Understanding the World of Cloud Automation

First, we must understand what automation means. In layman's terms, we can say that automation is to automate or process something without requiring any human intervention.

Once we have automated the process, it will perform all the activity automatically as per the flow or sequence.

We all know that manual activity is prone to errors and mistakes. To eliminate this, we automate the process using different tools. Automation not only eliminates errors and mistakes, but also saves time and costs.

We are in the era of the cloud, where automation is the utmost requirement everywhere. Organizations are now focused toward automation for improving quality of service while at the same time saving on costs and time.

DevOps is a combination of the following two words:

• Development: This denotes the development of applications 
• Operations: This denotes the management of applications

Earlier, we had different employees who performed different sets of activities, as we had separate employees for each workload, and everyone worked in sync to deliver the optimum performance. 

There are many organizations who have an operations team to manage and support their application because the software development team does not have experience with infrastructure.

However, in the cloud, every service is API based, which means they can be accessed using programming language or can be embedded into code. So here, the word DevOps is coined, where one person can play the role of developer as well as managing operations.

For automation, DevOps people use automation tools and the automation process. Here, popular DevOps tools are Chef, Puppet, Jenkins, GitHub, Selenium, and so on.

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

• DevOps
• The need of automation
• Infrastructure as a Code
• Configuration management
• Automate deployment—AWS OpsWorks

Now, let's understand DevOps in depth.