IT automation

IT automation is – in its broader sense – the processes and software that help with the management of the IT infrastructure (servers, networking, and storage). In the current shift, we are supporting for a huge implementation of such processes and software.

At the beginning of IT history, there were very few servers, and a lot of people were needed to make them work properly, usually more than one person for each machine. Over the years, servers became more reliable and easier to manage, so it was possible to have multiple servers managed by a single system administrator. In that period, the administrators manually installed the software, upgraded the software manually, and changed the configuration files manually. This was obviously a very labor-intensive and error-prone process, so many administrators started to implement scripts and other means to make their lives easier. Those scripts were (usually) pretty complex, and they did not scale very well.

In the early years of this century, data centers started to grow a lot due to companies' needs. Virtualization helped in keeping prices low, and the fact that many of these services were web services meant that many servers were very similar to each other. At this point, new tools were needed to substitute the scripts that were used before: the configuration management tools.

CFEngine was one of the first tools to demonstrate configuration management capabilities way back in the 1990s; more recently, there has been Puppet, Chef, and Salt, besides Ansible.