DevOps: think about it and automate it
DevOps contributes to lean and agile software delivery. An important goal is the improvement of IT value streams by automating tasks. But the ultimate objective of DevOps is automation by design. Kickstarting a new infrastructure – on premise or in the cloud – requires a strategy that fits your business. A configuration management system is an essential part of this strategy. It highly improves the productivity of your infrastructure when you automate and standardize tasks.
Our previous blog post was all about automating repetitive tasks, the so-called dirty jobs. Automating these tasks helps IT resources free up time. This allows them to perform tasks that meet key business requirements. Following the automation of dirty jobs, you start automating more complex tasks. Let’s explain how DevOps and automation helps businesses kickstart and maintain an entirely new infrastructure, locally as well as in the cloud.
Strategy
Before kickstarting a new infrastructure, it’s important to understand the impact of an infrastructure on your operations. First of all, you need to design an infrastructure strategy that fits your business. This requires in-depth expertise about your business-critical applications. And, of course, the ability to translate that knowledge into infrastructure requirements. Therefore, it might help to consult specialists. They have the knowledge and the experience to help design and implement your infrastructure strategy.
Kickstart
Kickstarting a new infrastructure is all about installing and configuring a server park. Going from the very start until the production stage. You could set up a VMware installation, for instance, buy the hardware for on-premise installation or decide to use the services of a cloud provider. An important tool to kickstart your new infrastructure is a solution for configuration management. It helps with the automation and standardization of tasks. Besides that, it increases the reliability of your infrastructure. For example, configuration management automatically sets up firewalls and upgrades software on all your servers.
Another benefit of configuration management is that you manage your virtual machines or servers centrally, whether they are installed on-premise or in the cloud. In addition, auto-configuration is able to quickly respond to changes. When you need to change router passwords due to a cyberattack, for instance, you do that within minutes. When performed manually, this task takes up several days. Auto-configuration also reduces server downtime because it helps to get the servers back up in minutes, instead of having to configure all servers manually. The same goes for virtual machines that need to be set up and installed again. Besides the benefits mentioned above, configuration management also helps to automatically maintain your infrastructure.
Automated maintenance
Maintaining your infrastructure is essential, as it helps minimize the impact on production. The good news? Configuration management can automatically maintain your infrastructure. It automates the registration of your servers in a monitoring environment, among other things, to ensure that continuous monitoring is done by default. In addition, if a person performs a non-authorized upgrade of an application that leads to compatibility problems, auto-configuration moves the upgrade and reinstalls the former version of the application on all your servers.
Do you want to kickstart your new infrastructure? Bryxx helps you design a strategy that fits your business and implement it.