{"id":1412,"date":"2012-05-07T15:30:10","date_gmt":"2012-05-07T15:30:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.journeytothecloud.com\/?p=1818"},"modified":"2012-05-07T15:30:10","modified_gmt":"2012-05-07T15:30:10","slug":"automation-and-orchestration-why-what-you-think-youre-doing-is-less-than-half-of-what-youre-really-doing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/automation-and-orchestration-why-what-you-think-youre-doing-is-less-than-half-of-what-youre-really-doing\/","title":{"rendered":"Automation and Orchestration: Why What You Think You\u2019re Doing is Less Than Half of What You\u2019re Really Doing"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the main requirements of the cloud is that most\u2014if not all\u2014of the commodity IT activities in your data center need to be automated (i.e. translated into a workflow) and then those singular workflows strung together (i.e. orchestrated) into a value chain of events that delivers a business benefit. An example of the orchestration of a series of commodity IT activities is the commissioning of a new composite application (an affinitive collection of assets\u2014virtual machines\u2014that represent web, application and database servers as well as the OSes and software stacks and other infrastructure components required) within the environment. The outcome of this commissioning is a business benefit whereas a developer can now use those assets to create an application for either producing revenue, decreasing costs or for managing existing infrastructure better (the holy trinity of business benefits). <\/span><\/p>\n

When you start to look at what it means to automate and orchestrate a process such as the one mentioned above, you will start to see what I mean by \u201cwhat you think you\u2019re doing is less than half of what you\u2019re really doing.\u201d Hmm, that may be more confusing than explanatory so let me reset by first explaining the generalized process for turning a series of commodity IT activities into a workflow and by turn, an orchestration and then I think you\u2019ll better see what I mean. We\u2019ll use the example from above as the basis for the illustration.<\/p>\n

The first and foremost thing you need to do before you create any workflow (and orchestration) is that you have to pick a reasonably encapsulated process to model and transform (this is where you will find the complexity that you don\u2019t know about\u2026more on that in a bit). What I mean by \u201creasonably encapsulated\u201d is that there are literally thousands of processes, dependent and independent, going on in your environment right now and based on how you describe them, a single process could be either A) a very large collection of very short process steps, or, Z) a very small collection of very large process steps (and all letters in between). A reasonably encapsulated process is somewhere on the A side of the spectrum but not so far over that there is little to no recognizable business benefit resulting from it.<\/p>\n

So, once you\u2019ve picked the process that you want to model (in the world of automation, modeling is what you do before you get to do anything useful ;) ) you then need to analyze all of the processes steps required to get you from \u201cnot done\u201d to \u201cdone\u201d\u2026and this is where you will find the complexity you didn\u2019t know existed. From our example above I can dive into the physical process steps (hundreds, by the way) that you\u2019re well aware of, but you already know those so it makes no sense to. Instead, I\u2019ll highlight some areas of the process that you might not have thought about.<\/p>\n

Aside from the SOPs, the run books and build plans you have for the various IT assets you employ in your environment, there is probably twice that much \u201crequired\u201d information that resides in places not easily reached by a systematic search of your various repositories. Those information sources and locations are called \u201cpeople,\u201d and they likely hold over half of the required information for building out the assets you use, in our example, the composite application. Automating the process steps that are manifested in those locations only is problematic (to say the least), if not for the fact that we haven\u2019t quite solved the direct computer-to-brain interface, but for the fact that it is difficult to get an answer to a question we don\u2019t yet know how to ask.<\/p>\n

Well, I should amend that to say \u201cwe don\u2019t yet know how to ask efficiently\u201d because we do ask similar questions all the time, but in most cases without context, so the people being asked seldom can answer, at least not completely. If you ask someone how they do their job, or even a small portion of their job, you will likely get a blank stare for a while before they start in how they arrive at 8:45 AM and get a cup of coffee before they start looking at email\u2026well you get the picture. Without context, people rarely can give an answer because they have far too many variables to sort through (what they think you\u2019re asking, what they want you to be asking, why you are asking, who you are, what that blonde in accounting is doing Friday\u2026) before they can even start answering. Now if you give someone a listing or scenario in which they can relate (when do you commission this type of composite application, based on this list of system activities and tools?) they can absolutely tell you what they do and don\u2019t do from the list.<\/p>\n

So context is key to efficiently gaining the right amount of information that is related to the subject chain of activities that you are endeavoring to model- but what happens when (and this actually applies to most cases) there is no ready context in which to frame the question? Well, it is then called observation, either self or external, where all process steps are documented and compiled. Obviously this is labor intensive and time inefficient, but unfortunately it is the reality because probably less than 50% of systems are documented or have recorded procedures for how they are defined, created, managed and operated\u2026instead relying on institutional knowledge and processes passed from person to person.<\/p>\n

The process steps in your people\u2019s heads, the ones that you don\u2019t know about\u2014the ones that you can\u2019t get from a system search of your repositories\u2014are the ones that will take most of the time documenting, which is my point, (\u201cwhat you think you\u2019re doing is less than half of what you\u2019re really doing\u201d) and where a lot of your automation and orchestration efforts will be focused, at least initially.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not to say that you shouldn\u2019t automate and orchestrate your environment\u2014you absolutely should\u2014just that you need to be aware that this is the reality and you need to plan for it and not get discouraged on your journey to the cloud.<\/p>\n

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One of the main requirements of the cloud is that most\u2014if not all\u2014of the commodity IT activities in your data center need to be automated (i.e. translated into a workflow) and then those singular workflows strung together (i.e. orchestrated) into a value chain of events that delivers a business benefit. An example of the orchestration…Read More »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[104,179],"tags":[113,114],"class_list":["post-1412","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cloud-computing","category-featured","tag-automation","tag-orchestration"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1412","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1412"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1412\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1412"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1412"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1412"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}