Most modern enterprises are in a race to produce digital value quickly and have darted to the fastest or cheapest venue from the wide range of resources available, contending with an inevitable mix of IT resources across a very complex vendor landscape of choices for configuration, management, and provisioning.
To capitalize on the scramble, big cloud providers have succeeded in attracting most DevOps engineers over the years with various solutions and have established a deep presence in many enterprises. AWS, Azure, GCP, and IBM Cloud provide ever-expanding self-service platforms for anything from simple operating system (OS) builds to pre-configured, containerized environments and serverless-computing. In some cases, DevOps teams can bring their own code to the table and they’re up and running right away. All of this comes at a cost, though, and enterprises now have to sort out what strategy they plan to use to take on these new technologies efficiently. They want to automate any manual process they can.
Enterprises use configuration tools such as Chef, Puppet, or Ansible to help make building their application environments easier. To access the tools required to assist in provisioning, enterprises have role-based access through Active Directory services or use a protocol like LDAP or RADIUS. Tying all of this together is the challenge.
Orchestration as the Nuts & Bolts of Automation
Orchestration is required to deliver digital business value quickly in the mad scramble while also being able to manage costs, deliver performance, and optimize resources.
Here are the four main components of an enterprise-grade orchestration strategy:
- Cost Management
- Quotas (rates, cpu, memory)
- Power Schedules
- Expiration Dates
- Performance
- Scaling
- Load Balancing
- Lifecycle Management
- Configuration Management
- Synchronize Resources
- Time to Value
- Approvals
- Notification
- User Management
For any of these “nuts and bolts” you should be able to set up relevant actions in the provisioning process. For example, once you set quotas based on rates or compute power and schedule when resources are powered on, you can orchestrate a best venue option to deploy the resources in a specific environment.
Being able to automatically scale up on demand or configure load balancing to automatically handle varying demand will ensure the proper performance for your digital workload. If you have a CI/CD process, having the ability to manage the configurations, synchronize, and rollback or forward any resources makes lifecycle management an easier process.
A good provisioning platform also has predefined rules to check for issues in the environment and take corrective action, automate policies, and adapt proactively to the state of a system. This can be as simple as user management or sending notifications when a resource has reached a certain state.
CloudBolt & Automation
CloudBolt provides a powerful way to automate your infrastructure, and actions based on triggers are executable code in the form of CloudBolt plugins, scripts, flows, email hooks or webhooks.
