Reaching The End Of The Path
Welcome back to our blog series on reducing cloud costs through a DevOps-Enabled, Automated IT Infrastructure. We've covered various steps, from choosing a Dedicated Managed Server provider, installing a Virtualization Hypervisor, setting up a cluster of Hypervisors, securing your data center with the OPNsense Firewall, managing user access with FreeIPA, managing your systems with Katello, monitoring your infrastructure with Zabbix, ensuring secure access with OpenVPN, to setting up backup servers. Today, we're concluding with the tenth and final step - embracing automation.
In today's fast-paced IT environment, automation is not just a luxury, it's a necessity. Automating repetitive tasks allows your team to focus on more strategic work and reduces the chance of human error, leading to increased efficiency and productivity.
All the tools we've discussed in the previous steps come with APIs, unlocking limitless potential for creating automation workflows tailored to your organization. Consider building a self-service dashboard, empowering users to provision their own infrastructure and applications on demand. Doing so speeds up the development and testing processes, allows faster product releases, and reduces repetitive tasks for IT and DevOps.
Remember, while building automation, it's essential to maintain strict control over permissions and segregations, enforcing role-based and host-based access controls using the tools mentioned in earlier steps. Utilize a combination of Bash Scripts, Ansible Playbooks, and Terraform Plans for automation and HTML for your User Interface.
This concludes our step-by-step guide to reducing your cloud costs. We hope this series has been informative and helpful, providing you with a clear roadmap towards a more streamlined, cost-effective, and efficient IT infrastructure.
By embracing automation, you're not only improving efficiency and reducing operational costs, but you're also enabling your team to focus on innovation and strategic projects, driving your business forward.
However, before we really conclude, we’d like to include a BONUS STEP: If you need extensive data storage solutions, consider installing TrueNAS, an open-source and highly popular storage platform. TrueNAS is equipped to handle large amounts of data, provides a wide variety of storage capabilities, including S3 compatible buckets, and offers excellent file sharing and collaboration options.
Stay tuned just one last time as we conclude our step-by-step journey towards efficient cloud cost management.
Remember, each step you take brings you closer to a more streamlined, cost-effective, and efficient IT infrastructure. One last step until the goal!