Cheaper infrastructure and easy scaling have promoted a drastic growth in the adoption of the public cloud. Consecutively rapid public cloud adoption has caused the need for cloud infrastructure automation to rise.
Teams require quick provisional infrastructure to automate tasks. A process that initially took longer with traditional data centers.
This article will quickly highlight the cutting-edge cloud automation tools making infrastructure automation easy to use and learn.
Top Cloud Infrastructure Automation Services
Cloud infrastructure must provide you with in-depth overviews of application service performance. Doing this helps users make effective business decisions and harness the total capacity of cloud infrastructure automation.
AWS Cloud Formation
CloudFormation (AWS) services help businesses set up Amazon Web Services resources save on the time spent managing resources focused on AWS’s applications.
You don’t need to create and configure AWS resources individually. All you do is underline all the AWS resources you want (Amazon EC2 instances or Amazon RDS DB instances). Cloudformation handles the provisioning and configuring of the resources for you.
Key Features of AWS Cloud Formation Include:
- Improved Automation: The template allows you to underline the layout of your resources and eliminates the need for other scripting and resource creation tools.
- Fast Infrastructure Replication: You can replicate your infrastructure smoothly without affecting other resources created within your template. The template allows the creation of as many stacks as required.
- Consistent Infrastructure: Template declaration and pre-definition also enhances consistency. It assures users that stacks created within a template remain identical.
- Easy-to-read Template: Yaml and JSON are widely used, especially in the web application or micro-service space. Therefore it’s easier to understand or find resources.
There are three fundamental concepts you must keep in mind when using CloudFormation:
Template
A template highlights the rules for defining your resources as a YAML or JSON file. Users can use templates to deploy resources using the console or command-line interface (CLI).
ChangeSet
Allows you to quickly run updates on the stack and let AWS handle the replacement of necessary resources. ChangeSet gives users the ability to see the impact of applied changes before actually implementing them.
Stack
When a template gets deployed, both resources, EIP and EC2, are taken as a stack. The resources get created as a unit, with all updates and deletions applied to the stack. You can create multiple stacks with a single template as long as they are named differently.
Kubernetes
There is rapid adoption of containers among businesses across different industries. This development has made Kubernetes, a software with container-centric management, the deployment standard for operating containerized applications.
Kubernetes arises from long-term transformative contributions from the google open source community. It helps create and manage google containerized workloads. Google’s internal cluster management system influences the containerized system to help make everything associated with deploying and managing applications easy.
Kubernetes improves business reliability by providing automated container orchestration to reduces the time and resources required for daily operations.
Key Features of Kubernetes cloud infrastructure automation include:
Automated Operation: Kubernetes has built-in commands that manage most of the computing requirements around application management. You can ensure that business applications are always running as intended by automating day-to-day operations.
- Infrastructure Abstraction: Installing Kubernetes enhances the handling of computing, networking, and storage for your workloads. It allows users to focus on business applications and operational alone.
- Service Health Monitoring: The Kubernetes cloud infrastructure automation system runs continuous health checks for your services. It restarts failed containers and making services available to users only when running.
Ansible
Ansible automation services can handle environments hosted on traditional servers, virtualization platforms, or a cloud platform. It enhances the configuration-wide systems and devices, including databases, storage devices, networks, firewalls, etc.
Primarily, Ansible can help you automate three varieties of tasks:
- Application Deployment: You can further simplify DevOps by automating the production deployment of internally developed application systems.
- Configuration Management: You can easily change the configuration of applications, OS, or connected devices; start/Stop services; install applications or updates; implement a security policy, or perform a wide variety of other configurations.
- Provisioning: You have the seamless capacity to set up various servers needed to operate business infrastructure.
Best of all, you don’t need to know the commands used to accomplish some task. You specify the state you want the system to achieve, and Ansible does the rest.
Chef
Chef is one of the oldest, best-known infrastructure automation tools released. It scales easily and can manage thousands of servers while facilitating consistent delivery and configuration management.
Chef converts infrastructure to code automatically to enable IT cloud automation of infrastructure development, deployment, and management.
Key Features of Chef Include:
- Use of reusable definitions to automate tasks
- Predefined resources and building blocks
- Code testing using isolated environments before official production deployment
- Automated security and compliance testing
- Infrastructure management, auditing, and troubleshooting dashboards
Puppet
Puppet is available both in open source and commercial offerings, and it has its language (eponymous Puppet.)
Puppet automates changes and eliminates manual scripting using a declarative, model-based approach to define infrastructure code and implement system configuration with programs. It’s not another shell language, like Windows’ PowerShell or Linux’s Bash shells.
You can seamlessly define high-level user, application, and service concepts, translated into operating system and software configuration instructions.
Everything gets modeled as data, and each Puppet-managed server instance receives a catalog of resources and relationships to compare with the desired system state. Necessary changes get made to manage the compliance of the system.
SaltStack
SaltStack helps make infrastructure easy to use by creating quick, easy to use, and scalable software. SaltStack provides dynamic communication and orchestration buses for configuration management and remote execution.
Also, SaltStack has been amongst the most active and fastest-growing cloud infrastructure automation projects developed globally.
Key Features of SaltStack include:
- Continuous code deployment and integration
- Multi-cloud Orchestration
- Instant security policy auditing
- Data filtering and event aggregation to promote efficient data management
- Agentless or Resilient running
Terraform
Terraform provides a multi-cloud, open-source, Infrastructure as Code software written in Go Language using HashiCorp Config Language. Users can use a command-line tool to access infrastructure using different platforms and services, including IBM, AWS, GCP, Azure, OpenStack, VMware. Etc.
A plugin-based model helps provide support to providers and provisioners to enhance their capacity to support almost any API service. Terraform is a cloud-agnostic tool that defines infrastructure as code. Users can seamlessly build complex, version-controlled, collaborative, disposable systems with high productivity.
It provides built-in dependencies that handle automatic provisioning of infrastructure on the public and private cloud consecutively.
Configuration management and server template services define the code that runs using each connected server. Provisioning tools help create servers, databases, caches, load balancers, queues, monitoring, subnet configurations, firewall settings, routing rules, SSL certificates, and almost every aspect surrounding your cloud computing infrastructure.
Key Takeaway
All infrastructure automation tools have their learning curves, strengths, and weaknesses. Thus, you’ll do your best to find the tool that best suits your project and team’s needs. Be keen on doing your homework to find the instrument with precisely what you need. In some instances, you may find that the best approach is combining two or more cloud automation tools.