IT automation not only increases efficiency and speed, it also solves the problem of staff shortages
A paradigm shift towards agile development has been taking place in software development for some years now. This shift has an impact on the lifecycle of services. Today, Time to Market (Time to Profit) is the most important factor. This means that IT operations must be more flexible and faster. This is either at the expense of quality or must be intercepted by external employees (costs).
The primary goal of classic IT processes is data and information security. Infrastructures are designed to operate long-lasting services securely and to monitor their function and, if necessary, to rectify errors as quickly as possible.
Increasing the speed of classic IT processes usually means making compromises in data and IT security. Administrators offten use scripts to speed up recurring tasks. This results in isolated solutions that can be used more or less flexibly and create problems with the documentation of results.
Configuration management systems are the ideal solution. Ansible, puppet, chef are examples of such configuration management systems. They are a central component of IT automation. These systems define a desired state and provide ‘scripts’ to reach this state.
Both the state definition and the application schematics must be considered as software and maintained in a source code management system. Further elements from the software development can be integrated for optimization:
The biggest challenge of IT automation is a holistic concept that can map different use cases. If this concept is missing, isolated solutions are created again and thus reducing efficiency.
Further challenges are:
