Why Solutions Providers Need Automation That Scales

By Jeramiah Dooley, Cloud Architect, Technology Solutions, SolidFire

One of the oldest sayings in technology is both simple and true: almost everything breaks at scale. From operations and maintenance, to deployment and provisioning, to the development of the technology that gets used inside enterprise data centers every day, we see this truism manifest itself. Whether it’s new tech, new operational and consumption models, or new business models, everything evolves and changes as the scale with which it operates gets larger.

This journey to scale is seldom easy and rarely comes without many, many things breaking along the way. Systems that work well a dozen at a time struggle to operate by the thousands. Network designs that perform well with hundreds of endpoints struggle to deliver with hundreds of thousands.  Provisioning processes that can easily handle deploying a workload every few days get crushed when the requirement is to deploy hundreds of new workloads an hour. From a finance and sales perspective, everyone loves to see the “hockey stick” curve of growth, but to the technology groups, the kind of rapid scaling that growth demands is a huge challenge.

Automation, the technique of making an apparatus, a process, or a system operate automatically, is one of the most critical parts to ensuring that IT can scale.

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