Infrastructure Automation is on the rise. In fact, there is a good chance part or all of your cloud infrastructures is automated. If it isn’t, it should be. There are numerous significant benefits to automating your cloud infrastructure. Some might even say automation is good for everything in your infrastructure. Below we break down a few of the most significant benefits.
Most importantly, automation reduces human errors across the board. The number one threat to security is human error. According to IBM’s Cyber Security Intelligence Report, human error played a major role in 95% of all breaches. Human error can also cause productivity to decrease, costs to rise, and more. Automation helps reduce the need for human intervention in your infrastructure, which will reduce the chance for human errors to occur.
Automation allows for process reliability which also helps reduce human errors. This is the method used to identify problems that, when addressed, could reduce costs and/or provide opportunities for deployments in other improvements.
Automation will drastically improve the speed and control you have over your infrastructure. This, along with process reliability, will allow you to create new environments or deployments in a new region. Automating deployments provide you with a standard, easy-to-understand, and transparent approach for deploying applications. It allows applications to be deployed with certainty, configure needed services from the beginning, and gets everything up and running.
Tracing in automation or traceability is not to be confused with tracing for Observability. In the case of automation, traceability means that you have a record of all the changes applied in your infrastructure. Automation is done through Infrastructure as Code which is submitted in Git repositories. This process allows for all the changes that are applied to be tracked in your infrastructure. You can then audit and roll back to a previous state when necessary.
When your infrastructure is automated, you can rebuild when disaster strikes. This is mainly due to the ability to return your infrastructure to a previous state or roll back to earlier versions. It makes recovering from disasters, both major and minor, much easier and faster.
Automation allows for Proces Enforcement Documentation. Most of your documentation is contained within your IaC of Infrastructure as code, but this does not eliminate the need for documentation. You will need to document the architecture or the “WHAT” of your infrastructure. The “HOW” is defined in the code, which considerably reduces the amount of documentation and time spent performing this task.
Not all the benefits of automation are as direct as those listed above. At Flugel.it, we’ve seen indirect benefits to automating as well.
You can build your infrastructure in such a way that it implements right-sizing. When you right-size, you restructure your infrastructure to get the highest possible value out of each part. By automating this, you eliminate the need for a lot of manual steps. This can save you time and costs while improving overall quality.
Updates are a big part of both your product development cycle and your infrastructure. Customers and clients will demand product improvements. You will also have to make sure you stay on top of all the latest security and compliance requirements. Automation streamlines the process of updating and releasing new software, reduces the time to fix bugs, and ensures your infrastructure is equipped to handle security threats.
The benefits of fully automating your cloud infrastructure cannot be overstated. Your system will be more secure, efficient, and cost-effective. Most of all, you will no longer have to worry about human errors undermining your infrastructure.
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