Datacenter operations

 

As part of building a public cloud from the grounds up, I have always been interested in Datacenter operations. The following is a summary of some of the routines performed in this regard.

IT organizations building a private cloud have a lot in common with the datacenter operations for a public cloud. There used to be a focus primarily on the agile and flexible infrastructure which became challenging with the distributed nature of the applications deployed by the Enterprises. Their operations evolved with the tools that transform how IT operates but these organizations continued to be measured by the speed, simplicity, and security to support their business objectives.

The speed is a key competitive differentiator for the customers of the infrastructure. The leveraging of data center locations as well as the service centric cloud operations model has become critical. Fueled by the transformations in the work habits of the workforce to work from anywhere at any time, the business resiliency and agility depended on a connective-fabric network.

The network connects the on-premises, cloud, and edge applications to the workforce, and it is a is a multi-disciplinary effort among NetOps, SecOps, CloudOps, and DevOps teams. Each one has a perspective into building the infrastructure such as the tools that manage where the workloads are run, the service level objectives defining the user experience, and implementation of zero trust security to protect vital business assets

Enablement of these teams requires real-time insights usually delivered with an automation platform. Both the cloud and the datacenter operations can be adapted to the new normal of shifting workloads and distributed workforces. Delivering a consistent simplified experience to the teams with such a platform, empowers them to align and collaborate more efficiently than before.

Some datacenter automations can be fabric agnostic but they all must have some common characteristics. These include providing a unified view into proactive operations with continuous assurance and actionable insights, an orchestrator to coordinate activities, and a seamless access to network controllers and third-party tools or services. The orchestrator can also enforce policies across multiple network sites and enable end-to-end automation across datacenter and networks. A dashboard offers the ability to view all aspects of management through a single pane of glass.  It must also define multiple personas to provide role-based access to specific teams.

Some gaps do exist between say NetOps to DevOps which can be bridged with a collaborative focal point that delves into integration with ticketing frameworks for incident management, mapping compute, storage, and network contexts for monitoring, identifying bottlenecks affecting workloads, and consequent fine-tuning.

Automation also has the potential to describe infrastructure as a code, or infrastructure as a resource or infrastructure as a policy. Flexible deployment operations are required throughout. Complexity is the enemy of efficiency and tools, and processes must be friendly to the operators. Automation together with analytics can enable them to respond quickly and make incremental progress towards their goal.