What is Cloud Automation?

Cloud automation is the process of using tools and scripts to streamline how cloud-based infrastructure and applications operate. It is about lending automation into a lot of tasks, such as configuring cloud environments, managing cloud workloads, or provisioning servers (no more manually provisioning servers), thus accelerating efficiency, saving time, eliminating errors, and improving consistency. 

Businesses can use cloud automation to guarantee peak performance and reduce downtime during high traffic periods. This is one of its most common use-cases since it automatically scales resources up or down as needed. This also applies to routine activities like software patching, security upgrades, backups, and monitoring. They can run automatically in the background, freeing up IT teams to concentrate on more crucial tasks like strategy and innovation. 

When we talk about tools, we refer to tools like AWS CloudFormation, Azure Resource Manager and Ansible. The first two help users provision, manage, and deploy AWS and Azure resources respectively, while Ansible automates IT processes like configuration management, application deployment, and provisioning. Through this approach, IT teams can define and manage their entire cloud environment, where changes can be tracked, so that they are replicated or rolled back as required.

Since a large part of cloud automation involves dynamically scaling resources up and down to match demand, you'll find that it also supports cost optimization (since unnecessary expenses are avoided during off-peak hours). 

So, as you can see, automation via cloud is hard to ignore, and it is essential for any business that wants to stay competitive and embrace agility and customer satisfaction.