There’s a growing awareness of the value of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) — the practice of provisioning and deploying infrastructure using DevOps processes and best practices — to decrease IT costs and management burdens. At the same time, more and more organizations have begun to recognize and take advantage of the value offered by cloud environments such as Amazon Web Services CloudFormation.

And yet, we haven’t seen a huge move on the part of enterprise IT departments to leverage the combination of IaC and AWS. Here are some of the benefits and use cases of IaC on AWS CloudFormation, and how organizations can get started.

Governance can be an overwhelming undertaking. For the organization, it can be viewed as stifling innovation; for the IT department, it is viewed as necessary to prevent out of control resources causing havoc in billing and security. These two divergent cultures must figure out a way to implement a solid governance structure for the cloud while still allowing developers and business the innovation the cloud promises. Microsoft has a solution to help bridge this conflict.

Driving greater automation is a process that underlies most every project in the data center. It’s an important business differentiator that can help determine an organization’s success. And like all good things, there are lots of problems that gum it up. Having greater awareness of some of these roadblocks will help you see and address them sooner.

Three of the most common problems you’ll encounter are: long system uptime, manual restarts and dated processes. This post will help you address them and strengthen your automation efforts.

The pace of change in IT is only accelerating, with many industry observers predicting that we’ll see the same amount of change over the next two to five years as we did in the past 10 or 15.

We’re already moving toward a world where data centers are able to handle 100,000 or more microservices, each created and ended on demand, in real time. But to get there, organizations will need to undertake another round of IT modernization. Here are some of the capabilities that organizations should consider as they get started.

When I talk with customers, many tell me that their data center teams spend around 80 percent of their time “keeping the lights on,” performing routine management and support tasks. There are a number of problems with this situation. First, an employee who spends 80 percent of working hours on rote tasks will be able…

In my day-to-day life, I try to figure out little ways to become more efficient and consistent while solving the problems that are in front of me. In my personal life, these problems are usually more self-inflicted, such as creating customizable holiday lights or graphing fermentation temperatures for home-brewing. Professionally, this often looks more like…