November 18, 2024
Accelerating AWS Automation with Infrastructure as Code
Read how applying AWS best practices helped a clinical testing company evaluate its migration readiness and expedite its growth.
A Prescription for Growth via AWS Automation
45%
percentage of cloud decision-makers and users citing “assessing technical feasibility” as a challenge when migrating workloads to public cloud1
18%
percentage of CIOs who anticipate a decrease in their involvement in cloud migrations over the next year2
How can growing companies ensure automation best practices?
A REAL-WORLD EXAMPLE
Enabling Growth in a Repeatable, Secure, Cost-Efficient Environment
A clinical testing company needed help expediting its growth and increasing its utilization of Amazon Web Services (AWS) while maintaining an environment that was repeatable, secure and cost-efficient. The company gave CDW data from the AWS Pricing Calculator to model its anticipated growth and outlined the best practices it wanted to establish.
THE TURNING POINT
Leveraging IaC to Accelerate AWS Automation
To help accelerate its automation framework, CDW worked with the company to apply AWS deployment patterns and best practices using Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) concepts.
The design and implementation included:
- Adopting “Don’t Repeat Yourself” principles to reduce complexity and improve code maintainability
- Applying and enforcing Policy as Code for governance to enhance security
- Importing resources into Terraform Cloud (from AWS) with Policy-as-Code examples, including a recommendations guide and runbook with directed steps
THE RESULTS
Standardized Automation Based on IaC Best Practices
CDW helped the clinical testing company evaluate its readiness to migrate new workloads to the cloud so growth could be expedited in a repeatable, secure and cost-efficient environment.
Here’s why it worked:
- Business accordance was assured by identifying gaps and aligning stakeholders around goals.
- CDW performed a discovery and analysis of the company’s current operating environment.
- A Migration Readiness Assessment focused on organizational readiness, standardization, resource consistency and governance.
What’s next?
The clinical testing company can now standardize automation through IaC best practices, establish governance and security with Policy as Code, and deploy one consistent resource creation and automation mechanism using Terraform Cloud.
Sources:
1 Flexera, “2024 State of the Cloud Report,” May 2024
2 Foundry, “State of the CIO Study 2024”