Automation in the AWS Cloud

Automation in the AWS Cloud

Automation is one of the most critical areas of next-generation IT services. Tasks such as scaling, code deployment, and system administration can be either fully automated or automated to the degree that introduces considerable benefits for your business.

Cloud automation helps eliminate human errors and repetitive manual tasks, make environments more consistent, and efficiently maintain IT infrastructure at scale.

Auto Scaling

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling is a technology that helps us ensure that we have the correct number of Amazon EC2 instances available to handle varying application loads.

We create a collection of EC2 instances, called Auto Scaling groups. Each group has the specified minimum and a maximum number of instances. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling ensures that the group never goes below or above the defined threshold. With scaling policies, Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling launches or terminates instances as the application's demand increases or decreases.

This process is entirely automatic, and once defined, Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling takes care of automatic scaling in the background. This functionality helps you have the right amount of resources for your varying workloads and keep your costs minimal.

DevOps

DevOps comes from the words 'development' and 'operations.' It is the combination of organizational structure, tools, and practices that help companies automate their code deployment.

AWS offers various DevOps tools such as AWS CodePipeline, AWS CodeBuild, AWS CodeDeploy, and AWS CodeStar.

The adoption of DevOps comes in three steps:

• DevOps Assessment - the analysis of the current situation; the goal is to identify critical pain points of an existing development workflow and propose the tools for code deployment automation;
• DevOps Automation - implementation of various tools for code deployment automation; the goal is to mitigate risk and increase productivity by automating end-to-end application delivery;
• DevOps Management - daily surveillance and workflow optimization; the goal is to ensure the flawless functioning of the delivery pipeline automation cycle.

Self-healing Infrastructure

System administrators are often cluttered with simple, manual, and repetitive tasks that solve issues detected by performance monitoring tools. These tasks include process restarts, resource cleanup, memory outage, and CPU utilization; they are very frequent and take up precious time. The size of various IT systems is increasing every day, and it's getting harder and harder for the system administrators to efficiently detect and fix problems distributed over IT systems. Automation of such tasks becomes critical to eliminate downtime and keep IT systems running without problems.

35% of all IT infrastructure problems can be fixed with automation; for an additional 40% of the issues, downtime can be reduced significantly by having better and more informative alerts. Generally, we can say that about 80% of all IT infrastructure issues need to be handled by automation.

Self-healing infrastructure can be accomplished by using three important components:

• Dynatrace,
• AWS Service Catalog,
• AWS Lambda.

Dynatrace AI detects and triggers a problem notification when something goes wrong; for example, a particular service becomes unavailable concerning the user's SLA agreement. The underlying issue can be simple, such as full disk, wrong configuration change, increased load, or a problem in depending service.

AWS Service Catalog creates and manages catalogs of services that are approved for use by a system administrator.

Lambda runs the code needed to fix the problem. For example, by using the AWS Service Catalog, the code can add more disk resources to the existing instance when the disk is full.

Conclusion

There are a lot of options to use automation in the AWS cloud. The use of Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling helps keep the right amount of IT resources based on varying computing needs. DevOps tools eliminate manual code deployment tasks and save a lot of time in the software delivery process. Self-healing infrastructure is achieved by combining various tools for detection, computing, and provisioning. In the end, all of these automation features help save precious time and money, eliminate errors and downtime, and help you focus on the important things that add value to your business.

As an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, we help companies build a fully automated, cost-effective, and performance-efficient AWS cloud environment based on their specific needs.

If you want to know more about cloud migration, cloud technology in general, AWS cloud, or you want to try AWS services:

• visit our cloud migration service page;
• give us a call at +385 1 3141 562;
• contact our sales department at sales@sedmiodjel.com.

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