SILENCE OF THE SERVERS
Building a highly automated, self-optimizing IT infrastructure that is so entwined with business operations, that it is no longer distinctly noticeable
You’re in your IT estate, you wake up in the dark. You hear absolutely nothing. Not a single hum of a server, and certainly not the screams of frustrated users. Now operational business continuity fully entwines with IT operations, there is a reliance on intelligently automated, software-driven, “zero-touch” IT infrastructure platforms. Various innovative technologies and practices combine to provide infrastructure services as fluent as possible – without the need for fixed assets or scarce, specialized personnel. With that, the vision of a truly invisible infostructure is near real. Worthwhile celebrating with a nice bottle of Chianti.
Cornelia Görs Expert in Residence
WHAT
- An agile organization that frequently delivers and renews its products and services, needs a matching IT infrastructure. Key components include hybrid cloud, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), serverless computing, event-driven architecture, and containers.
- This next-generation IT platform stack will in most cases need to be provided while supporting existing heritage/legacy systems, likely hosted on premises, and managed on resiliency and cost efficiency.
- These IT services are designed and managed as first-class products and seamlessly made available to Technology Business users through automated, agile, self-service consumption options.
- DevOps practices pervasively interweaving applications and platform delivery, paving the way for fully integrated solution delivery, featuring both functional application and data development, as well as platform-focused engineering and operations.
- Site reliability engineering (SRE) reduces toil, avoids technical debt, balances reliability, and enables velocity, successfully driving IT operations for an agile, high frequency and resilient enterprise.
- AIOps, intelligently automated workflows, and an API-first “infrastructure as code” approach all contribute to building resilient, autonomous, hands-free IT infrastructure services that move as one with the Technology Business operations.
USE
- DB Systel GmbH, IT service provider for Deutsche Bahn and its companies, abolished the classic pyramid and the associated functional lines, moving towards a hierarchy-free, autonomous, self-organized and networked world of work.
- Singaporean multinational banking and financial services corporation, DBS Bank Ltd (DBS), created an SRE task force comprising leaders from various tech teams and enabling platforms. As its initiatives grew, it moved to a hub and spoke model.
- BBC Online uses serverless functions to scale up fast and reduce the operational complexity of running the service. Serverless functions are ideal for handling unpredictable traffic volumes, as cloud providers operate these at a large scale.
- Rakuten Mobile implemented a fully automated, zero-touch operational environment for its cloud-native 4G and 5G network services. Optimizing the company’s OPEX, it can deliver rapid service innovation and network operations.
- A global technology services company has launched the Robotizing Data Centers project. Here robots are trained to take on central tasks in data centers autonomously and reliably.
IMPACT
- Customer-centric culture is a core focus across organizations, and this also pertains to employee centricity. Successful front-end experiences are therefore intrinsically integrated with both back-end business and IT operations.
- The responsiveness and availability of organizations is improving, driving on resilient IT platform operations that enable new, online channels and agile product/service delivery options.
- Service management is delivered in real time, on top of automated and orchestrated IT operations, covering areas such as event aggregation and correlation, major incident management, and service request management – all across multi-cloud platforms.
- Through the optimization of IT platform operations, the usage of scarcely available physical resources can be optimally managed, saving on energy consumption, transport, housing – and contributing to a zero-carbon mission.
- Hands-free, autonomous IT operations provide one of the most promising ways to deal with specialized skills shortages, making room for specialists to focus on more challenging, strategic, and satisfying tasks.
TECH
- Cloud operating models: Operating model comparison, Cloud Operating Model for Multi-Cloud
- SRE: Google, State of DevOps, blameless
- Event-driven architecture: Amazon EventBridge and Amazon SNS, Solace, hazelcast
- Serverless and Function-as-a-Service (FaaS): AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, Azure Functions, webtask.io, hook.io, IronFunctions, OpenWhisk
- Zero-Touch: IBM Cloud Pak for Network Automation, Zero-Touch-Provisioning
- Tools: Datadog, PagerDuty