Automation is an interesting conversation that I have had with many of our customers lately, especially with cloud migration in play and DevOps processes with continuous development becoming prevalent.
Management and monitoring in Software Defined Data Centers (SDDC) benefit from automation principles, programmability, API and policy-driven provisioning of application environments through self-service templates. These best practices help application owners to define, manage and monitor their own environments, while benefiting from the performance, security, business continuity and monitoring infrastructure from the IT teams. SDDC also changes the way IT designs and thinks about infrastructure – the goal is to adapt to demands of continuous delivery needs of application owners in a “cloudy” world.
It has been a while since Cisco announced end-of-life for its Application Control Engine (ACE) products. The last date of support, January 31, 2019, is fast approaching. If you rely on ACE for load balancing in your environment, it is time to migrate and look to the future.
I recently met with a regional cloud service provider (CSP) that has adopted provisioning on demand as their IT model. They spin up applications on demand, having virtualized most of their infrastructure and have developed tools to automate the provisioning of applications and servers for customers/tenants through a self-service portal. Rather than build-out and manage more and more physical infrastructure, with associated time and expense, the CSP is adopting the concepts of software-defined data center (SDDC) that builds on virtualization (of software, networking and storage) to offer software and network services for many different clients. More importantly, the CSP is also catering to needs of DevOps and IT architects – both internally, and externally for its tenants/clients by enabling true self service through automation.
Jim Frey is Vice President of Research, Network Management for Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) and is a featured guest blogger.
In Part 1 of this blog, we looked at the growing adoption of cloud and Software-Defined Datacenter (SDDC), but also the fact that network virtualization choices are many and varied, creating some uncertainty regarding how to proceed. In part 2, we will look at network virtualization options and how to align for best success.
Jim Frey is Vice President of Research, Network Management for Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) and is a featured guest blogger.
In order to remain engaged and relevant in the long run, a growing percentage of enterprise IT organizations are seriously considering transforming themselves into internal private cloud service providers. The requisite enabling technology is virtualization across all three primary technology domains – compute, storage, and network – combined with a healthy dose of automation and orchestration. Server virtualization is the most mature, and has taught us much with regard to automation and improving IT agility, fueling a desire to extend the model and achieve fluid architectures such as the Software Defined Data Center (SDDC).
