VMware: Getting Started with Aria Automation Config
VMware is a leading provider of multi-cloud services for all apps, enabling digital innovation with enterprise control. VMware was acquired by Broadcom in November 2023.
Length of project
January 2022 - April 2023
Product overview
Automation Config is an automated configuration management platform that provisions, configures, deploys, manages, and monitors nodes to ensure that the nodes in your system are always operating in a consistent, desired state. Automation Config runs on Salt, an open-source automation and configuration management engine.
Customers can use the on-premises version or the SaaS version of Automation Config. The target audience for the product is IT system administrators or DevOps team members.
Project description
In January 2022, the engineering team embarked on an initiative to improve the SaaS offering of Automation Config. At the time, Automation Config SaaS was a very costly, manual deployment solution. Our goal was to simplify the onboarding process for customers, simplify the deployment process for SREs, and increase user adoption rates.
I led the documentation effort to create a getting started guide for the new SaaS solution, including:
- Producing task topics about the onboarding process for Automation Config SaaS
- Generating code examples that demonstrate how to connect virtual machines (VMs) to Automation Config SaaS
- Creating troubleshooting documentation to help customers navigate common errors
Tools I used
- Authoring: Oxygen XML Author, DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture), SDL Tridion for Content Management
- Testing: Linux (Ubuntu), PuTTY (SSH Client), VMware Aria Automation Assembler to deploy Salt infrastructure
Work sample
Getting Started with Aria Automation Config (PDF): A topic that explains what Automation Config is, provides an overview of the product architecture, and briefly explains the setup overview