The history of infrastructure automation
The hardware purchase cycle was the critical factor influencing an organization’s infrastructure landscape changes during the 1990s. Back then, there was not much emphasis on infrastructure automation. The time spent from receiving an order to a physical infrastructure becoming available was much more than the effort spent in infrastructure setup. Individual infrastructure engineers and small teams automated repetitive scripting tasks without much industry-wide adaptation. Tools such as CFEngine, launched in 1993 for automating infrastructure configuration, did not have enough adoption during that decade. There was no industry-wide trend to invest in automation because of its minimal benefits and return on investment. In the 2000s, the idea of infrastructure automation slowly got traction because of the following:
- Virtualization techniques
- The cloud
Virtualization brought in the ability to have software representation...