devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Tag: IT management

Looking Ahead, 2023 Edition

DevOps is in a perpetual state of change that keeps all of us engaged and busy, but makes a mess of things overall. Do you cloud-first? Are your APIs GraphQL yet? Are you doing SDN to connect to the VPN so you can put files on the CDN and build closer to the market? Sorry, had to do it. You get the point.

The point is that the ground is forever changing under us, and often things that seem straightforward are not. Like “cloud-native,” including Kubernetes. Yeah, I get it, you mean software-defined infrastructure that works well with infrastructure-as-code (IaC); this field is confusing enough—calling it cloud is dumb when, these days, cloud has a specific meaning in the minds of IT.

In our current round of change, a few patterns are showing up. Automation is king. Sometimes it is sold as AI/ML because those are the buzzwords of the day, but it is just continuing the trend of automation to make IT more responsive and predictable. We are rapidly approaching a point where the entirety of the application development/deployment process can be automated reliably and configured to create predictable results. By that I mean that development has more assistance writing code, test has more assistance running tests and processing results, deployment environments can be grabbed from application release automation/orchestration tooling and the final product all of that means that builds can be deployed with very little human interaction unless something breaks.

Highly automated systems are a prerequisite of high-volume output, though – automobile factories are the easiest example of that statement. My problem is that we don’t seem to be asking “Should we be high-volume producers?” Does the average enterprise require non-stop development? I think that the initial answer is yes, and the more considered answer is “Only because the business wants more, consistently.”

At some point, the gains we received from DevOps need to be looked at from the “What value is added?” perspective. And that is a business function with IT input. Before SaaS and DevOps made IT easier (to get something running; not minimizing our work here), the business had to consider carefully if it needed that application or that change to an existing one. Today, that consideration is pretty much “Because we want it, put it on the backlog.” But all of our new development adds to our technical debt. While the wave of automation we have been living through since “The Pheonix Project” was first published is keeping us ahead of the curve, we will inevitably need to consider flattening the curve. I suggest that the time is now.

Getting started with this is actually pretty easy. For many organizations, simply stating, “We do not need two ways to do that” will yield benefits quickly. Other organizations will have to ask “Why can’t we use the functionality of existing tools/apps to do that?” and yet others will need to ask the business, “Do we even need to do that?” Prioritization still exists, and management does an okay job of pushing back at all of the organizations I talk to. Still, at some point it goes beyond “prioritize your wishlist,” and IT managers will have to start asking if a project is even necessary–even if doing so makes waves.

Continue to rock it, but we’re past time to look for redundancy, synergy and misdirection. There is more complexity coming, and more sweet solutions to problems (both known and unknown) are right around the corner. But, as I’ve said before, simplify as you go because you need to be able to handle the next wave, and eventually, automation won’t cover the gap.

January 31, 2023
BMC Extends Scope of ServiceOps Initiative

At the BMC Exchange conference this week, BMC revealed it has updated its Helix IT service management (ITSM) platform to include mapping and discovery capabilities. Those updates make it simpler for cross-functional teams to correlate incidents, alerts and data and pinpoint root causes faster.

In addition, BMC is now applying pre-trained artificial intelligence (AI) models to observability data and the service models it tracks to assess service health, predict service impacts and proactively manage IT environments as the volume of metrics, events, and alerts continues to increase.

Finally, BMC also announced that the BMC Helix Control-M orchestration engine now supports open source Apache Airflow, a workflow management platform for defining data pipelines using a Python programming tool.

Margaret Lee, vice president and general manager for digital service and operations management at BMC, said these updates extend a unified ServiceOps initiative the company launched last year to unify ITSM, DevOps and customer service desk workflows. While each of these disciplines may have distinct objectives—such as speed and reliability—that are often in conflict with one another, Lee said it’s apparent IT organizations need to reduce the current level of friction that is often encountered when managing IT.

As a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform, Lee said the BMC Helix platform achieves that goal via a consumer-like user interface that can be easily personalized. The goal is to make it simpler to create virtual agents, knowledge bases, live chat and tickets that make it easy for customers and employees to request IT help, she added.

Achieving that goal, however, will require IT organizations to rely more heavily on AI models to automate routine tasks as IT environments become more complex. There are simply not enough IT professionals available to manage IT environments using legacy processes, she noted.

In addition, end users and customers are expecting service requests to be automated in way that allow them to resolve issues via a mobile device, added Lee. In many cases, how cumbersome IT processes now has a direct impact on both customers and employee retention. The primary goal is to reduce the number of interactions required to complete a task such as changing a password or provisioning a laptop whenever a new employee needs to be onboarded.

While the pace at which IT management is evolving will vary greatly from one organization to the next, it’s apparent that many DevOps principles are being absorbed into traditional ITSM platforms. The challenge is that cultural divide between DevOps teams and centralized IT teams is still very wide. Most organizations are still trying to determine how far left they want to shift responsibilities toward application development teams versus continuing to rely on IT administrators using graphical tools to centrally manage IT workflows. It’s rarely going to be an all-or-nothing proposition. Rather, the issue is finding a way to strike a balance that enables organizations to be as agile as possible without introducing unacceptable levels of risk to resiliency.

October 26, 2022
Survey Surfaces Multi-Cloud Computing and Cost Challenges

A survey of 360 CIOs and IT leaders in the U.S. and the United Kingdom found that, as the number of cloud platforms an organization employs expands, the number of tools they are required to deploy and master does, too.

The survey, published this week by Virtana, a provider of a platform for managing cloud migrations, found nearly two-thirds of respondents (63%) reported their organization relied on at least five separate tools for migration, cloud cost optimization, integrated performance monitoring, application performance management and cloud infrastructure monitoring. A full 83% are expending some level of manual effort to consolidate data from all of these tools, or are simply using them in isolation from one another. Only 17% said data integration is fully automated.

Nearly three-quarters (73%) also noted that siloed efforts limit their ability to realize the full potential of the cloud.

It appears that multi-cloud computing only makes managing IT more challenging. Not to mention the increased pressure a multi-cloud approach puts on DevOps and developers that already juggle an overwhelming number of tools for development, DevSecOps and more. And, of course, the risk of cloud misconfiguration grows alongside the number of cloud platforms an organization uses.

According to the Virtana survey, a total of 82% of respondents have a multi-cloud strategy, with more than three-quarters (78%) deploying workloads in more than three public clouds. A full 59% now run more than half of their workloads on public clouds. More than half (51%) also plan to increase the number of public cloud instances they support this year, with more than a third (34%) planning on using five or more cloud platforms.

More challenging still, more than three quarters (76%) are in the early stages of implementing serverless computing frameworks. Overall, more than half (52%) will continue to maintain a hybrid environment as part of their core IT strategy. A full 96% of respondents see value in workload portability, but only 71% are in the early stages of achieving that goal. Top benefits anticipated include maximized cost savings (58%), reduced cloud service provider risk (46%) and increased business agility (43%). However, nearly three-quarters (75%) have either no or few cloud governance capabilities (34%) or have stitched together disparate tools to achieve that goal (41%).

Jonathan Cyr, vice president of product management for Virtana, said that as the global economy becomes more challenging, it’s only a matter of time before sensitivity to cloud costs start to rise. Each time the overall IT environment expands, increases in complexity drive the total cost of IT higher.

It’s not clear to what degree that sensitivity to cloud cost might drive more IT organizations to centralize the management of IT environments. In theory, a single control plane could be employed to manage multiple cloud computing environments, but today most clouds are still managed in isolation from one another.

IT teams also find themselves inadvertently locked into a cloud platform. The more developers invoke proprietary application programming interfaces (API), the more difficult it becomes to migrate a workload from one cloud platform to another.

It’s all but certain there will be a cloud management reckoning in the months ahead. Development teams may prefer one cloud platform over another for many reasons but, as the cost of IT continues to increase, there will soon be tougher cloud cost questions emanating from the finance office.

May 20, 2022
Survey Shows Shift to SRE Principles to Automate IT Management

A global survey of 1,500 IT decision-makers conducted by F5 found that, on average, organizations are managing more than 200 applications deployed across an extended enterprise as well as more than 20 different security and delivery technologies.

Lori MacVittie, principal technical evangelist in the Office of the CTO for F5, said that level of complexity makes it apparent that IT teams will need to embrace higher levels of automation to manage the IT environments that are now at the core of a wide range of digital business transformation initiatives. The survey revealed that more than three-quarters of respondents (77%) were embracing site reliability engineering (SRE) principles to automate the management of IT.

A full 95% of respondents also planned to mine operational data for insights they could use to improve the customer experience and drive business growth. However, 98% of respondents also said they are currently unable to extract those needed insights from their existing systems. A total of 90% said they planned to implement some form of artificial intelligence (AI) to achieve that goal. More than two-thirds of respondents said their organizations realized that creating superior digital interactions for customers will require modernizing business processes and back-office functions.

As part of those efforts, the survey suggested that application workloads are being shifted across highly distributed computing environments. In addition to the 84% of respondents that are planning to move workloads to the edge, the survey found two-thirds of organizations (67%) are currently or planning to repatriate applications from the cloud to a data center environment in the next 12 months. A total of 93% of respondents reported using some type of as-a-service offering delivered via the cloud today.

Naturally, securing that many platforms also represents a major challenge. However, despite inherent risks, more than three-quarters (76%) of respondents said, given the choice, they’d turn off security measures to improve performance. That lack of willingness to sacrifice performance suggests that attitudes to security may not have changed much despite all the breaches that now regularly occur, said MacVittie.

It’s not clear to what degree managing enterprise IT environments has become untenable; however, it’s clear that legacy manual processes will need to become automated. Organizations can’t afford to keep hiring IT staff to manage IT platforms that span everything from the network edge to public clouds. In fact, the survey makes clear that DevOps practices—in the form of the SRE principles first defined by Google—are gaining traction. That doesn’t necessarily mean everyone managing IT is becoming an SRE or an engineer, but it does suggest that automation frameworks are being more widely used.

It may be a while before those automation frameworks are ubiquitous. However, one way or another, many of the tasks that have historically conspired to make working in IT tedious are going to disappear. The issue, of course, is to not wind up with islands of disconnected automation that introduce more complexity.

April 12, 2022
AWS Unfurls Bevy of Automation Tools to Streamline DevOps

At the AWS re:Invent conference, Amazon Web Services (AWS) added a bevy of tools to its portfolio intended to accelerate the pace of application development while simultaneously simplifying DevOps processes.

AWS development tools unveiled this week include AWS Amplify Studio, a visual development environment that allows developers to create web application user interfaces (UIs) with minimal coding.

Ken Exner, head of product for developer tools at AWS, said as an extension of an existing AWS Amplify Studio tool, this latest addition allows developers to customize application UIs at a higher level of abstraction using a library of components while enabling them to drop down to a lower level of coding to customize their application further whenever required. After the UI is designed, AWS Amplify Studio automatically generates the associated JavaScript or TypeScript code for the developer.

In general, AWS is committed to improving developer productivity by providing, for example, automated reasoning tools that automate processes without locking devs into a layer of abstraction that, ultimately, may create a wall that blocks them from meeting customization requirements, he said.

Other developer tools launched by AWS this week include updates to Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer that adds a secrets detector that uses machine learning algorithms to identify hardcoded secrets that can be secured using AWS Secrets Manager; a revamped Amazon Inspector vulnerability management tool that provides automated assessment scans, automated resource discovery, support for container-based workloads, improved risk scoring, integration with Amazon EventBridge and AWS Security Hub and the removal of the stand-alone Amazon Inspector scanning agent.

AWS also revealed it has eliminated the need to manually pull images from the Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) repositories by adding automated synchronization capabilities that keep private and public registries consistent with each other.

In terms of IT operations tools, AWS added a managed database service to its Amazon Relational Database Service portfolio that allows IT teams to customize the underlying database and operating system using an RDS Custom option, a new table class for Amazon DynamoDB designed to reduce storage costs for infrequently accessed data and a service for RDS, dubbed Amazon DevOps Guru, that extends existing machine learning capabilities to automatically detect and diagnose performance bottlenecks and operational database issues.

Jeff Carter, vice president for relational databases at AWS, said that as databases are increasingly managed by DevOps teams rather than traditional database administrators (DBAs), the cloud service provider is moving to reduce friction by automating as many manual tasks as possible. That’s critical at a time when IT teams are deploying a much wider range of purpose-built databases that are optimized for different classes of applications, he added. The overall goal is to rely more on automation to reduce friction across the IT environment, said Carter.

Overall, there are two classes of AWS customers: The first are development teams that are increasingly relying on managed services provided by AWS to automate a wide range of DevOps processes. The second tend to be enterprise IT organizations that prefer to manage cloud services themselves.

Mitch Ashley, a principal for Techstrong Research, an arm of the parent company of devopsy.kinsta.cloud, noted that, in many cases, enterprise IT teams are managing DevOps workflows that span multiple clouds. As such, they tend to prefer tools and platforms that can be applied to both multiple clouds and on-premises IT environments. The more those organizations rely on managed services provided by a cloud service provider the more difficult it becomes to consistently manage DevOps workflows across multiple IT environments.

It’s too early to say just how much IT organizations will rely on managed services going forward. However, at a time when more organizations are using more IT platforms than ever, it’s clear the DevOps management challenge increases with each new platform introduced into the IT environment.

December 3, 2021
The Need for Agile, Adaptable IT Infrastructure
Through the adoption of Agile concepts and new best practices such as automated testing, organizations can move beyond the innovation curve and bolster their IT infrastructure. In fact, the need to build agile and resilient IT infrastructure has become increasingly pertinent over the past 18 months.

From remote working and managing the diverse needs of employees in remote locations to the growing rates of cybercrime, the move from the physical world to the virtual one has seriously impacted the ability of organizations to operate. It comes as no surprise that business leaders are increasingly investing more in new tools and technologies to improve their IT infrastructure, transform operations and drive business value.

That said, it still remains relatively rare for enterprises to wholly adopt Agile approaches and techniques, despite the fact that doing so can help improve the efficiency at which goods and services hit the market. The fact is that many technology companies still do not use Agile as it is difficult to implement at scale. In addition, Agile transformation demands a cultural change, which can often take time.

Nevertheless, sooner or later, Agile IT will need to be implemented across businesses in various industry sectors, as well as across all branches of an organization. Our experience has been that Agile transformation will help your business grow and succeed.

What is Agile IT?

Agile is a philosophy—a mindset that can be applied to improve the provisioning, management and operation of digital infrastructure. Agile promotes business-led development, whereby a product owner and software development team collaborate as a single entity to deliver tasks that are prioritized based on business value. These tasks are also delivered over a short timeframe, such as via two-week sprints.

Essentially, your infrastructure is far more likely to be both secure and resilient if Agile concepts are implemented throughout the software engineering process. As a result, new digital products can be delivered to customers more quickly. For example, Agile ways of working include making small, iterative changes to deliver high-quality results with speed. You can also spin up infrastructure when needed, which keeps the cost of innovation down.

The Differences Between Agile and Traditional IT Infrastructure?

Infrastructure agility is best achieved using modern solutions such as cloud technology. This significantly differs from the traditional approach of having on-premises infrastructure, which cannot be scaled up or down as needed. In fact, on-premises solutions often require extensive upfront capital, while investing in cloud resources works on a pay-as-you-go model to deliver flexibility and elasticity for strategic needs.

The conflict between adaptive software methods and predictive methods is another significant difference between these approaches. Development teams follow a comprehensive plan in traditional waterfall approaches, and any changes must go through stringent change control management. Agile requirements, on the other hand, require flexibility, allowing teams to adjust to changes as soon as they occur. This method is suitable for smaller projects that must be performed quickly and efficiently.

Benefits of Implementing Flexible IT Infrastructure

The advantages of having Agile IT infrastructure are numerous. In fact, the adoption of Agile methods not only promotes business growth but is also a great way to reduce costs and improve team performance. By working in sprints, teams can turn around features more often and nurture their value throughout the business. Agile transformation also enables organizations to offer new products or solutions to customers faster, gain early feedback and make changes if necessary, thus avoiding error from the very beginning.

Cost optimization is another benefit to consider. With Agile infrastructure housed in the public cloud, IT leaders can expand or decommission resources based on consumer demand. Cloud companies’ pay-as-you-go strategy also ensures that costs are kept to a minimum viable level. For example, maximum limitations can be set for the scaling out of resources. Most importantly, agile working methods eliminate the need for substantial upfront investments, resulting in a higher return on investment (ROI).

How to Achieve Agility

The benefits of Agile transformation are clear; however, the journey to achieving this can take time. First and foremost, becoming Agile requires a clear understanding of what it means and why it is important for your business’ competitive context. Once the ‘what’ and ‘why’ are defined, the ‘how’ becomes easy. The three core steps to achieving this agility are:
1. Implementing new methods
  Instead of trying to rework existing IT management tasks and procedures, it is often better to think of new ones as part of the Agile journey. This will ensure that your system’s performance and availability are in line with your core goals.
2. Investing in the right tools
  Agile is all about delivering smaller outcomes quickly. To achieve this speed, automating key stages of the software development process is key. There are a host of tools available to undertake this automation, including hybrid cloud solutions that can seamlessly switch between the public and private cloud. A careful selection of the tools that best fit your needs and the correct implementation of these throughout the organization is paramount to achieving success.
3. Changing the culture
  To become an agile business, the entire organization requires a cultural change—from how the business discovers a problem to how that problem is resolved by technology teams and monitored in production to enable a faster feedback loop. At every stage of the process, team members need to perform tasks differently, which often requires training, buy-in from the wider team and a collaborative approach.
Investment in Agile IT is a smart decision for business leaders hoping to transform their operations, ensure resilience and drive business value. By choosing infrastructure that caters to these needs, you can save money and ensure confidence at critical moments.
November 10, 2021
Newly Independent VMware to Focus on Multi-Cloud

As an independent company once again, VMware will focus its efforts on providing management planes that span multiple cloud computing environments after officially spinning out of Dell Technologies.

Ray O’Farrell, executive vice president for the cloud-native apps business unit at VMware, said the company now has a unique opportunity to work closely with providers of cloud services, builders of on-premises IT infrastructure and providers of telecommunications services.

The terms of the spin-off included an $11.5 billion special cash dividend that resulted in a $27.40 per share dividend payment to all VMware stockholders. VMware claims the simplified financial structure that arises from the deal will provide it with additional operational and financial flexibility.

Going forward, much of the development work will focus on providing management planes that not only span multiple clouds but also address specific cross-platform requirements such as security. It’s not likely there will ever be one single uber control plane for all of IT, noted O’Farrell. Rather, IT teams should expect VMware to deliver a series of well-integrated control planes to automate specific tasks in a way that breaks down IT silos, he said.

VMware, however, under terms of its existing alliance, will also continue to work closely with Dell to create server environments that are optimized for VMware hypervisor platforms, O’Farrell said.

Key to the strategy is a portfolio of observability tools that VMware plans to continue to expand, noted O’Farrell. VMware will also address the requirements of both traditional monolithic applications running on virtual machines as well as cloud-native applications running on distributions of Kubernetes, such as VMware Tanzu, that may be deployed on top of a hypervisor or on a bare-metal server, he added.

Given the complex state of IT environments today, it’s all but inevitable something will go wrong, said O’Farrell. The challenge and the opportunity for VMware is to provide IT teams with the observability tools required to discover as many issues as possible before they adversely impact the business, he added. Once those issues are discovered, IT teams should be able to automate the remediation process using the rest of the portfolio of VMware management frameworks, he noted.

Those management frameworks will also provide the foundation for unifying traditional approaches to IT service management (ITSM) with DevOps best practices that are now being used more widely, especially to manage cloud-native applications, said O’Farrell.

When it comes to on-premises IT environments, VMware continues to dominate. Its hypervisor is, by far, the most widely used on servers in local data centers. VMware has spent much of the last two years expanding its reach into multiple clouds to enable IT organizations to standardize on a series of management frameworks. The goal is to reduce the total cost of IT by reducing reliance on what would otherwise be a hodgepodge of isolated management frameworks. The challenge VMware regularly encounters is the IT teams that manage cloud computing environments are not always the same ones that are managing on-premises IT environments. As such, many IT teams that have deployed cloud applications tend to embrace the management frameworks provided by their cloud services provider.

VMware, however, is betting that as more organizations look to reduce the total cost of IT, the economic pressure to converge IT management using its frameworks will be simply too great to ignore.

November 2, 2021
CloudBolt Adds Cloud Cost Tool to Hybrid Management Platform

CloudBolt Software this week added cost management capabilities for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure public clouds along with codeless integrations with additional platforms to its hybrid cloud management platform.

Grant Ho, chief marketing officer for CloudBolt, said the Spring Release of the company’s platform, now generally available, enables IT operations teams to rely much less on custom code to integrate the various elements of a hybrid cloud computing environment. The Spring edition adds support for the VMware vRealize Automation 8 automation platform, the configuration management database provided by ServiceNow as a cloud service and the IP address management platform from SolarWinds.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, CloudBolt is betting more organizations will look to centralize IT management as part of an effort to reduce the total cost of IT. The cost management capabilities added to the platform enable IT teams to position themselves as more of an independent arbiter of where certain classes of workloads should run, based on cost, at a time when organizations have never had as many options as they do today, noted Ho.

A recent survey published by CloudBolt found 80% of respondents are prioritizing real-time insight into cost optimization and security remediation. A total of 71% want self-service to be easy for end users, while 62% want an approach to integration that doesn’t require deep domain knowledge or special expertise.

A full 94% of respondents also noted hybrid cloud computing will be critical to digital transformation. A total of 92% also noted that empowering end users through self-service IT is a digital transformation accelerator, while 99% said successful automation depends on streamlining integrations.

More than three quarters (78%) noted they lack the visibility necessary to optimize cloud deployments. More than half (56%) also admitted their self-service offerings fail to meet user needs and more than three-quarters (76%) still rely on some form of custom coding when it comes to integration.

Most enterprise IT organizations are trying to strike a balance between cost and flexibility as IT environments become more distributed. Each time a new platform is added to an IT environment, the total cost of IT rises because additional consoles for managing those platforms need to be staffed. The challenge is finding a way to centralize the management of IT in a way that reduces the number of consoles that have to be mastered without requiring every business unit to standardize on a platform that locks an organization into a single provider.

It’s unclear to what degree IT organizations will rely on traditional IT service management (ITSM) platforms manned by administrators versus DevOps platforms deployed by site reliability engineers (SREs) to achieve that goal. However, one way or another, the cost of distributed computing environments needs to be reduced, even as they are becoming more complex. The primary issue now is deciding how best to achieve that goal in an IT environment where every application owner tends to view themselves as master of their own IT domain.

June 10, 2021
Survey Shows Acceleration of Centralized IT Management

An OpsRamp survey published this week suggests large enterprises are looking to finally unify IT management at at time when it is becoming increasingly complex.

OpsRamp, a provider of an IT management platform based on machine learning algorithms, polled 132 IT operations directors working for organizations in the U.S. with more than 500 employees that spend more than $5 million a year on IT.

According to the results, the survey found nearly 73% of respondents plan to roll out a digital operations management platform in 2021. That platform will, hopefully, enable IT teams to unify hybrid cloud computing environments made up of monolithic and microservices-based applications via a single console. Another 21%of respondents expressed interest in such a platform, if budgetary constraints allowed.

More than half (51%) also noted they expect to employ automation and AIOps (51%) in the form of machine learning algorithms and process automation to reliably cut down on the number of alerts being generated, identify the root cause of issues and eliminate repetitive manual tasks.

The two main goals identified in the survey are to enable greater agility and resolve issues faster (46%) and reduce costs by consolidating tools (41%).

While the rise of cloud computing has made IT more agile, each cloud service that is added to the IT firmament tends to increase the total cost of IT. Each IT platform in use today requires a dedicated team to operate, which conspires to increase both the number of tools required and the overall size of the IT staff required to master them.

In the wake of the economic downturn during the COVID-19 pandemic, the amount of pressure being applied to reduce those costs has increased significantly. Security and compliance concerns are also starting to push organizations toward centralizing the management of IT as much as possible. The OpsRamp survey notes that platform security (59%) is the most critical attribute of a next-generation IT platform, followed by hybrid infrastructure management capabilities (52%) and flexible pricing (37%).

Deepak Jannu, senior director for product marketing at OpsRamp, said achieving those goals across what has become an extended enterprise requires a platform that has the ability to first capture telemetry data in real-time and then aggregate that data in way that enables artificial intelligence (AI) models to learn how the IT environment actually operates.

Armed with that data, it then becomes possible to employ AI to both troubleshoot IT issues more easily and surface recommendations that address capacity utilization, noted Jannu.

It may be a while before AI-enabled IT management platforms are commonplace in the enterprise. However, it’s also apparent a number of factors are driving IT leaders to reevaluate their existing platforms as IT environments become increasingly more complex.

Regardless of what platform an organization eventually opts to standardize on, the rate at which IT management tasks are being automated is only going to increase as machine learning algorithms become more familiar with the IT environment in which they are deployed. That doesn’t necessarily mean those algorithms will remove the need for IT administrators and DevOps teams, however. It does mean that the tasks the individuals on IT teams are focused on will, hopefully, provide a lot more value to the business.

April 21, 2021
Cisco Leans on HashiCorp to Manage Infrastructure as Code

HashiCorp and Cisco today announced a Cisco Intersight Service for Terraform offering based on HashiCorp Terraform Cloud Business software.

Cisco Intersight is an IT operations management platform that enables IT teams to manage IT infrastructure across a hybrid cloud computing environment. Open source Terraform tools have emerged as the dominant tool for provisioning infrastructure as code in the cloud and, increasingly, in on-premises IT environments.

HashiCorp Terraform Cloud Business is an instance of Terraform that has been extended to include some additional security and governance capabilities enterprise IT organizations typically require.

In recent years, Cisco has significantly expanded its presence in on-premises IT environments as many IT teams opted to deploy its servers alongside its networking equipment. Like every other provider of on-premises IT environment, Cisco has been moving to extend the reach of its management frameworks to public clouds to help foster the rise of hybrid cloud computing.

Prior to the pandemic, most public clouds and on-premises IT environments were managed in isolation from one another. However, in the wake of the economic downturn brought on by the pandemic, more IT teams are trying to centralize the management of IT platforms as part of an ongoing effort to reduce the total cost of IT. The multiyear alliance with HashiCorp fills a major hole in the Cisco management portfolio, as Terraform increasingly becomes a de facto standard for provisioning IT infrastructure-as-code.

Vijay Venugopal, head of product management for Cisco Cloud and Compute Software, said the alliance with HashiCorp will make it possible to provide Terraform support across a management portfolio that, over time, continues to be enhanced with machine learning algorithms that add artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, also known as AIOps. That platform is already being employed by 6,000 customers to manage more than 600,000 servers, running primarily in on-premises IT environments, added Venugopal.

It’s unclear how the battle for control over hybrid cloud computing will ultimately play out. While providers of on-premises platforms such as Cisco are making a case for using existing management frameworks to also manage workloads deployed on public clouds, the providers of those platforms are now extending their reach into on-premises IT environments. Cisco is, of course, betting that most organizations would prefer to extend an existing framework to achieve that goal, versus having to rip and replace existing IT infrastructure to employ an alternative framework from a cloud service provider.

Regardless of how organizations ultimately decide to manage IT in the age of the hybrid cloud, it’s clear developers, thanks to tools such as Terraform, are exercising more direct control over IT infrastructure. Incorporating Terraform within a larger IT management framework presents an opportunity to bridge the divide between developers and IT operations teams that have historically relied on visual tools to provision infrastructure. The challenge now is finding a way for developers and IT administrators – with varying levels of programming expertise – to work more closely as management of IT environments become increasingly more complex.

March 25, 2021