The Team Sport of Deploying, Managing, & Scaling Application Infrastructure

If you want to build modern applications, you need to leverage multiple resources across different infrastructure.

What kind of infrastructure?

Just in networking, we’re talking about resources across one or more data centers, physical and virtual firewalls as well as other security services, resources in either a single cloud or multiple cloud platforms, VPNs, transit gateways, DNS, load balancing…

Each type of infrastructure uses its own set of tools. These tools are chosen by the different teams who manage them, based on a variety of factors including team skillsets, tool pricing, specific features, security policies, etc. These tools are used to build all of the infrastructure resources that an application requires. They’re run by people and used to automate specific tasks within infrastructure domains. Tools also have different interaction mechanisms; some have JSON APIs, others have XML APIs, and some have CLIs, which is a challenge that system administrators must manage.

Delivering applications rapidly is a key priority across several industries, and we’re seeing a major uptick in the adoption of automation tools. However, organizations still struggle to accelerate, especially given the challenges presented above.

When a request for application deployment is initiated, it kicks off a process (probably driven by a series of tickets) that notifies all the different infrastructure teams about what they need to do.

They don’t always have visibility into what’s going on. They’re not looking at the big picture, just their own specific part of it. They run their tools or scripts, often manually (from their laptop), in order to provision each required resource. And this is repeated across all of the different teams in different infrastructure domains that have a part to play in the application deployment. Each team has its own priorities, workloads, and backlogs. On top of that, some processes are contingent on other teams finishing their work first as well as approvals being triggered on time. You can’t update firewall rules until you know the new IP addresses for the servers, which are allocated by the IPAM team. These processes get delayed when another process is delayed, meaning the entire application deployment is only as strong as its weakest link.

This is why orchestration is key to getting everyone, every domain, operating as a TEAM.

Think of an orchestration platform like the head coach of a championship soccer team, working to get every player in sync moving the ball and defending like the team has one brain.

But wait — deploying the app isn’t the whole picture either. That’s only the first half of the game… Managing changes over time is another, even bigger thing. You don’t win any trophies for winning the first half. You need every part of the game to be successful.

Over time, resource requirements for an application WILL change across all the different infrastructure domains. New servers added and removed, which leads to firewall updates, load balancer updates, DNS updates… You can see the chain reaction here.

Making these changes over time is usually also very inefficient. Before we make a change to the environment, we need to:

• Research and gather historical data on what’s being used.
• Remove old resources from utilization (and return them for future use).
• Assign new resources and activate them.
• Document all changes in a Change Request ticket or another change management system.

Now multiply this for each team involved. And again for every change involved. Now you can see why changes, especially continuous changes, can take a long time to complete.

Understanding this, how can we get all the players on our soccer team (aka different infrastructure teams) engaged, involved, and committed to the full game from initial deployment to ongoing changes over time?

We do what the USMNT is (hopefully) about to do and hire the best in the business.

Meet Head Coach Itential! The orchestration platform that delivers the efficient collaboration your organization needs.

With Itential, you can take all the different infrastructure tools used throughout the organization and utilize them visual workflows that model your application deployment processes. The workflows will execute these processes for end-to-end efficiency and validate their results.

Integration to every cloud, network, and IT systems in your environment is powerfully simple and doesn’t add any cost — a proper coach wants the entire team to work together as a whole. Creating orchestrated workflows that can execute the entire process will drive more efficiency in your business, delivering new applications faster and easier than before. But what about the critical second half of the game?

Here’s where things get even more interesting. Take those workflows and leverage them in Lifecycle Manager, another application in the Itential platform, which allows you to track the details from every infrastructure resource that comprise a service. Lifecycle Manager allows your automations to instantly understand the details they must operate on when it’s time to make changes to scale an application — without any research before the change. This streamlines how changes are made for the entire lifecycle of the full application, from beginning to end. This coach can remember the important details of every play run by every player on the team, for every game over the lifetime of the coach’s tenure. That’s powerful!

So if you’re tired of time ticking away with no results, and you’d like to see your team score more goals, take a look at this recent webinar where I dive into how it works. You’ll learn how to more efficiently deploy and manage infrastructure resources for applications by using orchestration, and how to simplify tracking related service resources so changes over time are delivered rapidly and efficiently. It’s time for your team to click — hire the best coach in the game and get orchestrating!