As organizations adopt the Agile framework, there is also a need for the Infrastructure teams to keep pace with providing the basic building blocks for application deployment in fast and cost-effect manner – this includes the underlying compute, network, storage resources, the DevOps pipeline, as well as the applications that flow through that pipeline. Enter composable infrastructure as a solution to meet these needs. However, there is usually confusion among teams as to who owns which parts of the deployment. Do the application teams own the entire stack? Which portions do the infrastructure teams own? Who owns the deployment of the OS layer? What about all of the other components? Composable infrastructure can help alleviate some of that confusion.
What is composable infrastructure? The idea is to make the basic building blocks of required infrastructure available in a fluid way, think software-driven datacenter, such that it can be stood up at any time, by any consumer, and with a consistent configuration every single time. This can help you create a more agile and cost-effective end product offering, and take huge leaps in to providing IT-as-a-Service. There are also profound business benefits derived from composable infrastructure because of efficiencies gained via modularization of the IT stack.
Let’s take a deeper look. One of the common questions we get asked by our customers is “Who owns IT automation?” Is it the Infrastructure team that owns the Software, or the Operations team, or the Applications team that wants to automate deployments for their CI/CD Pipeline? There is no standard answer to this. But most organizations that are on the upper end of the IT automation maturity curve respond by creating Composable Infrastructure for the Automation tools in question.
The Infrastructure team would own the development of the packaged offering (e.g. Red Hat Ansible and Tower configurations patched and packaged to the latest supported versions made available via source control repository), and the respective Application teams would own the development of IT automation unique for their requirements (e.g. writing Ansible playbooks that automate their tasks, without worrying about the maintenance of the underlying platform).
With composable infrastructure, the Infrastructure and Operations team would also jointly be responsible for releasing new versions of package and deploying them throughout the environment. This way, any team that needs to work on Automation need not worry about learning skills around administration or maintenance for the underlying software, but rather focus on writing automation leveraging pre-built modules. This same concept can also be easily extended to containerized applications.
Keyva has helped multiple organizations assess their application readiness and deliver application modernization, leverage Agile framework, and create Infrastructure-As-Code deployments by implementing composable infrastructures. If you’d like to have us review your environment and provide suggestions on what might work for you, please contact us at [email protected]
Anuj joined Keyva from Tech Data where he was the Director of Automation Solutions. In this role, he specializes in developing and delivering vendor-agnostic solutions that avoid the “rip-and-replace” of existing IT investments. Tuli has worked on Cloud Automation, DevOps, Cloud Readiness Assessments and Migrations projects for healthcare, banking, ISP, telecommunications, government and other sectors.
During his previous years at Avnet, Seamless Technologies, and other organizations, he held multiple roles in the Cloud and Automation areas. Most recently, he led the development and management of Cloud Automation IP (intellectual property) and related professional services. He holds certifications for AWS, VMware, HPE, BMC and ITIL, and offers a hands-on perspective on these technologies.
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