Most accidents happen due to human error, which can be avoided by automation. Automation not only handles jobs efficiently, but also increases productivity and saves costs. Anything identified as a repeatable task should be automated to free up valuable human resources so that team members can spend their time on more exciting work and focus on solving a real problem. It also helps to increase team morale.

When designing a solution, think about what can be automated. Consider the following components to be automated in your solution:

• Application testing: You need to test your application every time you make any changes to make sure that nothing breaks. Also, manual testing is very time consuming and requires lots of resources. It's better to think about automating repeatable test cases to speed up deployment and product launch. Automate your testing at production scale and use rolling deployment techniques, such as canary testing and A/B testing, to release changes.
• IT infrastructure: You can automate your infrastructure by using infrastructure as code scripting, for example, Ansible, Terraform, and Amazon CloudFormation. Automation of infrastructure allows environments to be created in minutes compared to days. Automation of infrastructure as code helps to avoid configuration errors and creates a replica of the environment.
• Logging, monitoring, and alerting: Monitoring is a critical component, and you want to monitor everything every time. Also, based on monitoring, you may want to take automated action such as scaling up your system or alerting your team to act. You can monitor the vast system only by using automation. You need to automate all activity monitoring and logs in order to make sure that your application is running smoothly, and that it is functioning as desired.

• Deployment automation: Deployment is a repeatable task that is very time consuming and delays the last-minute launch in many real-time scenarios. Automating your deployment pipeline by applying continuous integration and continuous deployment helps you to be agile and iterate quickly on product features with a frequent launch. Continuous deployment and continuous integration help you to make small incremental changes to your application.
• Security automation: While automating everything, don't forget to add automation for security. If someone is trying to hack your application, you want to know immediately and act quickly. You want to take preventive action by automating any incoming or outgoing traffic in your system boundary and alert any suspicious activity. 

Automation provides peace of mind by making sure the product is functioning without a glitch. While designing an application, always makes sure to think from an automation perspective and consider that as a critical component. You will learn more details about automation throughout the book in the coming chapters.