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- Hybrid, Multi-Cloud support, that is, LCM works across physical, virtual, and cloud environments, supporting on-premise, cloud, and distributed environments (like Edge)
- Complete system life cycle control (Plan/Design, Build, Provision, Operate/Manage, Retire, Recycle/Scrap)
- Enablement for automation of most system maintenance tasks
Key benefits of the Infrastructure LCM Automation are:
- Agility: stadardisation of the LCM process by writing and running IaaC allows to quickly and easily develop, stage, and produce efficient environmentsproduce environments
- Operational Consistency: automation of lifecycle reduces lifecycle results in consistently maintaining desired state, reduces the possibility of oversights errors and decreases the chances of incompatibility issues within the infrastructure
- Human Resource related Risks Mitigation: automation reduces risks related to human errors, rogue activities, and safeguards the institutional knowledge from leakage in case any employee leaves the organization
- Higher Efficiency: achieved by minimizing human inaccuracies and eliminating the lack of knowledge about infrastructure installed base and its configuration, using the CI/CD techniques adapted to infrastructure
- Cost/time Saving: engineers save up on time and cost which can be wisely invested in performing higher-value jobs; additional cost savings on cloud more optimal use of cloud resources using LCM Automation
Infrastructure LCM Automation Framework
The following diagrams provide mapping between different stages of the lifecycle automation across all layers of the stack, to owners of infrastructure and cloud and the tenant as the consumer of the cloud services, in three very different scenarios: applications running as containers within virtual machines (CaaS on IaaS scenario), application running as containers on bare metal (CaaS on BM scenario) and a more traditional view of applications running as VNFs within virtual machines (IaaS scenario). The diagrams define the scope of the Infrastructure LCM Automation for each of these scenarios. The dotted lines symbolise the interactions between the layers of each of the model.
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LCM Automation Principles / Best Practice
The following principles should guide best practice in the area of the Infrastructure LCM Automation:
- Everything Codified: use explicit coding to configure files not only for initial provisioning but also as a single source of truth for the whole infrastructure lifecycle, to ensure consistency with the intent configuration templates and to eliminate configuration drift
- Version Controlled: use stringent version control for the infrastructure code to allow proper lifecycle automation
- Self-Documentation: code itself represents the updated documentation of the infrastructure, to minimise the documentation maintenance burden and to ensure the documentation currency
- Code Modularisation: apply to IaaC principles of the microservices architecture where the modular units of code can be independently deployed and lifecycled in an automated fashion
- Immutability: IT infrastructure components are required to be replaced for each deployment during the system lifecycle to be consistent with immutable infrastructure to avoid configuration drift and to restrict the impact of undocumented changes in the stack
- Automated Testing: is the key for the error-free post-deployment lifecycle processes and to eliminate lengthy manual testing processes
- Unified Automation: use the same Infrastructure LCM Automation templates, toolsets and procedures across different environments such as Dev, Test, QA and Prod, to ensure consistency of the lifecycle results and to reduce operational costs
- Security Automation: security of infrastructure is critical for the overall security, dictating to use consistent automated security procedures for the threat detection, investigation and remediation through all infrastructure lifecyle stages and all environments
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