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title: "What is PagerDuty Runbook Automation?"
chapter: true
weight: 1
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## What is PagerDuty Runbook Automation?

PagerDuty Runbook Automation gives you powerful runbook automation without needing to install and manage the automation software yourself. Why is this useful? Let’s look at how cloud computing services themselves get provisioned and managed. Cloud computing is powerfully easy. With the press of the button, users can spin up nearly any kind of IT service. Despite the fact that the cloud provides a lot of powerful technical automation, this automation is not considered safe to make broadly available to all potential users. The reasons for limiting access include concerns about cost, speed of outcome, quality of operations, and security.

To mitigate this limited access, companies resort to having their engineers and stakeholders submit tickets to centralized cloud infrastructure teams for their needs. These infrastructure teams can keep track of all cloud usage, have the skills to properly set up and operate cloud services, and are able to enforce policies and ensure secure operations. However, a task that could take minutes to spin up in the cloud automatically ends up taking days to be manually fulfilled by the central cloud team.

What companies really need to do is build automation for fulfilling those tasks, and make them available to the humans that need them. In other words, automate their runbook procedures, and then delegate this automation to stakeholders.

![PagerDuty Runbook Automation Solution Overview](https://www.pagerduty.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/runbook-automation-diagram-optimized.svg)

Using PagerDuty Runbook Automation (previously announced as Rundeck Cloud), users turn manual runbooks into delegated, self-service requests and automate key IT tasks across environments to optimize security and compliance. This can include automating runbooks for resolving incidents, closing tickets, and fulfilling requests, now with the agility of operating in the cloud.