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Accelerate DevOps by Combining Automation and Cloud Management

Posted by Justin Nemmers

10/15/14 4:20 PM

The advent of DevOps in Corporate IT has dramatically increased the value that Configuration Management (lately, also known as CM and/or Configuration Automation/Data Center Automation tools) provided in a complex data center environment. Popular examples include Ansible, Puppet, and Chef. Whether your IT organization has implemented an end-to-end DevOps model, or you’re interested in implementing one, the unification of Cloud Management and Data Center Automation is a great way to ensure that your DevOps teams get the most out of IT-provided and supported services and resources.

At the core of highly productive and agile DevOps teams is the rapid access to required resources, and the ability to control what is deployed where. Long wait times for resource provisioning will not just delay release and product, but also likely anger your team. On the other hand, granting the DevOps team unfettered access to on-prem virt and public cloud resources is a capacity planning and potential financial disaster just waiting to happen.

As DevOps automates more of the application management and provisioning process with tooling (Related posting: Why Manual Provisioning Workflows Don't Work Anymore), it becomes more critical to effectively integrate CM with the actual infrastructure. Providing end users and developers alike with access to DevOps work product becomes more complex and challenging.  

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DevOps and Cloud Management go together like peanut butter and jelly. Each makes the other more awesome. (Image Credit: Shutterstock)

So how does an IT organization achieve maximum value from the time and cost investment in these CM tools? By tightly integrating Cloud Management with their entire stack of CM tools.

Advantages

Using a cloud manager such as CloudBolt to integrate CM with the infrastructure provides immediate value.  By deploying both tools, IT can provide DevOps with: 

  1. Controlled access to required infrastructure, including networks, storage, and public cloud environments.
  2. A single API and UI capable of front-ending numerous providers, which means when IT changes cloud providers, DevOps doesn’t need to re-tool scripts and automations.
  3. Fully automated provisioning and management for real-time resource access. 

CloudBolt allows IT to natively configure and import application and configuration definitions as well as automations directly from your CM tool of choice. End users can then select the desired components, and deploy them onto appropriately sized system or systems in any environment.

IT organizations can put into place hard divisions between critical environments—such that only certain users and groups can deploy systems, services, and applications into specific environments. For instance, CloudBolt will prevent a developer from deploying a test app onto a system that has access to a production network and production data.

Results

Customers that have implemented CloudBolt also are able to chose from one or more CM tools based on capabilities of a specific tool. Does one team prefer Puppet over Chef? Each team can be presented with a discrite slice of underlying infrastructure that makes use of their preferred CM tool(s).

The result is clear: more effective DevOps teams that spend less time dealing accessing resources, and more time getting their work done. IT is happy because CloudBolt enables them to improve governance of entire enterprise IT environments, and finally offers IT the ability to alter underlying infrastructure technology choices in ways that are fully abstracted from end users. By using a single CloudBolt API to access and deploy resources, DevOps isn’t disrupted when IT alters underlying infrastructure technology.

Interested? You can be up and running with CloudBolt today. All you need is access to a Virt Manager or a Cloud Platform, and less than 30 minutes.

Schedule a Demo  or try it yourself

Topics: Cloud Management, Automation, Puppet, Chef