Chapter 8: Defining Automation Tools and Processes

One of the major advantages of cloud environments is the fact that we can automate almost anything. We don't want too many manual tasks in our cloud environment. We also want to automate as much as we can in the management of the infrastructure. How do we automate cross-cloud, what processes do we need to have in place, and who's going to be responsible for managing the automation templates?

This chapter will introduce the core principle of automation in abstracting environments in layers. We will look at the automation tools that are integrated with the platforms of the major providers: Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud. Next, we will study how we can design an automation process, starting with storing our source code in a single repository, and then we will apply version control to that code. We will also briefly discuss the main pitfalls when defining automation.

In this chapter, we're going to cover the following...