types-of-automation.md

Types of Automation

Types of Automation

• Provisioning
• Configuration Management
• Application Deployment
• Security & compliance
• Orchestration

Provisioning

• The act of creating a server, network router, loadbalancer, etc. from some type of image
• Can be on bare metal or in cloud hosted virtualisation
• Example: Installation of centos image on a virtual host

Provisioning Tools

• Red Hat Kickstart
• [FAI](http://fai-project.org/)
• Debian Preseed
• Cobbler
• [Ansible](https://www.ansible.com)

Configuration Management

• Often synonomous with _automation_
• Determining the state that servers/applications should be in and making sure conditions are met
• Agentless vs Agents
• Often declarative syntax with DSL

Configuration Management Tools

• [Salt](https://saltstack.com)
• [Puppet](https://puppetlabs.com)
• [Chef](https://www.chef.io)
• [Ansible](https://www.ansible.com)

Application Deployment

• Take an artefact of development
  • Libraries
  • Executable code
• Place on platform of choice
• Make sure it runs

Application Deployment Tools

• [Fabric](https://www.fabfile.org/)
• [Capistrano](https://capistranorb.com/)
• [GoCD](https://thoughtworks.com/go)
• [Ansible](https://www.ansible.com)

Orchestration

• Concerned with automating workflows/processes
• Interconnecting components of an application
  • webservers
  • databases
  • message queues
  • application
• Make sure components function together as a unit

Orchestration tools

• AWS CloudFormation
• OpenStack Heat
• Hashicorp
• Red Hat CloudForms
• Docker
  • Kubernetes
  • Swarm
• Ansible

Security & Compliance

• Usually driven by some legislative or regulatory law
  • Designed to prevent unwanted disclosure, alteration or destruction of sensitive information
• PCI or government security standard compliance
• Often subject to audit
• Automation removes complexity of managing security in systems

Security & Compliance Tools

• Chef Inspec
• Goss (go)
• testinfra (python)
• Ansible