Cloud Automation to remove uncertainty and systematic risk

For years I’ve been attracted to and have been practicing with different Automation platforms within the Cloud. This is driven by both my affinity to seeing code turn into action, and also how that action drives Applications and the business outcomes delivered by these Applications. Recently I was asked by a customer on why they should invest in automation, if they can just do it manually once and move on? My answer included multiple components, one that I’d like to expand on today is Automation is a mechanism to reduce uncertainty and ultimately systematic business risk.

Applications are the revenue generators for business, these are supported by cloud infrastructure, 3rd party platforms such Directory Services, and other platforms such as security providers designed to keep risk out and the applications running. Cloud Automation is an approach to filter risk and reduce uncertainty within the enterprise, driving quality of services higher and also certainty in generating revenue. ?

Cloud Automation makes it easier to manage and scale these supporting systems without the need for human oversight or action; making it easier to manage application supporting systems at large scale. For example managing the lifecycle of 300,000 workloads that support application globally. Automation removes the risk from the system via multiple methods including:

Eliminating Human Error: Automation leads to fewer human introduced errors by automating routine tasks, and tasks with significant complexity. Many times Cloud platforms will require significant configurations and precedence of execution, operating such a system especially in production introduces significant risk. For example one of the platforms I automate has 400+ configurations required, expressed in the right order, and without errors for the system to be patched. What if during such an update someone simply mistypes a DNS configuration ? Such misconfiguration can and will bring down availability of all the applications hosted on the platform. Automating these steps has saved hundreds of hours per instance, and guarded against the risk of critical systems crashing in production; ensuring critical systems are always updated safely and protected against downtime.

Reducing Downtime: Downtime is a key performance indicator (KPI) for most CIOs and applications teams. Automation can help these KPIs significantly, by reducing or eliminating the risks associated with lifecycle and management of the Cloud platform and related systems. For example one of the automated daemons we run at customers is automated validation of all integrated systems end to end. ?The daemon enables Operations teams to quickly detect and respond to issues before they can cause major application disruption further upstream, reducing risk of, and keeping critical business applications generating revenue. ??

Identifying Spots of Failure: Typically folks have heard of Single Point of Failure (SPOF), in a production Cloud platform though there are multiple points for failure which could lead to application outages or platform downtime. For example someone rotates a credential relied on by integrated systems, which then leads to the system failure causing an outage and an operational challenge. Automating the smoke-test of the systems mentioned earlier will highlight both failures that can occur and the cascading impact they’ll have on the platform or applications. Ultimately providing deeper visibility into your application supply-chain, and better inform your operations teams on where to check when failures occur.

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Reduce Management Costs: From a business perspective, building and running applications are core to revenue generation, revenue recognition, and operating margins. Costs of managing the cloud platforms and applications have a direct impact on these three key priorities, automating the cloud platform, the lifecycle of the platform, and operations are a great way to reduce the cost of management. This reduction can come in many forms, such as the human capital required to manage the platform, any compression actions that can be taken to operate the platform, and the scale at which cloud platforms and applications be supported globally per operations employee. In a different write up, I will further explore the positive impact of automation on business metrics, and also a way to measure automatable operations via an Automation Ratio.

Reducing Systematic Risks within a Business: Application availability is critical to revenue generation, outages and application downtime affect aggregate outcomes for a business. Such outages impact not just revenue but also Operational Costs associated with recovery, and possible Compliance Penalties; leading to outages becoming systematic risks for a business. Automation of the Cloud platform and Applications mentioned above can help in reducing such systematic risks, where automated systems can catch the small errors that lead to larger outages. Initially the costs of automating might seem larger than the costs for manual execution, though over any significant timeline and scale, automation will deliver a large Return on Investment, especially when considering automation as a systematic risk reducer.

In summary Automation is a critical component of reducing risk and uncertainty from lifecycle, operations, and business aspects of Cloud Platforms and Applications that they support. Reduction of routine tasks, workflows, risks related to downtime, and scalability can drive business growth of Revenue Generating Applications, while improving financial efficiency.?If your business hasn’t yet considered Automation for your Cloud platform as a risk and uncertainty reducing function, now is the time to consider implementing automation within the business.

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