Often there are standardizations you can identify which will cover 90% of your needs, these could be templates, blueprints or workflows that you can provide and reuse over and over again.

 
If you don’t have these you will receive different requests from every consumer which require ongoing management, customization and troubleshooting removing from speed and cost of the automated deployment and undoing any of the great work you have put into an automated system.

Make sure you find the sweet-spot that delivers the right amount of flexibility but covers the internal needs of the consumers of your automation, this could be the consumers of applications or infrastructure alike.

More Automation tips

More tips from this series created by myself and Thomas Corfmat for a session at VMworld 2013 can be found below (updated as published), if you have a login for VMworld.com you can also watch the full session here.

As part of the “Automating the SDDC, Where do I start?” Session which Thomas Corfmat and I presented at VMworld we wanted to give some general Automation tips which can be used as best practices and guidelines to make sure you are thinking about the right things when automating your systems, we have 10 of these in total which will be posted on this blog in 10 separate blog posts, so lets get going with number 1.

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