What is Infrastructure Automation?

What do vacuuming, doing taxes, and washing your car all have in common? They can all be seen as repetitive, yet necessary tasks.

Many of the mission-critical actions in software development can be seen in the same light as the tasks mentioned above: repetitive yet necessary. And while automated car washes and online tax filing services exist, the practice of infrastructure automation exists for software development.

Infrastructure automation is the practice of using technology to reduce system human interaction by automating tasks, including, but not limited to, those pertaining to hardware, software, and networking actions.

Achievable by automating repeatable tasks through different scripts and functions, infrastructure automation enables organizations to:

• Tackle complexity and scaling issues
• Streamline their digital transformation
• Increase their internal productivity and growth efforts

With infrastructure automation, companies can also focus on maximizing their resource usage and consolidate unused resources like virtual machines (VMs) and workloads that automation has replaced. 

Through the automation of predictable and repeatable tasks and reduced human infrastructure interaction, countless organizations have been able to grow and innovate without bound, allowing development teams to focus on core development and providing immense business value.

How Infra Automation is Conducted

With so many repetitive tasks being a mainstay with an organization’s list of high priority items, infrastructure automation offers unparalleled value through the different means of automation. Amongst the biggest use cases for infrastructure automation are:

Kubernetes and Cluster Automation

Automating Kubernetes cluster management, operations, and deploying, while supporting cluster downtime through automated health checks, load balancing, and healing and repairing.

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System Maintenance and Configuration

Automating system updates and maintenance, as well as configuring the desired infrastructure state itself, automatically deploying and pulling resources to reach the specified state.

On the topic of configuration management, automation configuration processes allow you to meet service level agreements SLAS on a consistent basis, improving operational efficiency.

DevOps Processes

Enabling the automation of monitoring, management, and facilitation of resources through infrastructure-as-code (IaC) services and tools.

Provisioning and Request Automation

Many provisioning and requesting processes require manual interaction and approval from members on DevOps teams- automate the provisioning of resources and request decisions to avoid development pigeonholes. 

Automating these repetitive tasks also significantly reduces provisioning time for new resources.

Resource Decommissioning 

Many VMs and workloads can add complexity to your operations, while incurring higher operational costs. Automating the decommissioning of these resources, as proven unneeded by infrastructure automation itself, allows you to save resources and storage. 

And much more! 

It’s important to note that an organization’s ability to automate is limited by their imaginations. For example, VMWare offers infrastructure automation that pertains to cloud environments, public cloud services, and multi cloud operations through some of their solutions. Your specific business needs will outline what tasks need to be automated and what value they will provide.

IT Infrastructure Automation Benefits and Challenges

Infrastructure automation provides a plethora of uses for organizations of any industry, providing a human-free means of executing repeatable tasks, resulting in internal growth and development simplification. That being said, here are some benefits of automating your infrastructure processes:

Improved Workload and Developer Efficiency and Consistency

Think of a task that you groan at the thought of; infrastructure automation aims to complete those tasks without you having to lift a finger. This results in a couple things.

You and your workloads are able to become more efficient and productive- you’re able to focus on core development while your workloads have necessary tasks executed at a moment’s notice. The result of those repetitive tasks that you resent become more accurate and consistent, allowing for greater standardization across your workflows and entire infrastructure. 

Your infrastructure will become dynamic and evolve alongside you, without having to slow your development team down with repeatable tasks.

Cost Reduction

Manually interacting with processes can cost you more than you think: costs incur from things such as labor, VMs, resource utilization, and so on. Within VMs is a whole other layer of costs, such as hypervisor and operating system taxes, licensing fees, and server costs, further driving up your spending.

Infrastructure automation combats costs by cutting out the VMs and workflows that rely on manual interaction, replacing them with self-sufficient services that are able to optimize their resource usage and scale accordingly. In addition, less manual interaction overall is needed.

The result? Less costs.

A Holistic Increase to Speed

The needs of your business can change within a moment’s notice, having your infrastructure automatically respond to your changing needs is critical. Infrastructure deployments can automatically respond to your specified desired infrastructure state, quickly scaling their resources up or down to meet that state. 

In addition, infrastructure automation promotes a faster time to market, increasing process agility by pushing out updates and reliable configurations faster than manual interaction would.

Reducing Human Error and Security Risks

One of the biggest draws towards infrastructure automation is cycling out human interaction and the subsequent human error in critical processes. Despite the same tasks being presented often throughout a development lifecycle, mistakes can be made and can negatively impact an application. These mistakes can manifest themselves as security leveraging opportunities.

By automating many of the tasks that previously required manual management, organizations can significantly reduce security and business risks, increase process and operation standardization, and reduce complexity and miscommunication.

While the benefits of automation simply can’t be ignored, this practice also creates a certain degree of challenges that organizations must address. Challenges of which include:

Culture and Communication

Infrastructure automation provides a future-proof solution for many companies looking to undergo a digital transformation, though the automation process is disruptive. The fluidity of this transformation largely depends on the culture driving the company- if learning about infrastructure automation and changing core internal components and processes is not received well by employees, digital transformation may be halted.

The same employee support would apply towards communication about automation- decision makers must reassure their teams that automation represents a step in the direction of productivity and efficiency.

Tooling and Application Learning Curves

Many of the tools and applications used within infrastructure automation require a degree of technical knowledge to operate, teams may have difficulty welcoming automation with open arms if the tools chosen are unapproachable. Learning these tools and apps would also require time and effort from the teams that would be impacted by the tool usage, though the initial effort investment would be paid off by the effort saved from automation.

Infrastructure Automation Tools

Infrastructure automation is as important as the tools running the processes. From direct infrastructure management tools to infrastructure as code (IaC) tooling, there are a variety of solutions that can make your approach towards automation easier. Some of these tools include:

Terraform

Terraform is an open source IaC tool that allows you to automate infrastructure on any cloud, letting you automate provisioning and resource management processes within any cloud and data center. Terraform works by codifying cloud APIs into configuration files, files which take in your specified desired infrastructure state and create and modify resources to achieve it. The tool also supports the provisioning of Kubernetes and Helm charts.

The IaC tool supports a wide range of cloud providers, from big names like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, to your private clouds, letting you build automation workflows across these providers and your development teams. In addition, Terraform is able to automate your network infrastructure and integrate seamlessly with your existing CI/CD workflows, making this tool a jack of all trades and a must within cloud infrastructure automation.

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Jenkins

Jenkins is an open source automation server that supports project building, deployment, and automation through the use of plugins. Automation is triggered through code changes submitted by developers, prompting Jenkins to create a build in your preferred repository. Based on your code, Jenkins will automatically deploy changes to your application.

Jenkins presents an easily configurable and distributed infrastructure automation tool that’s integrated with your existing workflows. With its foundation revolving around the use of plugins and its open source shell, Jenkins is extremely flexible and works around any tech stack and workflow.

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Ansible

Ansible is an open source engine by Red Hat that automates many of the pesky IT processes, including but not limited to, provisioning, configuration, and application deployment. Through Ansible, DevOps teams are able to automate those repetitive tasks, providing standardized configurations and increasing security measures in the process. 

Ansible is also used to orchestrate workflows that developers may have difficulty operating, pushing out updates and installing software when necessary. Like the tools mentioned before, Ansible is extremely flexible, providing plugins and simple means of configuring Ansible so your approach is tailored to your needs. With Ansible, IT operations automation is achievable within a single engine. 

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Automated Infrastructure Management with Lyrid

In a development lifecycle, there are tons of tasks that repeatedly need to be tended in order to best service your application and infrastructure. Through infrastructure automation, DevOps teams and developer teams alike can sit back and relax while those pesky tasks are executed consistently. 

Some benefits of this practice include improved workflow and developer efficiency and productivity, cost reduction, and increased internal speed, while challenges that automating presents include potential culture backlash and learning curves within the tools and apps needed to automate. 

A huge tool within the infrastructure automation space is Kubernetes, though it’s important to note that Kubernetes doesn’t actually impact infrastructure processes, but rather the containers and clusters held within. 

Through the Lyrid platform, users are able to mobilize Kubernetes clusters AND reap the benefits of infrastructure automation, such as:

• Automated deployment
• Flexible IaC that encourage building in any language
• Seamless repository integration

And so much more!

Kubernetes clusters on top of the Lyrid platform already provide unprecedented value as well. Launch Kubernetes confidently with Lyrid Managed Kubernetes; enjoy the benefits of Kubernetes such as automated resource allocation and scaling, load balancing, and simple provisioning- all within a single platform.

To learn more about how the Lyrid platform and Lyrid Managed Kubernetes, book a call with one of our product specialists!