Three Steps to Prepare Your Environment for Automation
Did you know 82% of organizations struggle with automation because they lack a well-prepared environment? If you want to streamline your IT infrastructure automation, understanding how to set up an effective environment is crucial. This guide will walk you through three essential steps to prepare your organization for automation: managing your automation code through Source Control Management (SCM), deploying a configuration engine, and gathering your network and infrastructure data. These steps will set you on the right path to automating your processes effectively and accurately.
Step 1: Get Control of All Your Automation Code with SCM
What is Source Control Management?
Source Control Management (SCM), or version control, is a system that allows teams to manage changes to code and documents over time. SCM tools such as Git, Subversion, or Mercurial provide a central place where all code lives, making tracking changes, collaborating with team members, and maintaining a clean infrastructure easier.
Benefits of Using SCM
Version Tracking: You can keep track of every modification, allowing you to revert to earlier versions in case something goes wrong.
Collaboration: Multiple team members can work on the same code without overwriting each other's changes, reducing deployment errors.
Increased Security: SCM can protect your code from unauthorized access and creates a log of all changes made.
Steps to Implement SCM or Version Control
Choose Your SCM Tool: Choose an SCM platform that fits your organization’s needs. Git is widely recommended for its robustness and flexibility.
Migrate and Consolidate Existing Code: Start by migrating your existing automation code to the SCM platform. This will ensure a seamless transition without losing any crucial changes.
Setup an SSH key for your user using the proper commands for your SCM and user operating system
Encourage Best Practices: Encourage your team to follow best practices such as committing changes frequently, writing clear commit messages, and utilizing branches to manage feature developments and hotfixes.
Most projects can easily be initialized via git using:
$ git init $ git remote add "origin" git@gityour-new-scm-server:your-new-repo.git $ git add * $ git push
Be sure to define a .gitignore file to ensure you don’t push up any file you don’t want committed, like an env file with passwords
Having issues deciding on or deploying version control?
Step 2: Deploy a Configuration Engine
Understanding Configuration Engines
Configuration engines automate the management of application configurations, infrastructure setup, and service orchestration. Popular options include Ansible, Puppet, and Chef, each with benefits. Ansible, primarily, is well known for its simplicity and agentless architecture.
Steps to Deploy a Configuration Engine
Evaluate Your Needs: Determine what you need your configuration engine to achieve. Some requirements will require more declarative deployment using tools like Terraform and Ansible for the rest of their automation requirements. In contrast, others might stick to purely imperative tools like Ansible, Pulumi, or Python.
Experiment on a Local Host: If you're starting from scratch, deploy the configuration engine on a localhost to test and fine-tune your processes. This step allows you to experiment safely without affecting real-world applications.
Gradual Rollout: Once you're comfortable with the configurations, gradually roll them out across your infrastructure, testing each component to ensure reliability and performance before moving on.
Too many config engine options, and need help deciding?
Some shops might not have the ability to start running several servers at once. If you have to limit your computational resources, make sure you put your SCM on a central server, while tools like Terraform and Ansible can be run on user machines. If you’re out of on-prem resources you can explore options like using Gitlab cloud, or running a self-managed cloud instance of Gitlab. Both of these options incur a cost associated.
Step 3: Aggregate and Structure Your Infrastructure Data
Why Aggregate Infrastructure Data?
Effective automation requires a structured and comprehensive understanding of your IT landscape. Instead of relying on scattered or outdated documentation, you can use existing configuration management tools like Ansible, Puppet, or Chef to query and collect infrastructure data actively. This allows you to build dynamic automation inventories that drive efficient configuration management, provisioning, and orchestration.
Steps to Collect and Structure Infrastructure Data
1. Leverage Your Configuration Engine to Gather Data
Use your existing Ansible, Puppet, or Chef setup to collect hardware, network, and system information across your environment. For example:
Ansible Facts (
ansible -m setup all) can retrieve detailed system metadata, including OS versions, network interfaces, CPU, memory, and storage details.Puppet Facter (
facter --json) provides structured machine data for integration into automation workflows.Chef Ohai (
ohai) collects system-level insights that can be processed into an inventory.
2. Run Network Discovery with Ansible & Nmap
Ansible can run Nmap scans to discover devices, IP allocations, and open ports, giving visibility into networked infrastructure. Example playbook snippet:
Run Network Discovery with Ansible & Nmap
Ansible can run Nmap scans to discover devices, IP allocations, and open ports, giving visibility into networked infrastructure. Example playbook snippet: - name: Scan network for active hosts
hosts: localhost
tasks:
- name: Run Nmap scan
command: "nmap -sn 192.168.1.0/24"
register: nmap_output
- debug: var=nmap_output.stdout_lines
3. Centralize Data into an Automation-Ready Inventory
Store gathered data in a structured inventory file, such as Ansible’s
inventory.yaml, NetBox, or a CMDB.Use Git to version-control inventory files, enabling change tracking and rollback capabilities.
Format data consistently so that automation scripts can reliably query and apply configurations.
4. Normalize and Structure the Data for Automation
Once collected, ensure all data is formatted for use with automation tools by:
Converting unstructured output into structured YAML, JSON, or CSV files.
Using Ansible’s
json_queryto extract meaningful data from raw responses.Categorizing devices and infrastructure components into roles, regions, or clusters for automation grouping.
5. Continuously Update and Maintain the Inventory
Schedule Ansible fact-gathering jobs to keep data fresh.
Use Git commits to track inventory changes.
Automate API queries to cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP) to pull instance details dynamically.
Moving Forward with Automation
You're better prepared to embark on your automation journey with a solid foundation from the abovementioned steps. Establishing control over your automation code, deploying a suitable configuration engine, and gathering your network and infrastructure data will dramatically improve your automation strategy.
Additionally, as you gather more data, continue to reach out to automation experts who can help you decipher this information and turn it into actionable insights. Having streamlined processes is not the only goal—evolving these processes continually based on data-driven decisions is crucial.
So now what? If you’re ready to set up these essential components and fully take advantage of infrastructure automation, start by getting these items in place. If you need assistance, don’t hesitate to reach out to us. We can help you establish everything you need for a successful automation journey.
