Introduction
Agility, resilience, scale, and cost efficiency are competitive advantages of cloud computing. You can also gain these advantages with self-managed infrastructure by following three key aspects of the public cloud provider blueprint.
The first aspect is infrastructure automation, which seamlessly provisions networked servers at scale. Infrastructure automation creates and maintains highly cost effective, agile, and scalable IT environments.
The next aspect involves automating provisioning resources for your applications through the API-driven operations approach.
The third and no less important aspect is supporting application development and deployment best practices specifically designed for cloud-like infrastructure, such as small teams creating microservices.
Joining together these key cloud native aspects of infrastructure automation, application automation, and application engineering creates a self-managed infrastructure capable of equally delivering exceptional business value and competitive advantage.
Let’s explore these three ways to implement cloud-like behaviors for self-managed infrastructure in more detail.
1. Infrastructure Automation Platforms
An infrastructure automation platform is the center of a self-managed strategy for cloud-like behavior. It creates configuration declarations and runs scripts that provision and maintain infrastructure. Automation supports dynamic reconfiguration and ongoing provisioning for changing requirements.
Operations teams develop and maintain automation scripts for provisioning activities to support applications either individually or across the organization. The operations teams also define and create triggers, timers, and event responses to quickly respond to changing infrastructure requirements, including auto scaling of containers, auto increase of CPU and memory allocations, and automatic failover for business continuity.
Organizations can establish a dedicated Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team to handle automation functions for cloud-like applications. Such an SRE team ensures your self-managed infrastructure is always able to respond to dynamically changing application requirements, and always performs as expected during and after developer hand off to production.
2. Application Automation and DevOps
One of the biggest challenges in uplifting self-managed infrastructure to cloud-like computing is transitioning an organization’s operations approach to the API-driven model.
When AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud manages infrastructure for you, you don’t file a ticket with an operations team to provision an app server, VM, database, or messaging service. And you never execute manual actions. Instead, you use an API to issue a command over the Internet to automatically provision infrastructure, for example, to allocate required compute and storage resources, provision a database, or define security policies.
In the public cloud, manual operations processes just don’t exist. It’s all done using APIs and automation. Self-managed organizations can also shift their operations culture to an API-driven model to improve efficiency and lower cost.
The transition to API-driven operations can be very challenging, though, and often faces organizational resistance. You may need to reorganize your existing operations function or set up a new team dedicated to creating and managing APIs for the automated model. You can start small, with a single project or application, see how it goes, and then expand from there once it’s up and running. If you set up a dedicated team you can have them assist multiple development teams, and onboard them one by one.
This type of collaboration between developers and operators using APIs (i.e., DevOps) is required for the cloud and delivers comparable benefits for self-managed infrastructure. Best of all, you don’t have to invent it – lots of proven technologies, tools, and best practices are available from your suppliers or other industry sources.
3. Application Architecture Relies on Solid Infrastructure
Moving to the API-based operations model to achieve cloud-like benefits has implications for your approach to application teams. Development teams must learn to use these APIs to provision and manage the infrastructure components they need at the same time as deploying the application code.
They also need to follow cloud-native architecture best practices to achieve the best benefits of cloud-like infrastructure for their applications. Cloud-native best practices for application architecture include splitting the application into individual functions represented by microservices and working in small teams.
Reorganizing for small, self-managed dev teams (i.e., using CI/CD pipelines) helps you get applications, patches, and updates to production more quickly. Best practices for these small teams typically limit the scope of their responsibility to one or two microservices end to end – including production support.
For some organizations this may be too big of a change, but it’s possible to find a middle ground with a broader scope. As with automation platforms, you can start small and build from there.
With these changes, your goal is to become more agile, release to production more quickly, respond to incidents and outages more quickly, improve security, and improve customer experience with fast responsiveness and “always on” availability.
Platform automation helps achieves these cloud-like benefits for applications deployed on self-managed infrastructure just as it does for applications deployed in the cloud, ultimately erasing the differences between cloud and self-managed infrastructure.
The Intellyx Take
Cloud-like behaviors are not restricted to the public cloud. They originated with the public cloud, but the cloud blueprint and resulting benefits are available for self-managed infrastructure as well.
Infrastructure automation platforms, for example, arose out of the necessity to manage hundreds and thousands of computers: it’s just too much to do with the manual system administration tools.
Infrastructure automation becomes an important competitive differentiator, especially when combined with API-driven operations and cloud-native applications such as microservices.
It’s just a matter of selecting the right automation platform and adopting the parts of the cloud native blueprint that gives you the same advantages of scale, resilience, agility, customer experience, and cost efficiency.
Plenty of enterprises have already realized these benefits, and we are seeing a lot of examples of enterprises that have repatriated cloud applications to achieve equal or greater benefits from self-managed infrastructure.
RackN provides a full suite of platform automation tools and services to help you also achieve the benefits of cloud-like behaviors for your self-managed infrastructure.
Copyright © Intellyx BV. Intellyx has final editorial control of this article. As of the time of writing, RackN is an Intellyx customer. No AI was used to write this content.
