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INFRASTRUCTURE AUTOMATION

Infrastructure Automation is the process of creating and tearing down server and application infrastructure to support the development, testing, and production environments.

Infrastructure
  • Define and execute a consistent and repeatable process.
  • Amplify feedback and improve team communication.
  • Improve overall release deployment quality.
  • Accelerate the delivery of application features to production.

Models

In the diagram below, given the items on the left, implementing Infrastructure Automation will result in the items on the right.

 

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Key Metrics

Time to Fulfill

Time to Fulfill Environment Provisioning Request

redirects resources from application and business feature development and impacts time required for each release.

Percentage

Percentage of Available Capacity

indicates whether an environment is sized correctly and identifies potential stability issues that will occur when available resources are exhausted.

frequency

Frequency of Deployments

indicates the overall output and activity of the project.

Deployment Time

Average Deployment Time

impacts the available time for deployments.

Red Flag Areas

  • Embedded System and/or Application Configurations   
    lead to complicated code changes to handle environment changes and target releases.
  • Infrequent Check-ins of Configurations
    lead to misconfigured environments and tribal knowledge of environment requirements.
  • Inconsistent Environments
    increase deployment tasks and introduce instability into environments due to variations in topology and configurations.
  • Excessive Notifications
    result in team members ignoring important alerts.
  • Long Provisioning Request Fulfillments
    prevent rapid changeover and on-demand creation and scaling of supporting infrastructure elements.
  • Infrequent Deployments
    system provisioning runbooks could atrophy over time and without regular exercising of procedures, environment definitions, which could become outdated.

Key Roles


System Administrator

Responsible for preparing and modeling the target environments and deploying the application into each of them
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Build Engineer

Responsible for defining the release requirements and supporting the application deployment
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Release Manager

Responsible for defining and communicating the application release plans and reporting on the progress of the deployments

Why AEM?

Fortune 500 Financial Services Company

Challenge

Modernize an underfunded IT infrastructure to improve business agility while adhering to industry regulations.

Solution

Automate Day 1 and Day 2 operations to accelerate the ability to respond to business needs.

Results

- 98% reduction in time to fulfill IT provisioning requests

- Created a single platform to provide Infrastructure, Platform, and Database-as-a-Service capabilities