The benefits of automating cloud workloads

There is one common attribute for workloads that do meet the ROI test for moving to the cloud, whether they are to remain a collection of nodes, or get transformed into micro services and packaged/deployed as containers. These workloads are always worth automating. Automation allows an organization to consistently and effortlessly create multiple identical environments for the workload (e.g. test, staging, production), making it far safer to test changes before they are rolled into production.

In addition, automation unlocks the ability to easily move the workload to different availability zones or regions. Using platform-neutral automation tools extends this portability benefit across cloud providers, or even back to API-driven hyper-converged infrastructure running on-premises, providing maximum flexibility in the choice of deployment environment. The benefits of reproducibility and portability are critical in reducing the manual, error-prone, time-consuming, expensive work involved in standing up a workload. Portability also mitigates the threat of vendor lock-in, thereby significantly increasing the agility of the organization.

Last but not least, automation allows the organization to “bake in” its standards around security, policy enforcement, compliance, and governance into every workload, thereby increasing the consistency and safety of each of the workloads it runs in the cloud.