Many things have been covered already, but this section should give an overview what to think about when it comes to automation and standardization. Also, it will highlight how actual projects dealt with challenges and requirements which were discovered during the workflow creation.
Often, not all requirements for a deployment or delivery task in a data center may be known by all administrators. This is because traditionally, everyone is focusing on their own tasks until they hand it over to another group or department.
The mission sounds quite simple: Deploy a VM in a data center out of a portal. The server administrator in of us might think: Easy, just create a template for the OS, add some customization (hostname, IP) and that's it.
Indeed, the first step was to create a template containing the OS. But there is also a requirement to use the most recent version of the OS for each deployment.