In my first post, I discussed how software and various tools are dramatically changing the Ops department. This post centers on the automation process.
When I was younger, you actually had to build a server from scratch, buy power and connectivity in a data center, and manually plug a machine into the network. After wearing the operations hat for a few years, I have learned many operations tasks are mundane, manual, and often have to be done at two in the morning once something has gone wrong. DevOps is predicated on the idea that all elements of technology infrastructure can be controlled through code and automated. With the rise of the cloud it can all be done in real-time via a web service.
Infrastructure automation + virtualization solves the problem of having to be physically present in a data center to provision hardware and make network changes. Also, by automating the mundane tasks you can remove unnecessary personnel. The benefits of using cloud services is costs scale linearly with demand and you can provision automatically as needed without having to pay for hardware up front.