Summary
This chapter covered the two main factors for successful infrastructure automation: APIs and platforms. We defined consumable infrastructure and demonstrated how the APIs coupled with data models discussed in the preceding chapter enable it. Furthermore, we illustrated how APIs enable deterministic and efficient machine-to-machine interactions and are critical for successful automation. Platforms enable you to better scale operations made via API, provision physical hardware, and enable you to build more complex automated services on top of your infrastructure. We also examined what makes cloud platforms so powerful and how those same platform concepts can be applied to on-prem infrastructure. In the following chapters, we cover how to represent your infrastructure as code and then how to take some of the high-level things you have learned so far and assemble them into a framework for infrastructure automation at scale.