Why it's important to automate your infrastructure
Automation with regards to infrastructure is an expansive topic, and it easily deserves a book of its own. In fact, there are not only books dedicated to it but entire online courses as well. There are many different utilities you can use, each with their own pros and cons. We have configuration management tools, such as Ansible, Chef, and Puppet. We looked at Ansible earlier in the book and worked through some examples to see how powerful it is. When we worked with that earlier, I'm sure you immediately saw the benefit—not having to build a solution manually is a beautiful thing.
The importance of not having to build solutions manually cannot be overstated. Perhaps the most obvious benefit is the fact that it can save you hours, or even days of work. When I first started working in IT, setting up servers was always a manual task. Sure, you could create a Bash script and automate some tasks that way, but...
