Infrastructure automation basically is the process of scripting environments — from installing an OS to installing and configuring servers on instances. It also includes configuring how the instances and software communicate with one another, and much more. Automation allows you to redeploy your infrastructure or rebuild it from scratch, because you have a repeatable documented process. It also allows you to scale the same configuration to a single node or to thousands of nodes. In the past years, several open source and commercial tools have emerged to support infrastructure automation. These tools include Ansible, Chef, Terraform and Puppet. They support cloud platforms, but also virtual and physical environments. On Google Cloud Platform you have the possibility to use Cloud Deployment Manager. The Cloud Deployment Manager allows you to automate the configuration and deployment of your Google Cloud with parallel, repeatable deployments and template-driven configurations.