Build Your Own Cloud-Automation System Using Duct Tape and Glue
The largest companies in the world have armies of IT teams to build everything, connect everything, and service everything. They can do that because they take advantage of scale. Rolling out a $1M system to 50,000 employees is relatively cheap compared to doing the same for 10 employees. You can do this for yourself, or your own team — just use the special secret sauce I call Cloud Glue.
You’re the center of your workflow
Many people use several tools throughout the day while doing their job — I certainly do. Those tools are perfect for what we need: Excel helps us manage small amounts of data for quick calculations, Google Calendar helps us manage schedule meetings, and Trello helps us manage lists (to-do lists, development case lists, or even laundry lists). Individually, these tools are fine for helping you do each specific job on their own, but wouldn’t you be better at your job if they talked to each other? I propose: they do — right now! You’re the link, the handoff, or the “glue” in an un-spoken/un-documented process that involves moving information between two disparate systems.
Use cloud-based glue like Zapier of IFTTT to bridge your systems
If you’re like me, most of your tools reside in the cloud, and many cloud services today come with APIs. We won’t get too deep into that here, but those APIs let systems talk to the tool. Now, rather than build our own robots to access these APIs, we’re going to use a service such as Zapier or IFTTT. These light-weight integration services let you design workflows: a trigger in one system like a new Google Calendar event, then results in one or more actions in another system like Trello. You can even create workflows based on time-triggers; for example: every Tuesday at 3pm, send yourself a Slack message reminding you to get some ice cream!
Great, let’s glue these systems together! Not so fast. Just as a developer reviews the case information for what to build, you should review your workflow steps. Start by writing down what you do with the information from one system (extract), before inserting that into another system (load); if there’s any manipulation you need to do in Excel or in your head — that’s a step in itself (transform). These three steps: extract, transform, load (ETL for the systems integrations folks) is what you’re doing; and if you can clearly articulate it, you can have a robot do it for you.
Reap the rewards typically only available to enterprise-level organizations
Like I mentioned above — this type of systems integration was previously only available to large enterprises or those willing to invest money into processes that happen at scale. Once you reach a certain level (organization size/maturity, number of integration routes, or risk aversion), you should consider bringing that in-house. But even when you do reach that point, you can still keep your tech debt low by migrating only the mission-critical routes to in-house IT ownership.
Go ahead, check out Zapier or IFTTT. Then, when you need to level up, you may wish to learn how to code and then write your own enterprise-grade integrations as a serverless cloud application.
