During failures or spikes in load you do not want to be provisioning resources, identifying and deploying the right version of the application, configuring parameters (for example, database connection strings), and so on. Hence, you need to invest in creating ready-to-launch machine images, continuously monitor your system metrics to dynamically take action such as auto scaling, develop scripts for automated deployments, centrally store application configuration parameters, and boot new instances quickly by bootstrapping your instances, and so on.
It is possible to automate almost everything on the cloud platform via APIs and scripts, and you should attempt to do so. This includes typical operations, deployments, ...
