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IT Infrastructure Automation
Principles, Setup, Sourcing Models
Relying on 14 years of experience in IT infrastructure services, ScienceSoft shares the core practices, key steps, and potential sourcing models for infrastructure automation setup.
IT Infrastructure Automation: The Essence
IT infrastructure automation refers to provisioning and managing infrastructure components automatically, which speeds up deployments and scaling of IT resources, reduces failure rate, and boosts consistency. Manual infrastructure management tasks can be translated into scripts and configurations.
Core Principles of Effective Infrastructure Automation
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC).
IaC is the foundation of infrastructure automation, as it allows architecture configurations to be written in code format. IT engineers can then reproduce, alter, and version-control this code to automatically deploy, scale, and manage infrastructure components (e.g., servers and networks). - Configuration management.
Configuration management tools automate the setup and maintenance of software, services, or dependencies to ensure infrastructure scalability, portability, and system consistency across environments. This practice complements IaC by managing how systems are configured after deployment. - Automated testing.
Automated validation of infrastructure configurations in code format helps to identify and fix errors, security misconfigurations, or compliance issues early, improving infrastructure reliability. - Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD).
CI/CD automates the multi-step process of integrating changes, validating them, and deploying code. With the help of IaC, configuration management, and automated testing tools, CI/CD pipelines automate the full lifecycle of application or infrastructure updates. - Containerization.
In the context of infrastructure automation, containerization means packaging services like databases, logging, or proxies into containers with their dedicated runtime environments. This practice makes it easy to configure, isolate, or move services between environments. - Orchestration.
While CI/CD automates specific pipeline tasks for development and deployment, orchestration automates end-to-end workflows or infrastructure-level coordination, including scaling, managing dependencies, and handling interactions between systems. For instance, container orchestration with tools like Kubernetes enables automated deployment, scaling, and operation of containerized applications. - Security automation.
Continuous security requires dedicated tools that scan container images for vulnerabilities, validate configurations, and monitor deployment manifests. Automating patch management and incident response is key for robust infrastructure security.
What You Gain From Infrastructure Automation Done Right
Reduced errors and more dependable deployments due to the automated testing being built into the infrastructure management and provisioning processes.
Reduced manual efforts and faster workflows due to the automation of time-consuming, menial tasks and the orchestration of complex processes.
Rollback capabilities and more consistent, reproducible, and scalable environments with the Infrastructure as Code (IaC) approach.
Improved security and compliance due to automated compliance checks, security patches, and code-level enforcement of security and compliance policies.
Improved visibility into environments and resources, simplified knowledge transfer, and reduced bus factor due to codified infrastructure serving as part of IT documentation.
Optimized infrastructure costs thanks to autoscaling, lightweight containers, and dynamic removal of unused resources.
How to Set Up IT Infrastructure Automation
1.
Discovery stage
- Using diagramming tools like Microsoft Visio or Lucidchart, map out your IT infrastructure, including hardware, software, and cloud resources, as well as their connections and dependencies. An infrastructure map should also cover security systems, user roles, and various environments like production and development. Tools such as SolarWinds Network Topology Mapper (NTM) and DataDog have network visualization features and can automatically identify network components.
- Identify high-priority applications and workloads (e.g., production databases, development environments) that would benefit most from automation.
- Identify automation opportunities, capabilities, and constraints. Analyze available IT resources and skills. This analysis will guide decision-making and help draft an actionable roadmap for automation efforts.
Achieving 100% infrastructure automation is an attractive but unrealistic idea. Some non-repetitive tasks, initial setups, and experimental solutions are more effective when implemented manually, like tuning and adapting new cloud infrastructure resources during cloud migration. Some tasks can’t be automated in the first place and require human judgment, like dealing with emergencies or finding the root cause of a performance issue. A balanced approach is the key to pragmatic and cost-effective infrastructure automation.
2.
Planning stage
- Formulate clear and measurable objectives you want to achieve with infrastructure automation, making sure they align with the organization’s business needs. These objectives may include:
- Reducing deployment times to be able to roll out updates within non-business hours without disrupting office operations.
- Minimizing manual effort to cut IT staffing costs.
- Enhancing scalability to address performance issues.
- Automating cybersecurity checks to streamline compliance procedures.
- Define the specific processes or components to automate.
- Define clear KPIs to measure the success of the IT infrastructure automation process, for example:
- Mean time to recovery (MTTR) measures the average time the team spends fixing infrastructure issues, from the initial moment of issue detection until the affected service is restored.
- Mean time between failures (MTBF) indicates the average time between two consecutive failures.
- False positive rate (FPR) is the percentage of non-hazardous events incorrectly identified as hazardous or alerts triggered by normal system behavior and benign anomalies.
- Cost savings per period reflect the efficacy of replacing manual labor with automation or optimizing infrastructure resources.
- Select the tools for the planned automation activities, such as configuration management, container orchestration, CI/CD, and infrastructure monitoring. Consider whether the selected tools integrate well with each other and the existing IT environment, have comprehensive documentation, and are supported by reliable vendors. See a list of proven infrastructure automation tools below.
- Lay out a step-by-step implementation strategy detailing ownership of the automation tasks and the approach to containerization, CI/CD, testing, compliance, security measures, backup, disaster recovery, and other infrastructure automation aspects.
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3.
Implementation stage
- Implement the selected tools and set up infrastructure automation. Here’s how a sample process may look:
- Start by creating standardized modular templates using IaC tools like Terraform. These templates can be shared and adapted across various projects.
- Introduce configuration management to reduce the chances of configuration drift and discrepancies. Using tools like Ansible, you can apply configuration changes across a fleet of instances that are provisioned using the Terraform template.
- Incorporate automated testing to validate Terraform templates and Ansible configurations.
- Develop a CI/CD pipeline that automatically pulls the IaC code from the version control system (Github, Bitbucket, Gitlab, etc.), builds containers and artifacts, runs automated tests, linters, and security scans, and deploys the IT infrastructure.
- Document new ITSM playbooks, policies, and procedures and train the IT team on using the new tools and workflows.
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4.
Refinement stage
- Track automation progress by comparing KPI targets with actual outcomes and optimize your strategy. This can include:
- Increasing test coverage to improve the quality of IaC scripts.
- Iteratively containerizing services like databases in addition to containerized applications to further accelerate deployment.
- Fixing alerting rules to tackle high false positive rates and avoid overwhelming support teams.
- If an existing monolith application takes a long time to deploy, gradually breaking it down into microservices and, optionally, packing them into containers might help.
- Identify the next areas for IT automation and update your automation strategy accordingly.
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Explore How Automation Cut IT Costs and Improved Performance of Our Clients’ Infrastructures
Why Companies Partner With ScienceSoft for Infrastructure Automation
- In IT service management (ITSM) since 2008.
- In IT infrastructure services since 2010.
- In cloud services since 2012.
- In DevOps since 2013.
- A multi-skilled team of network engineers, system administrators, certified cloud experts, DevOps engineers, cybersecurity experts, and other talents. Over 50% of our IT professionals are senior-level experts.
- A mature quality management system backed by ISO 9001 certification.
- ISO 27001-certified cybersecurity management.
- Partnerships with Microsoft and Amazon.
What Our Clients Say About Our Infrastructure Services
ScienceSoft has been providing an excellent level of service maintaining the application’s AWS infrastructure… During our cooperation, ScienceSoft’s team has built a fault-tolerant and highly available application infrastructure with automatic crash recovery capabilities, which makes our web application stable and high-performing.
ScienceSoft's .NET developers have been assisting Upstream Works in refactoring a load testing system and bringing further automation to the load testing process. ScienceSoft's DevOps engineers helped us optimize our Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure and set up a continuous software delivery process.
ScienceSoft approaches every infrastructure component with a solid understanding of security, so our cybersecurity division doesn’t have to discover new vulnerabilities after every deployment. We opted for an outsourced team to reduce the strain on our internal support specialists, but ScienceSoft has brought much more to the table. With their assistance, we optimized a significant part of our IT infrastructure and reduced the share of manual work.
Sourcing Models for Infrastructure Automation
* ScienceSoft has experience in managed and co-managed infrastructure services. If you are considering splitting the responsibilities between vendors or between your team and a vendor, you can opt for a co-managed cooperation model.