Automation in the era COVID-19: 4 tips for beginners| 27.06.2020
Life in times of a pandemic would be very different without public cloud solutions. Traditional data centers were never expanded as fast as today, and none of the most thorough
the planning could not have foreseen so explosive demand for it resources. Covering the pandemic, the media would be unable to cope with the current load, when literally the whole planet continuously
updates the news sites, hoping for good news. Medical and research centers, publishes charts of the spread of the virus would be unable to obtain such huge amounts of data so
quickly, as is happening now. Services video conferencing and streaming platforms would not have been able to serve the unprecedented until today, the number of users who suddenly
was forced to work from home.
What are public cloud computing? This automation is absolutely amazing, unique in the degree of organization, orderliness and scope (as well as
several other, equally important things).
Automation not only allows us to cope with the rapid growth of demand for public cloud services and corporate data centers. It helps organizations in
worldwide moving personnel to remote work, because without automation, companies have had to manually lift VPN on millions
laptops, tablets and smartphones.
And we are talking about automating not only the digital world. What about all those things that we, in isolation, obtained with the help of Internet-shops and courier services?
Without semi-automated warehouses and distribution centers all it would be impossible to deliver in an acceptable timeframe.
If you need to scale in terms of COVID-19 as quickly as possible, automation can help. What your company can do now
to accelerate and expand automation?
1. Focus on small/simple tasks, instead of large/complex
In the current situation, the investment should pay off faster than ever. But this is impossible if you focus on one large process with many intricate components that
never undergone standardization or automation. So you can only waste resources wasted and I have repeatedly witnessed such a debacle. So you should focus on
automation of an increasing number of small tasks.
The more small tasks you automate, the more experience you get and the more confident you will be able to use their automation system. At the same time you’ll develop a basis for automation
processes – the very building blocks that will be useful when working on more complex automation projects.
2. Learn what other automatiseret
When own experience is small, knowledge of the industry peers is invaluable. Search for how other automatiseret tasks similar to yours (for example, on Ansible Galaxy or at other venues, depending on which platform you use). Evaluate how the presented solutions
fit for your it environment, and what needs to change in order to adapt them under her.
3. Cycle approach programmers in automation
Some automation systems (e.g. Ansible) use scenario-based language, which is much
easier traditional programming languages in terms of understanding and writing code, and Troubleshooting. The simpler and clearer the language, the more people will be able to apply it in their fields
competence and the faster the investment will pay off.
But no matter how simple was the language of automation, it still does not protect from human errors. However, the risks can be reduced through best practices of software development. For example,
to consider the approval of automated processes or version control. The more important the automated environment, the more serious it is necessary to approach to its automation.
4. Think outside the box
It automation is usually associated with initializing and configuring servers in data centers. Although modern automation systems course is oriented to the solution of this problem, some
of them capable of more, and can provide invaluable assistance in managing networks, security intelligence and protection of it operations.
Automation helps you to configure hardware components in the network immediately upon commissioning. Automation helps you to deploy security where you need extra protection.
Automation helps to speed up the sort of security threats and attacks, which is especially important today, when the network is a large number of people and organizations.
Given the current difficulties for the open source community around the world to help fight COVID-19 in a variety of ways, from predicting the load on hospitals, the development of protective face
flaps and 3D printing fans to create a full
laboratoriesable to test up to 10 thousand tests per day.
Outstanding automation tools that we have today is also a merit of communities open source. For Example, Ansible
is completely open source and part of the top ten projects by the number of participants on GitHub, where, we recall, hosted more than 100 million projects.
And this is a huge community ready to help you start automation.
Pirelli Alessandro (Alessandro Perilli)
Automation
