Managing infrastructure for development teams can be a real chore especially when there are thousands and thousands of instances to manage and a multitude of applications to serve. Automation is often the answer for many as a miracle in saving countless man hours of manual configuration and deployment work. As a result of the cloud, there have been many software automation tools that have come about to help the developer in understanding their operations environment better and making the approach more accessible as well. SaltStack, Fabric, Puppet, Ansible, Cloudify, Capistrano, and Chef are few options. Perhaps, the most interesting option here is the SaltStack which provides for both orchestration, remote execution, configuration management, and a whole host of other features. It embodies the answer for the cloud automation in so many countless ways and yet trying to keep things as simple as possible.
