OpenStack as Infrastructure Meets Applications for Automation & Orchestration

Posted on September 29, 2016

Zefflin Systems is excited to be sponsoring OpenStack Days Seattle on September 30^th.

One of the things we do at Zefflin is help IT organizations automate the lifecycle of complex, N-tier applications by defining applications once and deploying them automatically in hybrid cloud environments. This kind of automation is growing in popularity and demand being adopted across a wide swath of the IT industry because it pays.

The ROI on application automation is based on:

• Productivity – the same group can manage many more apps in a more complex cloud-based environment,
• Agility – app dev groups can respond faster to business needs or market changes, enabled by improved application portability.
• Speed – by enabling continuous integration and continuous delivery, application development cycles are accelerated because the time between code –> build –> test –> QA –> migrate to production is dramatically reduced.
• Cost Reduction – by utilizing a hybrid cloud model and adopting modern DevOps practices, customers can reduce both infrastructure and application development costs.

Thanks in part to the maturity of market leading software tools like Cloudify and ServiceNow, the cost of automation is now lower than ever.
ServiceNow is a SaaS based IT Service Management tool that has captured a large share of the market in the last 10 years.  It has become the de facto standard for ITSM solutions.

Cloudify is an open source software product distributed by GigaSpaces, and is an industry leading application lifecycle automation tool.
To realize the full benefits of application lifecycle automation, it has to be fully integrated into an operational environment like IT Service Management or ITIL.

Many of our customers tell us that they “need to integrate application automation with ITSM processes.” So when an application deployment doesn’t go as planned, an incident has to be opened to track the failure and get the issue fixed.  When the same application is deployed successfully, it represents a change to the production environment. As a result, a change request needs to be opened so ITIL-compliant audit requirements are met. Then, the Configuration Management Data Base (CMDB) should be updated so applications can be mapped to the infrastructure.

Integrating Application Automation with ITSM

Traditionally, application development and IT operations have been organized in silos, with clear delineation of responsibilities.  App development has been responsible for design, code, build, test, bug fixes and QA, where operations was responsible for production cutover, migration, support and reporting bugs.  Because of the clear lines of responsibility, hand-off processes had to be derived and implemented.  The result?  Both sides optimized their respective organizations as they saw fit.  This seemed like progress, but in fact resulted in inefficiencies, finger pointing and less then optimal use of resources.  DevOps as a discipline seeks to correct this situation and establishes a single set of processes and underlying technologies that enable the next generation of optimization, efficiency and cost reduction in IT.

Open source is an area where we see DevOps employed by a global community to deliver relevant, disruptive core products at very large scale and as an enabler to cloud product delivery. Fulfilling our customers’ need to integrate app automation with ITSM, Zefflin implements OpenStack for automated provisioning and management of OS/Storage/Networking and then integrates Cloudify as the single interface point with ServiceNow to automate the integration of infrastructure and app lifecycle processes to IT operations.

The take away: OpenStack is a solid performer for infrastructure coupled with apps like Cloudify and ServiceNow for application provisioning and orchestration. Stop by the Zefflin booth to chat, contact us at info@zefflin.com and follow us on Twitter @zefflinsystems.