How to Productize Network Services with Stateful Orchestration

Infrastructure teams are tasked with delivering business-critical IT services quickly and at scale. Often, these services are complex and touch multiple systems across your environment, which adds to the challenge.

Teams turn to automation to complete tasks more quickly, leveraging a combination of vendor-provided controllers, open source scripting, and homegrown solutions. While these solutions provide key benefits, task automation is limited to the domain level, meaning complex, multi-domain services can still be slow to fulfill.

Itential’s orchestration platform is designed to solve the scalability challenges teams can run into with domain-level automation. Users can stitch together multiple automations to coordinate processes end-to-end, integrating with key systems like ServiceNow, IPAM, and security platforms and building in logic to ensure an orchestrated process can flow correctly and in compliance with required standards. On top of these orchestration capabilities, Itential can also be used to define and retain stateful data for a service so teams can capture and leverage these details to build and manage self-service infrastructure products.

In our latest live webinar, Rich Martin, Director of Technical Marketing, and Dan Sullivan, Principal Solutions Architect, explored how orchestration and productization transform service delivery. They demonstrated how teams can evolve from siloed automations to orchestrated workflows and, ultimately, to delivering API-accessible self-serve products that are easy to consume, manage, and scale. Watch it on-demand below:

I got to play the orchestration architect during the webinar, focusing on how orchestration connects the dots between automation and productization. Like we say early in the video, “it’s about stitching these automations together and normalizing the things I need to build a workflow for this process.”

This includes integrating with systems like ServiceNow, ticketing platforms, inventory databases, and other tools.

Key Orchestration Benefits:

• Build workflows that combine multiple automations into an end-to-end service.
• Integrate workflows with IT systems, such as change management, ticketing, inventory, and more.
• Implement pre- and post-check logic, build in error handling, and enforce organizational standards for every orchestrated process.

Dan, adopting the perspective of a product manager, then covered how Itential allows teams to define resource models and track all the required information for every instance of a service so that organizations can truly productize the network.

“Users want to actually be able to consume a product. Usually, what they’re actually looking for is an API with some simple parameters. We want to offer them a way to actually define services in the way they want to consume them so that it fits their environment.”

Developers and internal customers expect services to be delivered through a consumable, API-driven interface, not a collection of disparate parts. This requires another step beyond building orchestrations — it demands tracking, managing, and scaling those orchestrated workflows as products.

To deliver services as self-serve products, the network team needs to be able to track requirements. Most orchestration out there is stateless, but by leveraging state, Itential allows teams to manage service instances by applying actions to them based on defined resource models. Productization ties all the different required information to manage a service and makes it consumable.

Key Productization Benefits:

• Deliver end-to-end services that developers can self-serve how, what, and where they want to consume via a single API.
• Track product requirements to manage products, ensure information is documented for audit purposes, and more.
• Maximize the business impact of network infrastructure.

When a developer requests an infrastructure product, they aren’t thinking about how it’s being fulfilled. The priority is to consume a standard service via API that will deliver resources the developer needs as quickly as possible. By providing teams with the ability to deliver network services as consumable products, Itential bridges key efficiency gaps in every corner of an organization.

This is what we mean when we talk about a product mindset, which Dan and I discussed towards the beginning of the webinar. It’s about evolving the way we deliver and consume network services — the developer doesn’t want to request a set of component parts they have to put together. To move as quickly as they need to, they want the ability to request a service in its entirety, standardized and secure, and receive the resources they need instantly. It’s looking at the public cloud model and transforming on-premises and private cloud infrastructure so it can be consumed in the same way — accelerating service delivery, lowering costs, and improving resource allocation for infrastructure teams.

Automation is just the first step — the more quickly and reliably developers, operations, and others can receive resources they need, the better for the business. That’s the impact of standardizing and productizing the network.