Automation 🤖 is a term for technology applications where human input is minimized 🦾🦿.
Definitely not this!
IT Automation 👨💻 is the process of creating software and systems to replace repeatable processes and reduce manual intervention. This IT automation is done mostly with the help of software to set up and repeat instructions, processes, or policies that save time and free up IT staff for more strategic work.
There are many advantages to automating IT tasks as long as it is done properly.
Let’s look at a few examples of modern day IT automation and/or orchestration:
→ Business Process Automation (BPA)
→ IT Process Automation (ITPA)
→ Infrastructure Automation (IaC)
• Business Process Automation (BPA):
Is the use of technology to automate repeatable, day-to-day tasks. It accelerates how work gets done. Most of the tools in this space are based on relatively simple logic flows of the type IFTTT (If this, then that). They are also often designed for non-technical people to use, which requires less/zero coding so they have front-ends/GUIs to help automate the workflows.
Ex: Power Automate Tool from Microsoft
• IT Process Automation (ITPA):
Is the automation of IT services, support, and administration into workflows in order to avoid the time and cost involved in manually managing them. Taking any IT-related task, and automating it using scripting tools and comprehensive software suites designed specifically to help automate IT tasks.
Ex: Password Reset – Thankfully, this was one of the first IT tasks to be automated. If a user forgets a password, it can be reset with a few clicks with no human intervention needed.
• Infrastructure Automation (IaC):
Is a relatively new phenomenon and allows companies to offload their network infrastructure configuration management (servers, databases, filesystems, disk storage, computational capability, firewalls, load balancers) to a hosting agent in the cloud. Obviously, this ability to rapidly and accurately duplicate and/or modify hundreds or thousands of cloud-based infrastructures is absolutely essential for any company trying to manage such resources.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) refers more to the idea of creating/maintaining/modifying cloud-based infrastructures based on well documented pieces of code or scripts. Push of a button you deploy the whole infrastructure need to host an application.
Ex: IaC is Terraform
Since Infrastructure as Code is relatively new in the market and people are getting acclimated to the new tools and strategies of creating/maintaining/modifying multi-cloud infrastructures. We need to spend time to distinguish the best tool for our need and pick up skills to use them.