Automation brings along several benefits, but, as manual operations give way to logical machines and decisions and actions are taken without direct human involvement, a number of dangers arise. Most importantly, automation introduces new types of errors. These are errors which have not been encountered in the specific environment until now.
Category: DevOps
Benefits of Automation
I tried to gather the automation benefits specifically for IT Infrastructure. Benefits can be small or large depending on the organization and the implementation. Automation is an investment, which requires cost, effort and good planning. Returns are not immediate, or may never come if automation is not planned correctly. The ultimate goal of automation is to eliminate human involvement. So, all benefits derive from reducing the human factor.
IT Automation Tiers
The term "auto-mation" comes from "(ε)αυτός", the Greek word for "self". Automating the IT infrastructure means making it capable of fullfiling its purpose without human involvement. In a 2015 report, Gartner talks about 3 IT automation tiers: IT tasks, IT services and IT processes. finally to processes. However, these 3 tiers are never static in real-life. We will amend Gartner's classification towards a continuous improvement model for automation in IT infrastructure:
Architect vs. Designer
The architect and the designed are two confused IT roles. They are used interchangeably, but they are essentially different for infrastructure and applications. There are many designers out there in IT, in infrastructure or software, but there are fewer architects. The Architect works with principles. He/she is not necessarily aware of technologies and tools, but rather defines the logic and how information will flow. The Designer works with technologies and frameworks, thus has to deal with technical limitations, restrictions.
Alexa controls the Cloud. Awesome, but…
I watched this video from Matt Dreyer's presentation in AWS re:Invent 2016, and then I saw "The Arrival", a film by Denis Villeneuve. In Matt's presentation, IT cloud infrastructure is controlled with natural language, as Alexa (an Amazon AI implementation) interprets the human speech to commands understood by the VMware cloud running on Amazon AWS. There are …
Next-Generation IT 