Most organizations aspire to automate building, deploying, configuring, testing, and managing their software and infrastructure.

But what benefits are we expecting from automation? Will we save money? Reduce our staff? Require less technical knowledge in-house? Achieve faster time to market? Improve reliability?

Some of these expectations may be difficult to achieve. Some may be impossible to achieve.

Let’s understand and exploit the true benefits of automation, which allow us to reach digital success and avoid expensive failure.

Kief Morris leads the Cloud Technology Practice at ThoughtWorks UK, and wrote the O’Reilly book “Infrastructure as Code” (http://oreil.ly/1JKIBVe).

He helps organizations to take