Automating legacy technology and processes using cloud services is a sound strategy in theory and many businesses have increased their competitive edge by doing just that. IT Automation minimises the risk of human error or inconsistency and allows a business to reduce the time it spends on repetitive IT administration tasks. Automation also enables applications and services to be developed and delivered much quicker. In fact, Gartner estimates that the Application Release Orchestration (ARO) market grew by an estimated 37.5% in 2017, taking what they call the Delivery Automation: ARO market size to over £200million globally.
It’s not all plain sailing though. Moving systems and processes that were built to be on-premise to the cloud for automation, is often difficult. Sometimes the benefits of automation can’t be realised, because the complex processes reduce productivity and negate any gains you may have made.
So how do businesses take advantage of automation technology to make sure they’re running their operations in as lean and efficient way as possible?
Enter RedHat Ansible Tower; the result of a collaboration between RedHat and AWS and an automation solution that allows businesses to harness the power of the public cloud to provision the resources it needs, develop applications in the cloud and simplify configuration file management. In addition, it allows businesses to deploy and manage applications more easily, secure the infrastructure and orchestrate multiple configurations and environments making sure that the necessary storage, networks and databases are in place to support new applications.
Being open source, users of this solution benefit from the large network of developers and open source communities that RedHat has cultivated and many different deployments that are outlined in easy, repeatable playbooks.
But does it matter if you choose a solution which requires agents, or one that is agentless? Actually, yes and especially in the cloud, where agentless technology is faster and easier to implement, is compatible with a broader range of systems and applications and the risks associated with upgrades are minimised as they can be rolled out to the entire system in one go.
RedHat Ansible Tower is an agentless solution that works across a businesses’ entire AWS environment, giving visibility and control over to the business, via a visual dashboard. Applications can be built and deployed continuously in the cloud, with a series of playbooks to speed up and simplify the process. Resources can be provisioned wherever and whenever needed, and the whole set of configurations can be orchestrated from the same dashboard.
With role-based access policies providing control over who sees and can manage what, and custom security policies that will automatically be implemented when new applications or servers are provisioned, security and compliance is built in from start to finish.
Systems Administrators who were previously spending all their time running complex, manual processes to update and provision their environments and developing and deploying applications are now free to focus on core business initiatives. Administration overheads reduce, productivity improves and no time is wasted in getting applications to market. As a result, it’s true to say that agentless automation helps the whole business become more competitive.
Useful Links
Top 5 Challenges of Automating the Software Delivery Pipeline
5 Ways Agentless IT Automation Can Benefit Your Business
Agent vs. agentless: Monitoring choices for diverse IT ops needs
An initiation into infrastructure automation tools and methods