As technology evolves, creating, migrating, and maintaining infrastructure on the cloud is become integral in the IT industry. You must put your mind and hands on too many tasks simultaneously. This way, you will not risk compromising the work of your system.
You need to create the virtual cloud network, networking infrastructure, security list, subnets, and many more. While you can do all these manually, it will take time to finish, and you are unsure whether you’ve created an efficient system or not. You have to find ways to make the manual processes automated.
A Brief Background about Machine Learning to Prepare You in Understanding Automation Tools
Machine learning works with algorithms dealing with big amounts of data. It is a subset of AI, leading the machine to gather information from data, make performance better, and come up with predictions.
The algorithms are fed with the data, which they train to eventually perform specific tasks after they have built the model.
Mphasis, a company that helps improve technology, offers machine learning services. The company employs algorithms that help solve various business problems, such as Associations, Clustering, Forecasting, Classification, Regression, and many more. The machines come in four types, based on learning and methods. For example, there is Reinforcement Learning (RL).
RL employs a feedback-based process. In this setup, the software component, the AI agent, is situated at the security operations centre. It works by automatically exploring the surroundings. It hits and trail, performs an action, takes note of the past mistakes, and performs better.
The AI agent’s goal is to maximize the reward, or else it gets punished for every bad action. On the contrary, it reaps the rewards for every good action.
This kind of learning process is similar to how humans learn. Your child learns with their experiences every day. On the other hand, the everyday environment of reinforcement learning is playing a game wherein the agent’s goal is to obtain a high score. It gets rewarded for the high scores and punished for a different result.
This kind of learning is helpful in multi-agent systems, Information theory, Operation Research, and Game theory. Reinforcement learning makes robots more powerful, which are then used in manufacturing and industrial industries.
This is only one of the four types of machine learning, which you can apply further and learn how to integrate automation in machines.
More about the Best Infrastructure Automation Tools
Automation tools used in infrastructure can be categorized into three: Config/AM, CI/CD, and IaaC.
IaaC Top Automation Tools
IaaC technologies manage and automate infrastructure components. It can deal with On-Prem managed services, cloud services, firewalls, apps, servers, and Networks.
- Ansible
You can use this orchestration and configuration management tool without agents. It utilizes Playbooks or the configuration modules of this tool. Playbooks are easier to construct as compared to other similar systems. The reason for this is that the device is written in YAML format.
- Terraform
This is a cloud-agnostic infrastructure provisioning tool. It is written in the Go Programming language and designed by Hashicorp. It allows public and private cloud infrastructure provisioning. It can deal with firewalls, managed services, servers, networks, etc.
Terraform utilizes state flies, which allow the tracking of the infrastructure’s condition. This is also what makes it different from other configuration management solutions.
- Chef
The ruby-based tool utilizes the rules in cookbooks, a concept in Chef, in configuring virtual machines. It allows only a little programming and coding of the infrastructure in domain-specific language (DSL). This tool mainly caters to developers.
- Puppet
This configuration management tool is written in Ruby, similar to Chef. The tool’s DSLs write the code that is wrapped in modules. This tool is quite valuable for system administrators.
CI/CD Top Automation Tools
- Jenkins
This continuous integration solution is java-based, which allows faster deployment of applications. This is also handy for developers. It requires using SVN, GitHub, and other version control systems.
The server is responsible for building and testing new code as it is placed in a code repository. Once done, it notifies the team about the modifications and results.
- Docker
This tool makes programs virtual at a process level. Docker creates isolated environments for applications wherein the containers are placed. The containers are then moved from one server to another without making changes in the program. This is seen as a potentially significant phase in the process of tools going virtual.
- Kubernetes Operators
This is considered among the most excellent container orchestration tools. It is beneficial for operators. You can use the GitOps approaches to create fully automated deployments of Kubernetes based on verification and GIT changes.
- GitHub Actions
They provide an excellent service in setting up your CI pipelines when you use GitHub. They make it easier to connect and make the workflow faster when setting up a continuous integration pipeline. You can also use this in private or public GitHub accounts.
Configs/Secret Management Top Automation Tools
- Vault
This open-source solution from Hashicorp is essential in recovering and storing confidential information. It is loaded with features to use encryption in storing your private key. You can build roles, policies, and ACLs to manage how the end-users access the secrets.
- Consul
This open-source key-value store is mainly used for service discovery. This works best in saving and retrieving operations in real-time.
Conclusion
One automation tool is not enough for all the work you need to ensure the safety of data and the fast performance of your automated system. This is where Mphasis can help you with. The company will assess your current infrastructure and workflow and suggest the automation tools you need to make everything seamless, fast, and functional.
You may be tempted to choose the tools based on how they work and give them to the people handling the machines involved. However, it is still best to hand over the selection of tools to the pro, a company with several years of experience handling similar tasks for various companies. It is necessary to choose the right tools based on your company’s requirements more than how the devices function.
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