Automating infrastructure

During failures or spikes in load, you do not want to be provisioning resources, identifying and deploying the right version of the application, configuring parameters (for example, database connection strings), and so on. Hence, you need to invest in creating ready-to-launch machine images, centrally storing application configuration parameters, and booting new instances quickly by bootstrapping your instances. In addition, you will need to continuously monitor your system metrics to dynamically take actions such as auto scaling.

It is possible to automate almost everything on the cloud platform via APIs and scripts, and you should attempt to do so. This includes typical operations, deployments, automatic recovery actions against alerts, scaling, and so on. For example, your cloud service may also provide an auto-healing feature. You should leverage this feature to ensure failed/unhealthy instances are replaced and restarted with the original configurations.

There...