Application & Cloud Automation Meets IT Service Management, Guest Post

Originally posted at Zefflin.com

Why Automate Application Lifecycle?

One of the things we do at Zefflin is help IT organizations to automate the lifecycle of complex, N-tier applications. This means defining applications once (blueprinting), deploying and upgrading them automatically in heterogeneous hybrid cloud environments and auto-scaling up/down based upon demand.
This type of automation is being adopted widely.  The reason is that it pays off in a big way. 

Cloudify 3.3 has landed – and it’s awesome.  Get it!

Application automation ROI:

• 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

Because of the maturity of tools, the cost of automation is now lower than it has ever been.  In order to get the full benefits of application lifecycle automation, however, it must be fully integrated into an operational environment. IT Service Management and ITIL in particular, has been widely adopted by IT organizations. That means IT support processes are delivered in a consistent way, from the way IT interacts with its users, to responding to environment failures, to managing changes to the production environment.
Many of our customers are telling us: “We need to integrate application automation with our ITSM processes”.  For example, when an application deployment does not go as planned, an incident should be opened so the failure can be tracked and the right people assigned to fix the issue.  When the same application is deployed successfully, it represents a change to the production environment. As a result, a change request should be opened so ITIL-compliant audit requirements are met. In addition, the Configuration Management Data Base (CMDB) should be updated, so applications can be mapped to the infrastructure on which they run.
What if all of that could be done automatically?

Market Leading Software Tools

• 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.

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About the Author

Sam Melehy is a data center automation and cloud management executive whose strength is identifying which tools can be implemented and integrated to effectively automate IT operations and solve problems. He is a technology entrepreneur, selling & delivering IT solutions to the Global 5,000 for more than 25 years. He is currently the CEO of Zefflin, a company focused on Data Center Automation and Hybrid Cloud implementation and integration.