The cloud offers numerous benefits to modern application development, with automation being one of the most significant advantages. Cloud architects excel in their roles by leveraging automation techniques that streamline the design, construction, and deployment of cloud-hosted applications. In this article, we explore five operations that every cloud architect should automate.
Automation #1: Scaling
Automated scaling lies at the core of the cloud. Whether it’s auto-scaling server resources or elastic scaling in cloud-native services like Amazon S3 and DynamoDB, scalability is fundamental to the cloud experience. Designing a scalable infrastructure is often the primary reason businesses migrate to the cloud.
Automated scaling involves rapidly and seamlessly launching new server instances. This leads us to the next automation technique.
Automation #2: Server Provisioning
In the pre-cloud era, provisioning a new server could take days or even weeks. Cloud automation now allows for the provisioning of fully functional server instances, complete with required software and services, within minutes. Automated server provisioning plays a crucial role in auto-scaling and self-healing infrastructures. By terminating failing or compromised server instances and letting automation replace them with fresh ones, the resolution of problems and errors in the cloud dramatically improves.
Automated server provisioning works for both virtual machine instances in compute services like Amazon EC2 and container instances in Kubernetes environments like Google Kubernetes Engine. This automation enhances speed and reliability when launching, scaling, and repairing server instances, which is fundamental for most cloud-enabled applications. Furthermore, automated provisioning improves availability by easily replacing a smaller number of larger servers with a larger number of smaller servers, reducing the impact of failures.
Automation #3: Infrastructure Creation
Automated provisioning of servers alone won’t make your cloud application fully functional. To ensure your application is up and running, you need to provision load balancers, firewalls, network segments, databases, and other services it relies on, such as queues and caches. Manually setting up all the necessary components can be time-consuming, but automation techniques like infrastructure as code (IaC) streamline the process.
IaC allows you to specify your infrastructure setup in source code, typically a JSON or YAML file, which can be managed using traditional software version control systems like Git. By passing the codified infrastructure configuration through an automation tool, your infrastructure components are automatically provisioned, configured, and connected into a working network. Popular IaC tools include HashiCorp’s Terraform and AWS’s CloudFormation.
Automated infrastructure setup based on code management offers unique benefits, including change control, change tracking, and infrastructure code reuse. Leveraging IaC tools, cloud architects can create reliable, secure, and repeatable cloud patterns for infrastructure provisioning.
Automation #4: Code Deployment
Automated code deployment pipelines are crucial for cloud-enabled applications. Continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines enable automatic code deployment to production applications based on code checked into a software version control system like Git. Automated code deployments can be scheduled or triggered whenever changes are made to the code base.
Various tools, such as Jenkins, Bamboo, GitLab, CircleCI, and AWS CodeDeploy, enable automated code deployments. Cloud architects must choose the right automation strategy based on the organization’s development needs. However, virtually all sophisticated, cloud-architected applications rely on some form of automated code deployment.
Automation #5: Native Cloud Services
Many cloud services offer automated dynamic scaling, which is often overlooked as a type of automation. Services like Amazon Simple Queue Service (queuing), Amazon S3 (data storage), and Amazon DynamoDB (databases) utilize automation to manage the scaling needs of dynamic applications.
Cloud architects often prefer using these services instead of creating their own because they are simple, safe, reliable, easy to integrate, and automatic in functionality. By leveraging built-in automation, architects can take advantage of powerful scaling features offered by cloud services.
Cloud and Automation
Automation is a defining characteristic of the cloud, differentiating it from traditional data centers. While it’s possible to run applications in the cloud without automation, the real benefits come from embracing automation. It ensures greater consistency, reliability, security, scalability, and responsiveness for businesses.
Migrating an on-premises application to the cloud “as is” is straightforward but misses out on most cloud advantages. Building a truly cloud-enabled application requires a cloud architect who understands and utilizes automation. A skilled architect automates as much as possible, taking advantage of the power and potential of cloud automation. The most successful application deployments thrive on automation.
FAQs
Q: What are some common cloud automation techniques that cloud architects should use?
A: Cloud architects should automate scaling, server provisioning, infrastructure creation, code deployment, and take advantage of automation in native cloud services.
Q: How does automated server provisioning improve cloud applications?
A: Automated server provisioning enables quick and easy replacement of failing or compromised server instances, improving problem resolution and reducing mean time to resolution (MTTR) for many classes of problems and errors.
Q: What are the benefits of infrastructure as code (IaC)?
A: Infrastructure as code (IaC) allows for reliable, secure, and repeatable cloud patterns for infrastructure provisioning. It offers benefits like change control, change tracking, and infrastructure code reuse.
Q: Why is automated code deployment important for cloud applications?
A: Automated code deployment ensures that code changes are automatically applied to production applications based on changes made to the code base. It enables faster and more efficient software delivery.
Q: How does automation in native cloud services benefit cloud architects?
A: Native cloud services often include automated dynamic scaling, simplifying scaling needs for cloud architects and offering safe, reliable, and easy-to-integrate functionality.
Conclusion
Automation plays a crucial role in the success of cloud architecting. By automating scaling, server provisioning, infrastructure creation, code deployment, and leveraging native cloud services, cloud architects can design, build, and deploy highly efficient and reliable cloud applications. Embracing automation is key to unlocking the full potential of the cloud.