Automating Infrastructure and Application Provisioning

Abstract

The hardware and software that comprise the infrastructure of a large website typically consists of some number of servers residing in a datacenter. Installing and maintaining this infrastructure must still, to this day, be done manually to a degree. In this chapter, we’ll discuss how virtualization (and cloud and private cloud) infrastructures are mimimizing that requirement as the field of computing advances, and how some of the processes can be automated. Before thinking about automating, however, it’s a good idea to look at how processes currently work.