4 real-world examples of cloud automation

Cloud automation is unlocking major business value for organizations large and small — with three-quarters of companies reporting that they've experienced higher revenue and profitability.

Wondering what cloud automation is? Check out our blog.

Let's take a quick look at four real-world examples of cloud automation in action.

1. Netflix

Cloud automation is an essential part of "DevOps," a software engineering culture that emphasizes close collaboration between development and operations to further encourage flexibility and agility. Netflix is one of the leading proponents of DevOps, and cloud automation plays a key role.

When rolling out new changes to the Netflix website, developers save their changes in a deployable web image, which then receives part of the site's traffic once it goes live. If the new code creates performance issues, users will be routed back to earlier versions of the site, without disrupting their activities.

Thanks to cloud automation, Netflix enjoys near-continuous availability and a seriously fast rate of deployment.

2. Amazon

Amazon is a great example of "dogfooding" (when companies make use of their own product). In 2010, Amazon migrated its operations from its physical on-premises servers to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.

Since the move, Amazon has leveraged the benefits of the cloud to serve its millions of customers more intelligently. For example, the company uses a provisioning system that can automatically scale capacity up or down depending on the current amount of traffic. Amazon also uses cloud automation to propagate new software deployments across its tens of thousands of servers.

Related: 4 public cloud trends to watch for

3. Walmart

In the effort to catch up with Amazon in the e-commerce market, Walmart has adopted the twin strategies of cloud automation and DevOps. The company made waves when it released the OneOps open source cloud platform for deploying applications across multiple cloud providers.

Walmart first began automating its cloud resources by working on its server-build processes, aiming to bring automation to its entire distributed compute environment: corporate servers, public clouds, distribution centers, and stores. By using the configuration management software, Puppet, Walmart was able to organize more than 55,000 nodes under a single Puppet instance.

4. Facebook

As the king of Web 2.0, Facebook is also part of the cloud automation bandwagon. Facebook relies on the open source tool, Opscode, to automatically deploy its servers and scale its applications. In addition, Facebook moved its entire infrastructure and back-end IT to the Chef configuration management software in order to facilitate the process of cloud automation.

With hundreds of millions of users, Facebook depends on cloud automation to intelligently deploy software, rolling it out across thousands of servers worldwide while ensuring the website's continuous availability in order not to disrupt operations.

Final Thoughts

Cloud automation isn't a theoretical concept—it's a real tactic that world-class organizations are using right now to boost their revenue, agility, and efficiency. For more information about how cloud automation can benefit your business, speak with a knowledgeable, experienced managed cloud provider.

Recent Posts