One of the most difficult tasks in modern IT management is deploying and managing infrastructure. The complexity of modern infrastructures, coupled with the rapid pace at which they evolve. Making it a daunting task to maintain an efficient and cost-effective environment without incurring downtime. In this blog post, we will discuss what infrastructure automation is and when you should use it.
Infrastructure Automation is a way to reduce human error in your IT department by letting technology do the work for you. This saves time, money, and resources that would have been spent on manual labor. Tasks like deploying servers or creating security patches. You need to know some scenarios where it makes sense to automate your infrastructure. This will get you back to doing more important things.
Why is it a good idea, and what it entails to put it in place? The first step you should take when considering it is to understand the different types of infrastructure that can be automated. These types include computing (i.e. servers), storage, networks, containers, or even entire data centers. You need to consider which components are appropriate for your use case. Then how much control needs to be given over those systems. Do they need higher levels of autonomy? For example, if there’s an outage on one network node does the system react to route traffic to a different node?
Cost Savings
Cost savings is one of the easiest ways to measure the effectiveness of a solution. Infrastructure automation will provide you with significant cost savings in time and money. With less overhead, demands for human resources are reduced. Meaning that your employees can be allocated to other projects or tasks as needed even if they’re not technically savvy! This also means there’s no need for expensive contractors.
Increased Efficiency
Automation can increase your efficiency is in regards to monitoring for failures and addressing them before they lead to downtime. There are many more benefits such as having consistency when it comes to SLAs. It also improves customer experience. Sometimes up to 20% according to research on improvement in customers’ perceptions. Besides, automating how work is performed means you need fewer human resources. No need for expensive contractors as well so this will translate into cost savings as well.
People are needed for deployment. It is also great when deploying infrastructure in remote locations. One of the major challenges you may encounter when implementing is that there’s a steep learning curve that can confuse or frustrate users. It’s important to make sure everyone has access to training so they know how everything works. So there aren’t feeling anxious about changes. Another challenge might be integration with existing tools like CMDBs/PDMs. since some configuration management systems require these integrations. This will allow them to report on your infrastructure by checking things such as system health, patching level, and even
Some challenges you may encounter during implementation. One major benefit is that configuration management becomes more focused. Instead of having many different processes going in parallel, all deployment tasks are handled by an automated system. You can automate infrastructure changes using tools like Puppet or Chef. They also have different approaches but the goal is to make it easier for humans to configure systems. While still enabling them to do their jobs as well. Some may use this approach while others prefer an all-in approach. It also allows you to limit downtime when deploying updates. Since each change only has to happen once rather than many times. It decreases operational costs associated with human labor too. The reason being, fewer people are needed for deployment. It is great when deploying infrastructure in remote locations.
Closing Thought
This Automation offers several advantages over traditional systems management methods like scripting or repetitive manual processes. Where teams may have different areas of expertise such as provisioning vs. managing servers. The goal should always be to create solutions that automate as much as possible. While still allowing human intervention when needed. This minimizes risk due to errors in the program. It can also help you save both time and money. Especially if your infrastructure uses a lot of resources or needs frequent maintenance. The goal here isn’t always about making things easier on yourself. It’s often about reducing overhead so infrastructure can be maintained more efficiently.