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What is cloud automation?

Cloud automation is the use of technology that performs tasks with reduced human assistance in order to unite cloud management processes.

Cloud computing

Cloud computing is the act of running workloads within clouds—which are IT environments that abstract, pool, and share scalable resources across a network. Neither cloud computing nor clouds are technologies unto themselves.

  • Cloud computing is an act—the function of running a workload in a cloud.
  • Clouds are environments—places where applications run.
  • Technologies are things—software and hardware used to build and use clouds.


Automation is the use of technology to perform tasks with reduced human assistance. Automation helps you accelerate processes and scale environments, as well as build continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment (CI/CD) workflows. There are many kinds of automation, including IT automation, business automation, robotic process automation, industrial automation, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning.

Why automate clouds?

Hybrid and multicloud environments add an additional layer of complexity to infrastructure, network, application, and user administration. IT teams need to manage both on-site and cloud-based environments, often using specialized management tools for each. As a result, it can be nearly impossible to effectively maintain, track, scale, and secure resources and applications by hand. Automation can unite hybrid and multicloud management under a single set of processes and policies to improve consistency, scalability, and speed.

What cloud computing processes can be automated?

Scale multiclouds

Multicloud is a cloud approach made up of more than 1 cloud service, from more than 1 cloud vendor—public or private. Each cloud provider offers specific tools for operating and managing their own cloud resources. These tools rarely interoperate directly with each other, requiring IT teams to provision, administer, and maintain each cloud differently. Automation can help you manage multicloud environments more consistently. You can create automation assets that codify resources across all of your clouds and offer a single application programming interface (API) for a given operation, regardless of the cloud involved.

Integrate hybrid clouds

Hybrid cloud is an IT architecture that incorporates some degree of workload portability, orchestration, and management across 2 or more environments. This variety can make it difficult for IT teams to integrate and support both infrastructures consistently. A flexible automation platform lets you apply the same automation code to existing on-site systems, current cloud resources, and future assets—ensuring consistency and providing a layer of operational integration.

What companies have automated their clouds?


Datacom transformed its service offerings with automation, streamlining internal operations. This provided customers with a flexible platform that can adapt over time and led to 20% higher operational efficiency.

Ascend Money

Ascend Money built an automated central application development and deployment platform. This simplified operations across geographies, increased consistency and scale, and reduced the time it takes to perform tasks by 57%.

Why Red Hat?

Because no matter what type of cloud you deploy your workloads on, those workloads should be open source. With unlimited access to the source code, everything you deploy will be highly compatible across the most popular cloud providers—like Alibaba Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. With that kind of interoperability, you can use the same automation platform, playbook, or module across every cloud you use. 

Cloud automation tools

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

An agentless automation platform.

There’s a lot more to do with cloud computing and automation