I used to treat "cloud automation" as one of those phrases that shows up in vendor decks right before your eyes glaze over. That changed when I started a new job where I had to manage a small-scale cloud environment manually.
Between provisioning servers, deploying applications, and keeping one anxious eye on costs, it all felt less like modern infrastructure management and more like trying to juggle knives—technically possible, but not something you'd recommend to anyone who enjoys having an afternoon. That's when I turned to cloud automation to tackle the complexity, and it changed everything.
In this guide, I'll walk you through what I've learned about what cloud automation is, what it can take off your plate, where it fits (and doesn't) next to cloud orchestration, and how you can use Zapier to bring it to your workflows.
Table of contents:
What is cloud automation?
Cloud automation means using software to tackle the repetitive parts of setting up a cloud environment, like provisioning servers, deploying applications, and monitoring performance metrics.
Say you're building a simple web app called "bot or not" that takes user-uploaded images and identifies any robots in them. Once you've written the code, it'll need to live in a cloud platform that lets people interact with it. That means hosting it on a server, exposing an API endpoint, feeding images to an AI model for identification, creating a storage layer, and so forth.
Cloud automation enables you to accomplish all of this seamlessly, letting machines handle most of the manual work for each step in this process.
One of the best things about cloud automation is that it works across a range of setups, including private, public, hybrid, and multicloud environments. So, no matter where your cloud data lives, automation can lighten the load.
Cloud automation vs. cloud orchestration
It's worth pausing here to explain the difference between cloud automation and cloud orchestration, since they're similar but distinct concepts.
Put simply, you can think of cloud automation as focused on individual tasks, like spinning up a single server, creating backups, and provisioning tools. Cloud orchestration takes a broader view, coordinating multiple automated workflows to build complete, end-to-end business processes.
The two terms are sometimes used interchangeably, but they represent distinct approaches focused on different aspects of utilizing cloud tools.
With Zapier, the most connected orchestration platform, you can take a sprawling cloud stack and integrate it across teams and systems. Automate data syncing across more than 8,000 apps and create powerful automated workflows without writing a line of code.
Core capabilities of cloud automation
Cloud automation is basically a way to stop doing the same cloud chores over and over (and over). Instead of someone on your team manually spinning things up, deploying updates, or babysitting dashboards, you set rules once and let software do the repeatable work. Here are a few of the biggest areas it can help.
Automated resource management
There's an old joke that goes "The cloud is just someone else's computer," and that's (sort of) true. When you go "cloud native," all that means is making use of servers, CPUs and GPUs, networks, protocols, and tools that have been created and maintained by someone else.
Instead of manually configuring servers, storage, or networks, what if you could have automation handle it all? Besides the obvious fact that you'll be saving time (which is worthwhile enough), this dramatically cuts the risk of human error.
Application deployment
Deploying applications used to be a giant time sink, but with cloud automation, you can streamline everything from configuring containers to integrating databases, queuing up faster releases with fewer hiccups and happier (less sleep-deprived) teams.
It'd be an exaggeration to say automation tools like CI/CD pipelines make rolling out updates effortless, but, speaking from experience, they make a night-and-day difference in terms of ease.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
If you've been in the cloud engineering game for a while, you might remember the days of manually tweaking config files and holding your breath while you check that everything's still working as intended.
Thankfully, those days are behind us, as IaC lets you define your infrastructure using code, which means you can spin up carbon-copy environments with identical specifications and simplify your IT management flows, among other use cases. This approach ensures consistency, speeds up deployments, and makes disaster recovery a (relative) breeze.
Cost management
Cloud computing resources, apps, and deployments don't come cheap. You'll especially love this one if you've ever looked at your software bills and thought, "How did we spend THAT much?"
Cloud automation helps you monitor spending, identify underused resources (that can be switched off during periods of low use), and optimize costs by flagging budget anomalies and automatically scaling infrastructure based on actual demand.
Workflow automation
Cloud workflows often involve complex steps across different services, so data processing, approval handling, and follow-up actions might all occur on separate servers. Configuring your automation isn't trivial, but if you do it correctly, you can eliminate the need for manual handoffs and speed up your entire pipeline.
Zapier is the best choice for building automated cloud workflows without writing code, and it can connect all the cloud tools in your tech stack at the level of application integration.
Security and compliance
Cloud automation simplifies the process of keeping your cloud environment secure and compliant by enforcing policies, managing user access, and generating compliance reports. It's like having a security guard who never gets tired.
Cloud automation examples and use cases
With cloud automation, we're not looking at an "all smoke, no fire" situation. It has clear practical value for the businesses that implement it.
Let's look at some of the ways organizations use cloud automation in their workflows. Your own organization's context will obviously look different, but this should get the mind jogging.
Provision resources
If you need a new virtual machine or database, automation can create it in seconds, dynamically scaling up or down in response to demand. This is especially useful for disaster recovery and load testing.
For example, you could automatically spin up backup infrastructure in a different region if your primary systems fail, or provision dozens of test environments to simulate peak traffic levels without manual configuration.
Configure environments
Setting up servers, networks, and permissions manually is tedious (ask someone on your cloud engineering team). Automation ensures your cloud environments get configured consistently and quickly, standing up platforms according to pre-determined rules with minimal manual intervention.
Whether you're launching a new project or scaling an existing one, cloud automation will make the configuration stage simpler.
Deploy applications
Once you've finished testing an application's code, automation can act as a digital forklift and push it to production on your behalf. From setting environment variables to connecting services, automated tools handle it all while minimizing the chances of downtime.
This is the backbone of modern CI/CD pipelines—developers commit code, automated tests run to verify everything works, and if all checks pass, the application deploys automatically.
Monitor performance
Long after the actual coding is done, you'll need to keep tabs on resource usage and system health for your cloud systems—which, go figure, will sap even more time and attention. With automated monitoring, you can set up alerts to notify you of potential issues, configure auto-scaling when CPU usage spikes, or restart service when health checks fail.
Manage backups and recovery
Automated backups and failover processes ensure your data is safe and recoverable. You can set up your cloud environment to make regular data backups and respond to outages by automatically kicking off a recovery process, minimizing disruption.
Cloud automation tools
Given how useful cloud automation is, it's no surprise that there are tons of different tools to choose from. Below, I've gathered a few popular options so you can sample what's out there.
AWS CloudFormation: AWS is one of the big three cloud platforms, and CloudFormation enables Infrastructure as Code for AWS, letting you define and provision resources using templates.
Azure Automation: Azure is another one of the big three clouds, and its Automation suite manages cloud and hybrid environments at scale, handling tasks like patching and resource provisioning.
Red Hat Ansible: Ansible offers automation for configuration management, app deployment, and more. It's noteworthy because it can be used across environments (including on-premises and hybrid cloud setups), has robust security tools, and a built-in AI assistant to help administrators with common tasks.
Terraform: An open-source framework that provides platform-agnostic IaC, Terraform enables DevOps teams to manage resources across multiple clouds with a unified language.
Google Cloud Deployment Manager: Google is a major player in the cloud space, and its Cloud Deployment Manager tool supports repeatable, template-driven infrastructure management within the Google Cloud platform.
While there are many specialized cloud automation tools for backend infrastructure management, you don't need to be a cloud engineer to automate cloud workflows. Zapier connects over 8,000 cloud apps and lets non-technical teams build automations without code. If you're looking to automate tasks between cloud applications—like syncing data, triggering runbooks, or routing alerts and approvals across teams—Zapier is your best bet.
Build your first cloud automation workflow in minutes
By now, it should be clear that cloud automation isn't something you can just skip out on. It's an integral part of cloud infrastructure management and something pretty much every business is using across their cloud environments.
But even if you're not deeply involved in your tech stack's back end, you can automate cloud apps with Zapier. Start small by identifying a task you'd like to automate, then build a workflow that integrates the cloud apps you already use. Zapier lets you automate cloud storage systems, IT management, provisioning, and so many other tasks that normally drain resources or require dev time.
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