Overview of automation techniques

One of the fundamental benefits of cloud technologies is the ability to use code to describe and build your infrastructure. This is called Infrastructure as Code (IaC). You can use IaC techniques on-premises as well but often, you will be limited by physical restrictions such as running out of storage within your storage arrays or running out of physical CPU cores on your virtual machine coordinators (hypervisors, for example). While the same physical restrictions can impact a cloud deployment, a capacity outage on a cloud platform is extremely rare. Using IaC on-premises is also often complex due to a wide variety of technologies that do not use a command interface, programming language, or application programming interfaces (APIs).

IaC allows you to create code that can be run multiple times to create exact copies of the same infrastructure, which is extremely useful when you're creating test and development environments. You can use code...