What is cloud automation?
Cloud automation uses software to configure, deploy, provision, and manage cloud computing resources and infrastructure. The purpose of cloud automation is to reduce the need for human intervention in these processes, so they’re faster, more efficient, and less error prone.
Cloud computing
Cloud computing is the act of running workloads within clouds—which are IT environments that abstract, pool, and share scalable resources across a network. Neither cloud computing nor clouds are technologies unto themselves.
- Cloud computing is an act—the function of running a workload in a cloud.
- Clouds are environments—places where applications run.
- Technologies are things—software and hardware used to build and use clouds.
Automation
Automation is the use of technology to perform tasks with reduced human assistance. Automation helps you accelerate processes and scale environments, as well as build continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment (CI/CD) workflows. There are many kinds of automation, including IT automation, business automation, robotic process automation, industrial automation, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning.
Why automate clouds?
Hybrid and multicloud environments add an additional layer of complexity to infrastructure, network, application, and user administration. IT teams need to manage both on-site and cloud-based environments, often using specialized management tools for each. As a result, it can be nearly impossible to effectively maintain, track, scale, and secure resources and applications by hand. Automation can unite hybrid and multicloud management under a single set of processes and policies to improve consistency, scalability, and speed.
Red Hat resources
What cloud management processes can be automated?
Scale multiclouds
Multicloud is a cloud approach made up of more than 1 cloud service, from more than 1 cloud vendor—public or private. Each cloud provider offers specific tools for operating and managing their own cloud resources. These tools rarely interoperate directly with each other, requiring IT teams to provision, administer, and maintain each cloud differently. Automation can help you manage multicloud environments more consistently. You can create automation assets that codify resources across all of your clouds and offer a single application programming interface (API) for a given operation, regardless of the cloud involved.
Integrate hybrid clouds
Hybrid cloud is an IT architecture that incorporates some degree of workload portability, orchestration, and management across 2 or more environments. This variety can make it difficult for IT teams to integrate and consistently support both cloud infrastructures. A flexible automation platform lets you apply the same automation code to existing on-site systems, current cloud resources, and future assets—ensuring consistency and providing a layer of operational integration.
Govern efficiently
Cloud governance is the process of defining, implementing, and monitoring a framework of policies that facilitate consistent performance of cloud services and systems. As cloud environments can quickly scale beyond manual control capabilities, automation makes efficient governance possible. With a unified automation platform, IT teams can optimize infrastructure and resource usage, maintain business continuity, and enforce compliance across an organization.
Orchestrate automated tasks
Cloud orchestration is the process of organizing the automation of cloud management tasks into higher-order workflows. By condensing disparate automation tasks—across teams and domains—into more efficient end-to-end workflows, organizations can eliminate provisioning errors, ensure consistent communication between applications and infrastructure, and enforce governance policies across their hybrid cloud.
Which companies have automated their clouds?
Datacom
Datacom transformed its service offerings with automation, streamlining internal operations. This provided customers with a flexible platform that can adapt over time in hybrid cloud environments and led to 20% higher operational efficiency.
Ascend Money
Ascend Money built an automated central application development and deployment platform. This simplified operations across geographies, increased consistency and scale, and reduced the time it takes to perform tasks by 57%.
Why Red Hat?
Because no matter what type of cloud you deploy your workloads on, those workloads should be deployed with open source technology. A Red Hat® Ansible® Automation Platform subscription provides open source innovation—hardened for the enterprise—with all the tools, services, training, and support you need to automate your enterprise at hybrid cloud scale. And your cloud deployments will be highly compatible across the most popular infrastructure vendors and cloud providers.
With that kind of interoperability, you can use the same automation platform, playbook, or module across every cloud platform you use. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform can help you extend automation to private clouds, on-premise data centers, edge locations, and other public clouds—wherever you do business.
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