IT Ops at the speed of Dev: Finding Balance in your Automation Strategy

Over the past few years, we have seen the rapid growth and maturity of tools and platforms that enable operations teams and software developers to deliver important outcomes for their businesses.  From the explosive growth of services in the public cloud, to a plethora of open source automation and orchestration platforms – such as Chef, Puppet, Ansible, and Terraform – there has never been a better time to improve the way we tackle the challenges introduced by continuous delivery and continuous integration.

However, as is the case with most things in this space, a wide-array of choice also comes with its challenges! 

Navigating a multi-vendor landscape and avoiding a potential increase on operational overhead from introducing too many tools or integration points is a risk. The more streamlined, efficient, cost-effective and productive the tooling, the better contribution it makes to the overall pipeline. Otherwise – according to Ross Winser, a Senior Research Director at Gartner -“enterprises risk ending up with a duplication of tools, processes and hidden costs that culminate to form a situation where they simply cannot scale infrastructure in the way the business expects.”

Conversely, in an attempt to avoid this exact problem, some teams may find themselves forcing a tool or platform to accomplish something that is not a core competency.  Like eating soup with a fork, what’s technically possible might not always be the easiest and most efficient route to success. 

Rather than developing overly complicated work streams, the focus should be on choosing and using products that can deliver on IT objectives while maintaining the balance between functionality and “tool sprawl.”  This enables businesses to design, deploy, and optimize infrastructure and applications across their environments in a repeatable fashion, without introducing complicated or fragile integrations. 

For example, this is the thinking behind Action Orchestrator, Cisco CloudCenter Suite’s component that can simplify technical and business workflow automation by providing integration through a broad set of adaptors and standardized interfaces.  Action Orchestrator enables IT operations to use best-in-class software without developing complicated, ad-hoc work streams that do more to get in the way than solve the many challenges of running a modern data center and cloud strategy. 

In a few days, at Cisco Live! in Barcelona, we will be discussing how to modernize automated pipelines for software and infrastructure delivery.  The goal is to enable enterprises to push automation to the next level via building automation strategies that reduce human error and eliminate the repetitive and complicated tasks that often plague technical integrations and business processes.

In our session, PSOCLD-2980: How to make IT Ops move at the speed of Dev, we will be  demonstrating how Action Orchestrator can help automate your development workflows, reduce operational complexities, and apply governance and policies to your application deployments.  Come watch as Action Orchestrator “orchestrates” the entire continuous integration and delivery (CICD) pipeline – from GitHub, to Jenkins, to K8s – to showcase how IT operations and software developers can both appreciate the benefits of DevOps and Infrastructure-as-Code.

We hope to see you there!  Please see the links below for more information on our sessions at Cisco Live! in Barcelona:

PSOCLD-2980 How to make IT Ops move at the speed of Dev | Tuesday, January 28 | 1:15 PM – 02:15 PM

BRKCLD-1215 Simplify Multicloud Deployments with Workload Manager and Action Orchestrator in CloudCenter Suite | Wednesday, January 29 | 2:45 PM – 04:15 PM

BRKCLD-2826 DevOps with CloudCenter and Kubernetes in a Multicloud Environment | Wednesday, January 29 | 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM

Cisco Live! Network Operations Center (NOC) Come visit the Cisco Live! NOC in the World of Solutions, where our engineers have developed over 55+ workflows  in Action Orchestrator to automate the setup, operation, and troubleshooting of the entire Cisco Live! network.  Monday – Thursday | Please see website for hours.

Follow Andrew Horrigan on Twitter: @nubexus13.