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Product overview

Automation Config was an automated configuration management platform that provisioned, configured, deployed, managed, and monitored nodes to ensure that the nodes in your system are always operating in a consistent, desired state. Automation Config ran on Salt, an open-source automation and configuration management engine.

Customers could use the on-premises version or the SaaS version of Automation Config. The target audience for the product was IT system administrators or DevOps team members.

Length of project

January 2022 - April 2023

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