In a long distant former life, I looked after a farm of around a hundred Citrix servers. It was so long ago that they were physical servers, and we built or rebuilt servers following dozens of pages of written instructions. You can imagine that there were plenty of helpdesk calls for faults in the build of individual servers. This environment typifies the “handcrafted perfection” that Enterprise IT operations teams had to build. Even back in 2001, I created an automated build process of these servers to avoid manual builds. Manual processes work at the speed of humans, and they are full of human errors. To work faster and smarter, we need methods that are protected from human errors. Operational processes must be executed precisely the same every time. With manual processes, you must get it right every time. With automation, you only need to get it right once. Automating build and deployment is an excellent start as it will deliver consistent and reliable infrastructure on demand.
Ideally, infrastructure automation should be more like software development and use a declarative configuration service to implement the specification in a design file. The design file is the source code for the built environment and is stored in version control, just like the source code for the application. Once you can deploy an environment automatically, the environment is automatically recreatable. You might recreate an environment that broke rather than troubleshoot the problem. You might recreate rather than restore from backups. You should also create a copy for testing, for both changes to the environment and changes to the deployed software.
With deployment automated, it becomes easy to build an environment for testing, then dispose of that environment when the testing is complete. I don’t mean at the end of the project, but at the end of the test. When we want to implement Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery or Deployment (CI/CD), we need to run tests for each code change made by a developer. Without build automation, these tests simply cannot happen at the pace demanded by CI/CD methodologies. There is a strong argument to be made for keeping the infrastructure design file alongside the application source code, a single source location for both the application and the infrastructure that the application requires.
Infrastructure automation aims to increase the consistency and velocity of operations. Once the infrastructure lifecycle is automated, you unlock the ability to automate application lifecycles. With the ability to innovate in applications safely, business agility is easier and more reliable, providing greater value for overall IT spend.
© 2020, Alastair. All rights reserved.
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