Serverless driving automation adoption & architecture
The average cloud environment is doubling in size every 6 to 9 months, so it is apparent that with a finite amount of technical skill in the market continuing with manual repetitive tasks is not a scalable or long term solution.
Organisations are therefore turning to cloud automation to alleviate this pressure in three keyways:
Innovation capacity
Cloud skills are expensive and because of this cloud experts are typically pushed to capacity just keeping the lights on. With these expensive resources undertaking repetitive and mundane tasks, innovation quickly become a lower priority.
With the pace of change in cloud technologies, introducing cloud automation means your admins are able to allocate more time to innovation and modernisation, ensuring you’re maximising your return on investment.
Service scalability
If you’re using the cloud to offer external services to customers, scalability of the service as you expand your userbase is going to be a high priority. Having to scale demand manually, whether this is through configuring new customers or scaling the service as a whole, is not a long-term strategy.
The scalability of the entire service on offer must embrace automation across the board to maintain competitive advantage and customer experience.
Over 90% of unexpected downtime is caused by human error through manual configuration.
Human error
A reduction in human error caused by manual intervention will dramatically increase your service quality and availability. Over 90% of unexpected downtime is caused by human error through manual configuration.
Automation introduces consistency, error reporting, and auditability to your processes.
Serverless technologies are fuelling the adoption of cloud automation. This has, for the most part, been assisted by the maturity of serverless capability in the cloud and the ever-increasing options available to assist cloud development.
2023 will see an even further rise in the use of event-driven architecture involving serverless and automation as a de facto way of providing a rigid process for adoption.
Event-driven architectures are usually dealing with 4 critical areas:
1
Event – this could be a trigger on a schedule for a repeatable task or maybe a change of configuration that is being monitored.
2
Channel – the channel is where the event information required for analysis is processed, formatted correctly, and forwarded on to a particular end point based on the event information. This could be a messaging queue or service that based on the input has specific endpoints available to forward the event to the correct process.
3
Automation – This is where the event information is forwarded, and the automation process is executed. This could be anything from configuring a resource, sending an alert, emailing a person etc.
4
Action – The action is the result of what is completed by the automation step, whether that is the completed configuration of a resource or modification of another.
Event-driven architectures are becoming popular in driving automation because they are relevant everywhere; with virtual machines in the cloud as well as serverless/platform-as-a-service resources.
The point being that service capability, reliability, scale, and human error are quickly addressed using a recurring architecture principal, and something that is becoming more popular and helping customers to innovate and stay ahead of the curve.
Event-Driven Architecture Example
Event driven architectures can be used widely. As an example, an Azure virtual machine event-driven architecture could be:
