How to Overcome Challenges of Cloud Automation

Top Cloud Automation Challenges Solved!

No company chooses a new IT service haphazardly. (At least, they shouldn’t!) A lot of thought goes into every new vendor, architecture, infrastructure, and automation solution. There are thousands – if not hundreds of thousands – of dollars that go into ensuring that systems are secure and have 100% uptime. The consequences of lapses in either can be dire.

Cloud automation is an emerging solution to the increasingly complex multi-cloud ecosystems; though, automation challenges abound especially at the beginning of the switch from admins to automation. Here are three hurdles technology leaders may face surrounding cloud automation and how the right automation solution can allay each concern.

Getting company buy-in

"Given these complexities, and the growing overhead seen in cloud management, we need to focus our automation on the human workflows. Only then will we be able to keep up with the complexity of modern cloud deployments and automation."

--Tom Hatch, Creator of Idem Project

While most have hung up their notions of the automaton autocracies portrayed in ’90s action films, some technology leaders may still receive pushback around automation. IT and cloud admins especially may feel wary about the security of their jobs.

To win the approval of employees, emphasize that cloud automation will not make them obsolete; rather, automation gives those employees the chance to expand their professional expertise, learn about new technology and contribute to tasks that work toward company goals. While maintenance and alert monitoring are important duties, it merely keeps the company from collapsing instead of excelling. Technology teams can offer advanced certifications to admins to prepare them for new and fulfilling roles. In the end, emphasize that automation doesn’t eliminate jobs. It creates them.

For finance team buy-in, the argument is simpler: cloud automation boosts efficiency. While automation may seem complicated at the outset, it leads to consistent, secure and mistake-free cloud management. The consistency is thanks to automation’s idempotence, or the ability to put out the same result no matter the state of the system. Additionally, cloud automation seeks to simplify operations. There’s only the perception that it’ll be more complicated. The less complex the cloud ecosystem is, the easier – and less expensive – it is to maintain, use and discover.

Vendor lock-in

Embarking upon automation for the first time can be intimidating, even for the most seasoned IT pro. Before committing to any one solution, companies must do a considerable amount of forward-thinking. For example, the optimal solution is one that’s scalable, doesn’t have vendor lock-in and will be cost effective in the long run.

An open-source cloud platform ensures that companies are never handcuffed to one single vendor. That allows cloud architecture teams to expand automation to other areas of IT and lets teams choose for themselves the best services and vendors for their company. Open source doesn’t denote a product that’s created in the basement of a coder shrouded by an anonymous GitHub username. Did you know that 100% of VMware software includes open source components? The open-source community is a brilliant one. It is a huge asset to any technology to leverage their talents.

Mountains of code

The more manual coding that needs doing by a human, the more error-prone a system is. That’s not to say that humans aren’t talented or that they’re careless. It’s just a fact that humans can’t (and shouldn’t) code for days on end. As each hour passes, fatigue waxes and focus wanes. The goal with any new automation effort is to limit the amount of coding needed to install, maintain, and update it. Just because someone works in IT doesn’t mean they know how to code.

The solution to chiseling away mountains of code is switching from infrastructure as code to infrastructure as data (IaD). IaD is another effort to simplify the cloud, which, again, makes it much easier to wrangle and explore.

Top cloud concerns, solved

According to one survey, security, lack of resources/expertise and managing cloud spend were the top three cloud concerns among more than 700 technology professional respondents.1 A sound cloud automation solution can jump all these hurdles!

Enter Idem Project: an open-source cloud automation solution that securely simplifies cloud systems and slashes cloud management spend. Idem delivers infrastructure as data, which sidesteps concerns over unequipped teams as very little coding is involved. It’s easy to install and the resulting simplified cloud is much more cost effective than large-scale cloud and API systems with expensive and vast codebases.

To learn more, check out Idem Project’s cloud media resources. Through engaging podcasts, videos, tutorials, and coding live streams, feel part of the Salt community and have fun getting to know Idem Project and the people behind it.

1Flexera, “State of the Cloud Report”