entities and their configuration items. It helps a lot in workload management by facilitating ways for automatic scaling tasks such as addition of more resources or removal of excess or unwanted instances.

• Version Control

  Cloud automation services offer version control through consistent setups that work in line with organizational regulations and policies. These setups help businesses track the resource usage, users, predict resource usage and achieve improved service quality.

• App Development

  Continuous delivery and continuous integration are key to the success of agile development driven by DevOps culture. The success here relies on the speed of resource deployment and scalability in testing software releases. While public clouds are already capable of doing so, private cloud are not that successful. Cloud automation tools can be the savior in adding such capabilities to any of the cloud variants.

• Hybrid Cloud

  In a hybrid cloud environment, cloud automation automates tasks related to a private cloud environment and also enables integration with public cloud platforms such as Azure, GCP and AWS.

Cloud Automation Tools

There are a wide variety of tools for different use-cases of cloud automation. Considering the significance of automation in infrastructure, we are listing some of the popular cloud infrastructure automation tools.

Tool	Tool Name	Description
	AWS CloudFormation	Suitable for AWS cloud platform, this tool helps automate and deploy resources into your AWS cloud infrastructure. Handles automated management of accounts, supporting business scaling.
	Puppet	Leader in configuration automation market. Helps model, configure and enforce required infrastructure configurations. Works for all cloud variants, from computing to storage and further to networking resources at a high scale.
	Ansible	Easy to use and task-based cloud infrastructure automation tool known for its ease in automating configurations. Uses simple language called ‘playbooks’ to compose automation, configuration, and orchestration tasks.
	Chef	Another popular infrastructure configuration tool that helps in effective compliance management, from enforcing configuration policies to continuous delivery of production code. Besides compliance, it also ensures high availability and GUI-based workflow pipeline creation.
	Kubernetes	A container orchestration tool known for automating deployment, scaling and management of container apps. Cloud Native Foundation’s flagship project supported by leading tech giants such as Google, AWS, IBM, Microsoft, etc. Allows to deploy and run apps on microservice architecture for all cloud variants.
	Terraform	An open-source tool that helps you automatically configure high-level resources through extensive graphing. Requires a configuration management tool like Puppet or Chef to automate software on those resources.
	Google Cloud Deployment Manager	Suitable to build cloud infrastructure through Google Cloud Computing. Automate configuration and deployment of Google cloud with repeatable deployments and template-driven configurations. Use CLIs, APIS and other tools for all phases of manage infrastructure configuration and management.
	Microsoft Azure Automation	Automation and configuration service for consistent management across Azure and non-Azure environments. Also provides automated control over maintenance and compliance tasks. Process automation and update management are among other features that help reduce errors and time on infrastructure deployments.
	Cisco Intelligent Automation	Supports Cisco and other cloud environments, from cloud infrastructure automation to hands-on management and provisioning of instances. Self-serving portal for users, multi-tenancy and network service automation are some salient features.
	SaltStack	Focused on automating security compliance, this tool helps configure and manage all aspects of cloud-based infrastructure. Agentless node management and exceptional security tooling are the salient features of this tool.
	VMware vCenter Configuration Manager (VCM)	Configure and maintain VM cloud environments in line with security and compliance requirements. Control configuration of your VMware-based infrastructure from a centralised location.
	CFEngine	Configuration management tool used to automate IT infrastructure for enterprises of all sizes. With requiring a central management, CFEngine runs on autonomous agents that run in regular intervals to enforce configurations.
	Foreman	Best for teams building opensource lightweight tool that manages complete server lifecycle. Supports provisioning of cloud instances on all major cloud solution providers.

Every tool has its own strengths and weaknesses that make it specific for different tasks. Choose the one that matches your requirement!

Why Choose Us?

As a US-based Cloud Services Provider, Veritis assists you at every step of your cloud automation journey, regardless of your current maturity level with automation and autonomics.

We automate your entire cloud infrastructure through our end-to-end cloud automation capabilities, leading you to harness full business value of automation.

The Veritis Advantage:

• 360° turnkey cloud solutions
• Vendor-agnostic, best-of-breed approach
• World-class expertise
• Optimal customer satisfaction

The Conclusion

It’s time to identify, whitelist and automate key tasks that can ease infrastructure burden and enhance your cloud capabilities!