Infrastructure Automation is the cornerstone that allows IT to provide consumable infrastructure for development and application teams inside your organization. Automation is also key to reducing toil and having engineering and operations teams focus on important work and driving your business into the future. However, for many, getting started with Automation can seem like a daunting task, and prioritizing where to start can be a difficult decision.

In today's race to the cloud, companies often take the path of least resistance, or "lifting and shifting" existing apps without modification. Yet, to maximize gains from a cloud migration, it is frequently preferable to update workloads to leverage cloud native capabilities. This guided technical demo progresses through seven different means of replatforming and refactoring an application, illustrating the pros and cons of each architecture.

This briefing incorporates the AWS Transit Gateway and Palo Alto firewalls to demonstrate the architectures as provided in the Securing Applications with AWS Transit Gateway guide from Palo Alto. The briefing is built entirely using Terraform code to demonstrate the power of automation.

AWS Transit Gateway is the long-awaited cloud-native solution that simplifies connectivity of the multiple VPCs and also provides the ability to connect the on-premises networks. This lab briefing provides a detailed overview of the Transit Gateway architecture and then dives into the NGFW integration and more advanced routing topologies.

Mid-market service providers are faced with numerous operations challenges every day. Network rollout, new services and ever-tightening budgets are driving operators to find new solutions, particularly in the area of automation. But service automation and IT automation can be very different matters. Tools that work for data center rollouts may not work for deploying and managing new customer services. Operations managers, network planners and solution architects are asking: what tools are best for service automation, can we automate without a costly consulting project, how would automation affect my operation, could we support it, how can we get beyond CLI-based operations, and what are other mid-market service providers doing?