Automation Introduction for Private Cloud recap

Earlier this year we looked at how to turn a business need into a piece of code to be used as part of an automation or orchestration workflow.

This (very) brief article is to briefly summarise the whole series in one easy-to-find place.

1. Defining the high level business problem and breaking it down into smaller subtasks was the focus of the first article.
2. The focus of the second article was to find the right tool for the job for our use case of efficient data-copy management. This gave us a few lines of PowerShell that made use of some Tintri REST APIs and Tintri’s space-efficient SyncVM feature.
3. Our third installment looked at the concept of modularity. This allowed us to write one piece of code that could then be reused many times over without modification.
4. We looked at separating the code from the configuration in our fourth part in the series. This allows us to start to safely delegate management of automated tasks to folks that may not need access to the code itself.
5. Article number 5 finished up by spending time looking at the importance of error handling in our automation. We wouldn’t normally leave this to the end when developing something, but it’s a topic that deserved an article of its own.

Extending upon that, we’re moving into articles on using our automation within Orchestration frameworks for delegation and self-service. Keep an eye out for those.