Achieving Scalability in Cloud Operations (AWS/GCP/Azure) through Infrastructure Automation

Cloud operations (CloudOps) is the process of provisioning, managing, and maintaining cloud infrastructure components in platforms such as AWS, GCP, and Azure. It plays a crucial role in ensuring the scalability of your environments.

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Effective CloudOps strategies maximize app performance, improve long-term reliability, and optimize your infrastructure's cost efficiency. But how can you build a CloudOps implementation that achieves this, even when multiple cloud services are involved?

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In this guide, we'll discuss leading tools and techniques for enhancing scalability through cloud infrastructure automation. We'll focus on processes including Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) that simplify cloud operations by centralizing workflows. This unlocks easier scaling that suffers from fewer errors and inconsistencies.

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Why You Need Automation to Scale Cloud Operations

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It's hard to scale cloud operations when you're reliant on manual processes to provision infrastructure, make config changes, and enforce compliance policies in different environments. Commonly cited issues with traditional CloudOps include:

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• Poor visibility into what's running: It's tedious to monitor infrastructure resources in different environments without switching between tools and systems. Scaling up to more resources can be overwhelming.
• Unable to scale infrastructure when required: Lack of automation prevents you from dynamically scaling infrastructure based on demand, leading to performance slowdowns and cost inefficiencies.
• No central enforcement of security and compliance policies: Without a dedicated management layer, critical compliance policies must be manually enabled in each cloud platform. This poses a risk of oversights occurring as you scale up to more environments.
• Complicated developer access and onboarding mechanisms: Standard CloudOps implementations are designed for the needs of platform teams and operators, but developers increasingly need infrastructure access too. Clunky access control mechanisms make it harder to scale your infrastructure and accelerate software delivery throughput.

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Replacing legacy CloudOps with automated processes solves these problems. Automating key workflows including infrastructure provisioning, compliance management, and developer access empowers you to scale your infrastructure whenever you need, via IaC, CI/CD, and dedicated cloud management tools.

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For example, you could dynamically provision new compute instances in response to user demand, or provide a self-service workflow that instantly provisions new cloud resources for developers to use. This flexibility improves outcomes for everyone involved with your project: infrastructure operators, engineers, and end users.

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How to Implement Infrastructure Automation to Scale Cloud Operations?

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Infrastructure automation underpins the scalability of cloud operations. It's achieved by combining IaC tools with CI/CD-driven processes:

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• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Allows you to define infrastructure components as versioned code files. This makes it easy to review changes, rollback failures, and replicate new changes across different environments at scale.
• Continuous Integration and Delivery (CI/CD): The process of automatically testing and applying new IaC changes, as soon as they're committed to your repository. It prevents the conflicts, inconsistencies, and access control issues that occur at scale when DevOps teams have to manually run IaC tools.

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Applying IaC configs within a CI/CD pipeline provides the basic framework for improving CloudOps scalability. However, conventional CI/CD solutions like GitHub Actions, GitLab CI/CD, and CircleCI aren't designed for infrastructure workflows. Whereas app delivery pipelines are usually stateless, IaC tools like Terraform and Pulumi must store your infrastructure's state between pipeline runs. IaC also requires precise access management, monitoring, and security and compliance controls so you can reliably operate your infrastructure at scale.

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Modern IaC orchestration solutions like Spacelift and Env0 are designed to solve this problem. They automate your infrastructure workflows by connecting directly to the Git repositories that store your IaC code. After you push commits, the platform automatically runs your IaC tool to apply your infrastructure changes. You don't have to manually configure any complex pipeline scripts to provision and maintain your AWS, GCP, and Azure resources.

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Benefits of using an IaC orchestration solution include:

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• Automated infrastructure deployments: Infrastructure changes apply automatically after you commit changes to your repository. You don't have to run tools locally and there's no need to manually configure traditional CI/CD pipeline scripts.
• Safe rollbacks and recoveries: You can easily restore previous configurations by reverting commits that trigger failures. This helps optimize infrastructure availability at scale.
• No conflicts: IaC orchestrators manage infrastructure state for you. They prevent two changes from applying at the same time, avoiding nasty conflicts in busy environments. It's often challenging or impossible to enforce concurrency constraints when using traditional CI/CD.
• Integrated drift detection capabilities: Platforms like Spacelift include built-in drift detection capabilities. Regular scans of your live infrastructure identify differences compared to the IaC files in your repository. Problems will be flagged and fixed much sooner, helping prevent resources from silently becoming misconfigured.
• Continual compliance using Policy-as-Code: Granular code-defined security and compliance policies let you tightly govern your infrastructure, even when there's thousands of users and resources involved. You can precisely manage access to different infrastructure components and configure which changes are allowed.

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You can use this strategy to automate your infrastructure processes with any major cloud provider. Leading clouds like AWS, GCP, and Azure are well-supported by IaC tools, CI/CD services, and infrastructure management platforms. If you're using another cloud provider, you can still expect to find good IaC compatibility, but your orchestration options may be more limited.

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Individual cloud providers also offer their own automation solutions. For instance, AWS CloudFormation lets you prepare templates for infrastructure resources that you can then provision on-demand. GCP and Azure offer similar services called Deployment Manager and Resource Manager respectively.

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Cloud provider tools offer a useful automation starting point, but they're inherently narrower in focus than a cloud-agnostic solution like Spacelift or Env0. This impedes CloudOps scalability because combining infrastructure from multiple clouds is often one of the most effective ways to boost performance and cut costs. Conversely, general-purpose IaC tools managed in an orchestration platform make multi-cloud infrastructure a reality. They empower you to manage every infrastructure task in one place. You can centrally monitor your resources, automate provisioning processes, and enforce governance policies—all without constantly switching between different admin interfaces.

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Implementing Infrastructure Automation for Cloud Scalability: Key Steps

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Looking for some actionable steps towards improving cloud scalability through infrastructure automation? Here's your five-point guide to getting started.

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1. Choose your IaC tool. Evaluate different options, such as Terraform and Pulumi, to find the best fit for your team, processes, and cloud providers.
2. Write your IaC configs. Use the config languages and APIs provided by your IaC solution to describe the required state of your infrastructure components, then commit your files to your repository.
3. Connect an IaC orchestration solution. Choose from platforms such as Spacelift, Env0, and Atlantis to run your IaC tool automatically, as you modify your config files.
4. Configure team access and policy-as-code rules: Add your team members to the platform so everyone can safely perform IaC interactions, without needing their own cloud credentials. Set up security and compliance policies to block unsafe changes that would cause infrastructure to become misconfigured.
5. Continue to scale by regularly reviewing your configuration. Once you've implemented the basics, you should be optimally positioned to continue scaling your cloud operations. You can connect new cloud environments, centrally monitor provisioned resources, and enforce compliance requirements using your orchestration solution. All infrastructure changes will run through one consistent workflow, triggered by merging pull requests into your IaC repository.

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This is a high-level guide that's ready to adapt to your requirements. The final steps to take will vary depending on the size of your organization and the infrastructure components you use. Book a consultation with Semantive's cloud transformation planning specialists if you'd like customized guidance on how to adopt IaC.

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Comparing IaC and Automation Tools

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There's a plethora of tools to choose from when implementing, automating, and scaling IaC workflows. Here's a quick summary of some of our favorites, but remember that other alternatives could be a better fit for your needs. These options cover many different use cases, so check out our notes on each tool to learn how it fits into your overall IaC strategy.

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Spacelift

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Spacelift is an automated CI/CD solution for your IaC tools. It connects to your IaC Git repositories, then automatically applies changes to your infrastructure as they're committed. There's support for Terraform, OpenTofu, Ansible, Pulumi, and more, while direct integrations with AWS, GCP, and Azure simplify multi-cloud management.

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Unlike traditional CI/CD solutions, Spacelift is specifically designed for the requirements of IaC workflows. As well as running your IaC pipelines, it also stores your infrastructure's Terraform state, supports precise policy-as-code compliance controls, and includes built-in drift detection capabilities.

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Terraform Cloud

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Hashicorp Terraform Cloud is a managed cloud service for administering your Terraform code. It builds upon the familiar Terraform CLI by providing an all-in-one backend for state management and team access control.

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Terraform Cloud connects to the Git repositories that host your Terraform code, then applies their states to your infrastructure. You can use workspaces to deploy your Terraform configs to multiple cloud providers, using different credential environment variables each time. The platform lets you quickly get started automating your infrastructure processes, but is only suitable if you exclusively use Terraform.

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Pulumi

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Pulumi is one of the most popular IaC solutions. Whereas tools like Terraform have their own config languages, Pulumi lets you define your infrastructure using familiar programming languages including Go, Python, and JavaScript. This makes IaC changes more accessible to developers with limited knowledge of cloud operations.

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You can automate Pulumi workflows within your own CI/CD pipelines, or use the managed Pulumi Cloud service. Similarly to Terraform Cloud, this combines GitOps-based automation, state management, and cloud integrations in one centralized platform. You can also set security and compliance policies to protect your infrastructure as you scale.

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Env0

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Env0 is an infrastructure automation platform that works with leading IaC solutions including Terraform, OpenTofu, Pulumi, and more. Its CI/CD implementation is purpose-built for IaC requirements. The platform includes integrated state management, drift detection, and policy-as-code features to ensure your infrastructure runs reliably.

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Env0 supports AWS, GCP, Azure, and Oracle OCI cloud environments, allowing you to scale your infrastructure across different providers. You can monitor all your resources using simple dashboards. Env0 also reveals the costs associated with individual IaC changes.

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GitHub Actions

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GitHub Actions is the CI/CD system that's included with GitHub. It's popular with developers because it's versatile, modular, and easy to use with your GitHub repositories.

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You can use GitHub Actions to run IaC tools like Terraform and Pulumi when you push new commits. However, it's primarily designed for traditional CI/CD pipelines that target application code, not the unique requirements of infrastructure workflows. There’s no ability to store infrastructure state files so you’ll need to connect a separate solution such as AWS S3 and DynamoDB. Nonetheless, Actions offers good flexibility when you're scaling custom automated processes across different environments.

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Ansible

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Ansible is one of the most popular configuration management solutions. Ansible playbooks automate key tasks within your infrastructure, such as installing packages and applying security optimizations. This enables you to maintain consistency and control as you scale your cloud operations to include more resources.

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GitLab CI/CD

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GitLab CI/CD is an end-to-end CI/CD system. Although primarily targeting conventional app delivery workflows, GitLab's broader platform also includes an integrated Terraform backend that you can use to store the state files created by running terraform apply in your pipelines.

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GitLab includes native Kubernetes integrations too, enabling you to develop, deploy, and monitor your apps and their infrastructure within one solution. This helps keep everything organized as you scale your environments.

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CircleCI

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CircleCI is a dedicated CI/CD solution that runs in the cloud or on your own infrastructure. It's popular for its simplicity, clear user interface, and good portability across different environments and use cases. CircleCI is most commonly used for application pipelines—building, testing, and deploying code—but supports integrations with infrastructure tools including Terraform, Pulumi, and Quali to manage cloud operations too.

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Atlantis

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Atlantis is a platform that automates Terraform IaC workflows based on pull request events from GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket. It's a lightweight Terraform-specific alternative to platforms like Spacelift and Env0.

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Atlantis enables you to effectively scale IaC workflows as your teams grow. It automatically executes Terraform when your configs change, so developers don't have to run terraform commands on their local machines. Atlantis also provides clear visibility into the effects of changes by adding the output from terraform plan as a comment on your pull requests.

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Best Practices for Cloud Scalability through Infrastructure Automation

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Infrastructure automation makes cloud operations much more scalable, but you should still keep best practices in mind. Use the following tips to plan your automation strategy and prevent mistakes.

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• Adopt multi-cloud workflows: Multi-cloud can be daunting, but it also offers substantial performance, resiliency, and cost efficiency improvements at scale. Try combining services from different clouds, then use IaC, CI/CD, and cloud orchestration tools to ensure consistent configuration.
• Obtain cross-team cultural buy-in for IaC: IaC must be the single source of truth for your infrastructure. Conflicts and errors can easily occur when developers and operators manually interact with infrastructure components, instead of using your IaC workflow.
• Use IaC orchestration tools to automate infrastructure management: Dedicated IaC orchestration platforms like Spacelift and Env0 let you consistently manage your infrastructure workflows across clouds and IaC tools. They automate infrastructure CI/CD and include centralized monitoring and compliance controls.
• Implement automated drift detection and resolution mechanisms: Managing configuration drift is one of the biggest CloudOps challenges at scale. It causes unexpected failures and compliance breaches as infrastructure resources silently deviate from the IaC configuration you've defined. Use automated tools to regularly compare your live infrastructure's state to the config in your IaC repositories, then review suggested resolutions to restore the correct state.
• Use policy-as-code to ensure infrastructure resources are fully protected: Security and compliance requirements grow as you scale your infrastructure, so it's vital to enforce robust guardrails. Policy-as-code engines like Open Policy Agent (OPA) provide the control and accountability required to properly protect your infrastructure. They can also help abstract differences between cloud providers, making continual compliance simpler in complex environments.

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Beyond these pointers, you should remember that there's no one-size-fits-all approach to CloudOps and infrastructure automation. Favored cloud platforms, IaC tools, and observability workflows vary widely between organizations. It's best to start small by combining IaC and CI/CD, then regularly review your infrastructure workflows as you scale your cloud operations.

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Conclusion: Use IaC and Automation to Achieve Cloud Operations Scalability

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Modern enterprises need scalable cloud infrastructure that's performant, reliable, and cost effective. However, legacy CloudOps strategies limit scalability as they're dependent on manual processes. Moreover, observability and compliance controls are often missing or duplicated across different cloud providers. This makes infrastructure management time-consuming and error-prone.

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Automated infrastructure workflows based on IaC, CI/CD, and dedicated orchestration platforms are the answer. Combining IaC tools such as Terraform and Pulumi with the CI/CD capabilities of platforms like Spacelift and Env0 lets you achieve scalability without losing control. You can automate infrastructure provisioning, open up developer access, and enforce security and compliance requirements using policy-as-code.

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Need more guidance on how to scale your cloud operations? At Semantive, we're cloud transformation specialists. Book a call with our experts to explore how we can help with cloud adoption planning, IaC, and Spacelift implementation.