Optimization of Infrastructure / Environments through Digitalization

Srikanth Govindarajan – Senior Consultant

Vijaya Ranga Kumar, Gopalan (Director – Consulting)Abbaraju, Venkata Satish Kumar (Senior Manager – Consulting)

Cognizant Technology Solutions

AbstractIs it time to level up your aging IT Infrastructure / Environment? 42% of major IT Organizations say that aging infrastructure is their top IT challenge.

Businesses today must move at the speed of Digital and traditional software development cycles are too slow moving to be up for the challenge. A recent Gartner survey revealed that 85% of IT departments are pressurized by their customers to deploy new or changed IT systems or services faster. Today IT challenges are changing from managing the existing to being able to support rapid development cycles. Complex and inflexible infrastructure supporting many legacy systems – will be unable to support constantly increasing data volumes and changing regulatory requirements unless a lot of money is spent on building enough capacity to handle demand peaks. High capital expenditure on the capacity planning which is used minimally for most of the time is not agreed by the business.

In the recent past, there have been some key technology and IT management innovations to improve time to market. DevOps, Agile and cloud computing have been the key enablers to increase the speed of IT. DevOps framework enables organizations to accelerate business returns by enhancing the speed and quality of the application development. It aims at establishing a culture and environment where building, testing, and releasing software can happen rapidly, frequently, and more reliably. This is implemented collaboratively by application development, testing and IT Operations team. However, the effort from IT infrastructure and operations is often overlooked though significantly high.

This paper primarily explores how to change the way you design IT services so they are optimized for DevOps, Agile and Cloud computing to support Digital Infrastructure.

A recent survey showing Top 3 focus areas & Top 3 technology related initiatives on the Digital Transform Initiatives.

1.0 Problem Statement

Delay in environment provisioning and code deployment Nonstandard Configuration and Release Management process across business units Delay in test cycle due to environment downtime The existing manual build and deployment process was very repetitive and error-prone Prod/Non prod servers were multi-located with different domain controllers and so

there were frequent network related failures

2.0 Need for Environment Standardization & Infrastructure requirements (Efficiently managing the delivery & increasing the business values)

Let’s hear from Business and Projects perspective on the infrastructure issues:

Business Standpoint:In order to be competitive in today’s digital era, businesses have to adapt rapidly and cost efficiently in response to the changes in marketplace. Development and delivery practitioners are accelerating rapidly the design and development paces, however the cycle time for releasing the software to customers often fails to keep pace.

Projects team Standpoint:-Today, one of the largest obstacles, and biggest delays, faced by development and delivery practitioners is access to the data; we hear over and over that gaining access to a single database copy can entail multiple steps and weeks of waiting. It’s even more difficult when application capacities are measured in terabytes and petabytes. Gaining access to large data sets typically requires multiple teams to provision storage, network, and Operating system before the developer can get at it. It’s a technical hurdle, a security issue, and a business problem all rolled into one.

The primary reason from both the above perspectives for this disconnect is:

“Infrastructure delays and the huge effort required to setup test and development environments.”

Almost all IT service organizations establish, manage and maintain various environments to ensure smooth and on time project completion along with strong secure access level management. However, managing these environments manually in efficient and consistent manner across the delivery cycle is very complex, error prone, expensive and time consuming. Also, few of the IT Organizations / Delivery practitioners have developed strategies to respond to the inevitable increases in unplanned demand on environment. Organizations looking for faster deployments treat infrastructure like software: as code that can be managed with the

same tools and processes software developers use, such as version control, continuous integration, code review and automated testing. These let you make infrastructure changes more easily, rapidly, safely and reliably.

Recent surveys on the IT Environment have shown that up to 40 – 50 % of a Dev / tester’s time are consumed by environment issues; there by affecting quality of the deliverable and productivity. This in turn causes friction in generating business revenue.

3.0 Proposed Solution – Infrastructure automationDevOps represents a change in IT culture, focusing on rapid IT service delivery through the adoption of agile, lean practices in the context of a system-oriented approach. DevOps emphasizes people (and culture), and seeks to improve collaboration between operations and development teams. DevOps implementations utilize technology — especially automation tools that can leverage an increasingly programmable and dynamic infrastructure from a life cycle perspective.

Adopting DevOps for application development has a notable impact on the underlying infrastructure environment.

Key focus for enterprises adopting DevOps- Infrastructure Perspective

Implementing and customizing CI systemsIntegrating systems with authentication and authorization infrastructure such as Lightweight DirectoryAccess Protocol (LDAP), AD, or native operating system schemasEnsuring high availability of the system through clustersAutomating the backup of the CI repositoryEnsuring scalability of file systems to support future growthMaintaining replication architecture at the Disaster Recovery (DR) siteManaging user life cycle in the environment

In terms of infrastructure support, moving to the Agile methodology requires the implementation of continuous integration (CI) software, which enables uninterrupted delivery across the software development chain.

Adopt an Agile Infrastructure Shift from manual to automated infrastructure environment build

The infrastructure team plays a vital role in automating environment provisioning, which is a critical activity in DevOps implementation, while also supporting application deployment in software container.

The environment build activities that can be automated:Operating system provisioningAssignment of CPU cores and memory, file system spaceProvisioning of web, application, SOA, ESB, and portal serversCreation of high availability application server clustersMessaging and integration server provisioning and configurationLDAP and SSO installation for authentication & authorizationDeployment of J2EE and .Net applicationsProvision of RDBMS, high availability configuration

Impact of DevOps on IT Infrastructure DevOps needs to be integrated into existing IT Infrastructure with new tools and skillsets

required for DevOps-driven operations IT/Operations. The IT operations for DevOps needs to have knowledge of operating DevOps tools across 3

functional areas: Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment and Monitoring/Logging.

DevOps advocates automation of application configuration and deployment. By using tools to manage application configuration and deployment, these tasks become more well-defined, consistent, repeatable, transparent, and hence, less risky.

Key Considerations for DevOps Infra Implementation

Key focus for enterprises adopting DevOps- Infrastructure Perspective

Complex software release in an Agile development environment requires orchestration tools such as CA Release Automation and BMC Release Lifecycle Management. Release of new applications often involves configuration changes in non-production and production environment.It is imperative that enterprises integrate the release management methodology through existing service management tools that include IT operations ticketing and change management systems.IT infrastructure team must implement orchestration tools with high availability features, customize workflows with security access controls, and integrate service catalogs in the IT operations ticketing systems.

Leverage release management orchestration tools

Implementation Details / Case Study

Summary & ConclusionAt any point of time an IT Infrastructure becomes out-of-date, the business would be facing serious problems, both in its inability to handle modern workloads and to take advantage of key emerging technologies.

IT managers are constantly looking for ways to better serve both the business and also provide the applications they need. One powerful way to achieve this is to boost the capabilities of their IT Infrastructure. As IT organizations look to optimize their software’s / hardware’s in order to realize the same benefits, here are the few critical steps to consider:

Embrace the leading trends: As IT continues to be prominent, it is increasing important that IT organizations pay attention to the technology trends that are helping to improve the quality of technology infrastructures. With initiatives like private and hybrid cloud becoming more and more prominent, it is critical that companies take advantage of these opportunities in order to help optimize service delivery to the business and ultimately the customer

Understand your application delivery from end to end: As infrastructure continues to become more and more complex, it is critical that IT organizations are able to understand and identify all of the movies pieces, especially when there is a hiccup with an application. Application downtime not all frustrates the business, but it also costs organizations money in terms of lost time and resources spent addressing the issue

Get a “real-time data” on your infrastructure while automating processes: Best-in-class organizations are leading the charge when it comes to making sure that their IT infrastructure is optimized in a dynamic and automated way. This capability keeps the services that the company relies on optimized, which in turn saves the business money.

References & Appendix Snapshot- 2016 state of DevOps report, based on the survey of over 25,000 organization by

DORA (Devops research assessment). infoworld.com blogs Cognizant internal resources / framework Forrester report, Q4 2011 & Q3 2015

Author Biography

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