A note about automation continued...

The landscape of automation has also evolved. At one time, they were bound to the hosts and the programmability offered by the components on the hosts. In the Linux world, automation relies on shell scripts often invoked with SSH. In the Windows world, PowerShell added SSH support recently. Cross-platform support is still lacking but organizations have inventory and core functionalities deployed on both platforms. Fortunately, more and more automation now rely on microservice APIs for programmatic and shell-based access (think curl commands) to features that are not limited to the current host 

Public cloud computing infrastructure hosts customer workloads as well as the ever-increasing portfolio of services offered by the cloud to its customers. These services from publishers both external and internal to the cloud require automation over the public cloud. They write and maintain this logic and bear the cost of keeping up with the improvements and features available for this automation logic. This article investigates the implementation platform for a global multi-tenant automation-as-a-service offering from the public cloud. 

Multi-tenancy and software-as-a-service model is possible only with a cloud computing infrastructure.  The automation logic for a service for a cloud differs significantly from that for a desktop. A cloud expects more conformance than a desktop or enterprise automation justifying the need for a managed program. As Cloud service developers struggle to keep up with the speed of software development for cloud-savvy clients, they face automation as a necessary evil that draws their effort from their mission. Even when organizations pay the cost up upfront in the first version released with a dedicated staff, they realize that the cloud is evolving at a pace that rivals their own release timeframes. Some may be able to keep up with the investments year after year but for most, this is better outsourced so that they spend less time on rewriting with newer automation technologies or embracing the enhancements features to the cloud.