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The new generation of infrastructure management technologies promises to transform the way we manage IT infrastructure. But many organisations today aren’t seeing any dramatic differences, and some are finding that these tools only make life messier. As we’ll see, infrastructure as code is an approach that provides principles, practices, and patterns for using these technologies effectively.

Why infrastructure as code?

Virtualisation, cloud, containers, server automation, and software-defined networking should simplify IT operations work. It should take less time and effort to provision, configure, update, and maintain services. Problems should be quickly detected and resolved, and systems should all be consistently configured and up to date. IT staff should spend less time on routine drudgery, having time to rapidly make changes and improvements to help their organizations meet the ever-changing needs of the modern world.

But even with the latest and best new tools and platforms, IT operations teams still find that they can’t keep up with their daily workload. They don’t have the time to fix longstanding problems with their systems, much less revamp them to make the best use of new tools. In fact, cloud and automation often makes things worse. The ease of provisioning new infrastructure leads to an ever-growing portfolio of systems, and it takes an ever-increasing amount of time just to keep everything from collapsing.

Adopting cloud and automation tools immediately lowers barriers for making changes to infrastructure. But managing changes in a way that improves consistency and reliability doesn’t come out of the box with the software. It takes people to think through how they will use the tools and put in place the systems, processes, and habits to use them effectively.

Some IT organisations respond to this challenge by applying the same types of processes, structures, and governance that they used to manage infrastructure and software before cloud and automation became commonplace. But the principles that applied in a time when it took days or weeks to provision a new server struggle to cope now that it takes minutes or seconds.

Legacy change management processes are commonly ignored, bypassed, or overruled by people who need to get things done. Organizations that are more successful in enforcing these processes are increasingly seeing themselves outrun by more technically nimble competitors.

Legacy change management approaches struggle to cope with the pace of change offered by cloud and automation. But there is still a need to cope with the ever-growing, continuously changing landscape of systems created by cloud and automation tools. This is where infrastructure as code comes in.

What is infrastructure as code?

Infrastructure as code is an approach to infrastructure automation based on practices from software development. It emphasizes consistent, repeatable routines for provisioning and changing systems and their configuration. Changes are made to definitions and then rolled out to systems through unattended processes that include thorough validation.

The premise is that modern tooling can treat infrastructure as if it were software and data. This allows people to apply software development tools such as version control systems (VCS), automated testing libraries, and deployment orchestration to manage infrastructure. It also opens the door to exploit development practices such as test-driven development (TDD), continuous integration (CI), and continuous delivery (CD).

Infrastructure as code has been proven in the most demanding environments. For companies like Amazon, Netflix, Google, Facebook, and Etsy, IT systems are not just business critical; they are the business. There is no tolerance for downtime. Amazon’s systems handle hundreds of millions of dollars in transactions every day. So it’s no surprise that organizations like these are pioneering new practices for large scale, highly reliable IT infrastructure.

This book aims to explain how to take advantage of the cloud-era, infrastructure-as-code approaches to IT infrastructure management. This chapter explores the pitfalls that organisations often fall into when adopting the new generation of infrastructure technology. It describes the core principles and key practices of infrastructure as code that are used to avoid these pitfalls.

Goals of infrastructure as code

The types of outcomes that many teams and organisations look to achieve through infrastructure as code include:

• IT infrastructure supports and enables change, rather than being an obstacle or a constraint.
• Changes to the system are routine, without drama or stress for users or IT staff.
• IT staff spends their time on valuable things that engage their abilities, not on routine, repetitive tasks.
• Users are able to define, provision, and manage the resources they need, without needing IT staff to do it for them.
• Teams are able to easily and quickly recover from failures, rather than assuming failure can be completely prevented.
• Improvements are made continuously, rather than done through expensive and risky “big bang” projects.
• Solutions to problems are proven through implementing, testing, and measuring them, rather than by discussing them in meetings and documents.

Extract taken from Infrastructure as Code (O’Reilly Publishing) by Kief Morris.

Read more: Kief Morris: On DevOps, containers, and empowering end to end services

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The concept of infrastructure as code (IaC), where computing infrastructure is managed and configured by automation rather than through manual processing, has been around for a while. Mark Burgess’ work on CFEngine, an open source configuration management system dating back to 1993, laid the groundwork, while DevOps.com introduced its readers to the concept back in May 2014. But what does the landscape look like in 2016?

Kief Morris (left) is cloud practice lead at ThoughtWorks, and author of Infrastructure as Code (the opening extract you can exclusively read here). The book discusses the different approaches of IaC, examples of dynamic infrastructure platforms, going on to detail patterns for provisioning servers. The book has taken Morris two years to write, and in the introduction, he outlines the need for IT teams and developers to move away from the traditional fire-fighting culture to continuous improvement.

“I have been discovering, refining, and using the ideas of infrastructure as code shared by people in the DevOps movement for years,” Morris tells CloudTech. “In working with ThoughtWorks clients, I’ve found that although most people are using technologies and tools like cloud and automated configuration, many teams haven’t worked out how to fully take advantage of the tools. So I thought it would be useful to pull these ideas together into a book.”

Key to these ideas is changing working models while keeping things running smoothly. “Teams need to be empowered to own their services and applications from end to end,” explains Morris. “But teams that provide supporting services to other teams in their organisation need to engage closely with their users to make sure they’re building the right thing, while not making themselves a bottleneck for routine operations.”

Morris notes in the introduction to Infrastructure as Code that the movement is a ‘cornerstone’ of DevOps, and represents the ‘automation’ part of CAMS (culture, automation, measurement and sharing). DevOps as a whole is a skillset which research firms continually claim is vital to have – so what do organisations need to know about DevOps trends going forward?

“I believe a few shifts still need to happen,” says Morris. “One is a move from the split between ‘build’ and ‘run’, [but] this doesn’t mean every application team should build and run its own infrastructure.

“Cloud creates a clean model for teams to manage the way they use infrastructure provided by other teams, and other companies, and this empowers teams to have full ownership of their applications from concept to production,” he adds.

An increasingly important part of the conversation is through containerisation platforms, with Docker assuming the position of court favourite. A Diginomica article from July 2014 proclaimed that ‘virtualisation was dead…long live containerisation’. Naturally, containerisation is essentially just another flavour of virtualisation, but Morris notes its influence over the past couple of years. “Container references increased from a few paragraphs to a few sections, and eventually throughout the book,” he explains.

Can Docker become a platform that is fully enterprise-grade? “I believe Docker is ready for the enterprise, but not necessarily everything in the enterprise at this point,” says Morris. “Containerisation is a great model for defining the contract between applications and the systems they run on in a way that simplifies both, so it’s a natural mode for building new applications and services. But there is a mass of existing software which isn’t architected to be containerised – and we’re all still learning how to implement containerised platforms and applications.”

All in all however, with increased knowledge of IaC, how to deploy it, and how it relates to DevOps and containers, Morris hopes readers will have one takeaway when reading the book: “Use automated pipelines to test infrastructure changes so that you can make changes to your systems confidently.”

Read more: What you need to know about infrastructure as code – and why now

A data breach could happen to anyone. Data managed by your company is valuable to someone, no matter what the data is. Everything has a price tag on the dark web. It is especially true when it is customer data, such as personal and payment card details.
When your customers’ data turns up somewhere unexpected on the Internet, you may feel the world is collapsing around you. People start tweeting about the hack, angry customers phone in, and Brian Krebs publishes his first article. Your organization switches to an emergency mode to handle the situation. It is the time when your incident response team takes control to put the genie back in the bottle.

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Venafi has extended the power of its platform in an easy-to-use utility for DevOps teams available for immediate download. Now DevOps teams can eliminate the hassle of acquiring and installing TLS keys and certificates. Instead, customers can focus on speeding up continuous development and deployment, while security teams have complete visibility and can keep the DevOps environment secure and compliant to protect customer data. Extending the Venafi Trust Protection Platform requires only a single line of code and works out-of-the box with leading automation, orchestration, and containerization platforms including Puppet, Chef, Docker, Terraform, Saltstack, and Ancible – on premise and in the cloud.

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Many private cloud projects were built to deliver self-service access to development and test resources. While those clouds delivered faster access to resources, they lacked visibility, control and security needed for production deployments.
In their session at 18th Cloud Expo, Steve Anderson, Product Manager at BMC Software, and Rick Lefort, Principal Technical Marketing Consultant at BMC Software, discussed how a cloud designed for production operations not only helps accelerate developer innovation, it also delivers the control that IT Operations needs to run a production cloud without getting in the way.

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As cloud and storage projections continue to rise, the number of organizations moving to the cloud is escalating and it is clear cloud storage is here to stay. However, is it secure?
Data is the lifeblood for government entities, countries, cloud service providers and enterprises alike and losing or exposing that data can have disastrous results.
There are new concepts for data storage on the horizon that will deliver secure solutions for storing and moving sensitive data around the world.
In his session at 18th Cloud Expo, Scott Sobhani, CEO and cofounder of Cloud Constellation Corporation and the SpaceBelt, Information Ultra-Highway, attendees learned about new best practices to bypass the Internet.

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IT automation software provider Chef has announced the launch of Chef Automate, claimed to be a flagship software product which ties together all of the company’s product portfolio.

Chef Automate aims to give users comprehensive visibility across all applications and their supporting environments, providing a single dashboard with access to analytics, trending data and health status of Chef-managed resources.

Other key features include a unified workflow, essentially a shared pipeline – previously known as Chef Delivery – which provides a fixed and reusable workflow when changing infrastructure or applications, monitoring progress and changes as workflows move from development to product. Chef Automate also offers proactive compliance to ensure companies are operating according to their security policies.

The product is available immediately through an annual subscription, and includes commercial support for open source projects Chef, InSpec and Habitat.

“Velocity is the ultimate goal of every business and in today’s software-driven economy, that can only happen through IT automation,” said Ken Cheney, VP business development and product marketing at Chef. “However, many organisations are still forced to choose between speed and security.

“We think that’s absurd. Chef Automate allows businesses everywhere to stop trading off between velocity and safety – you can have both,” he added.

Chef claims its client has been downloaded more than 37 million times, with more than 80% of its revenue coming from enterprise organisations. Total booking have grown more than 80% year over year in the second quarter of 2016, according to the company.

Chef has also announced the launch of a certification program, offering training and credentials for developers, IT and system admins. The regular missives which arrive in this publication’s inbox regarding key tech job skills invariably mention DevOps and automation; according to Rackspace last month, jobs requiring DevOps skills went up a ‘modest’ 53% over the past year, with 3,723 jobs available. The managed cloud provider argued this was indicative of the area moving more into the mainstream.

Since we launched our Agile Digital Transformation Roadmap poster two weeks ago, several hundred people around the globe have downloaded it – but it’s not clear how many of them have taken the time to work their way through it.

Haven’t seen it yet, you say? No worries – you can download the poster for free at AgileDigitalTransformation.com.

OK then – everyone have the poster handy? Good. Here’s how to make sense of it.

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There is abundant evidence that prove the mainframe remains the world’s most reliable, scalable and secure computing platform today. Does the adaptability, scalability and low entry costs offered by the cloud compete for its workload?

Short answer: no. Rather, cloud has increased the mainframe workload. Cloud, mobility, and the explosion of the application economy are directly responsible for driving growth in mainframe utilization. In fact, our mainframe customers have reported an average 8% to 9% growth in their mainframe workloads.

This might seem ironic to some – the popular storyline in technology is that new technology replaces what came before it. There are two reasons why mainframe is the exception to the rule: 1) more than 70% of corporate data still resides on the mainframe and 2) the mainframe remains a spectacularly reliable, scalable, secure, and cost-effective platform. So the more that enterprises deploy cloud and mobile, the more they use their mainframes. Furthermore, according to IBM, 55% of all enterprise apps, which are mushrooming, touch the mainframe in one way or the other because if they didn’t those apps would be static, shallow and quickly abandoned.

Given this reality, here are three imperatives for every IT leader, whose company has a mainframe, to build the right foundation in the application economy.

Commit to mainframe growth

Many IT leaders have neglected their mainframe environments as they’ve focused more on distributed, cloud and mobility initiatives. However, unless you’re going to undertake the costly, disruptive, and extremely risky path of massive application “re-platforming,” your mainframe environment is going to keep growing—which means its potential value to your business is going to keep growing too.

Smart IT leaders will re-invest in the mainframe to ensure that it can keep delivering reliable, secure, and cost-efficient computing services that underpin their mobile/cloud apps for the foreseeable future. Specifically, for those net-new critical workloads, consider designating your mainframe as the platform of choice, especially Linux workloads that can run very cost-efficiently at scale on IBM’s Linux on z Systems implementation.

Mainframe-enable your next-generation IT staff

As you build the foundation for your IT environment in the application economy, it’s also critical to enable your developers and ops teams with the right skills. Few if any of your younger developers have ever written a line of COBOL. Nor is it likely that anyone under 30 on your ops team knows anything about flattening mainframe workload peaks to keep MSUs down. Because you will be updating your mainframe apps, tuning your mainframe databases, and managing your mainframe environment, you therefore need to invest in tools and training that will enable a new generation of IT professionals to perform all the DevOps tasks you need them to perform including those on your mainframe.

Create a unified cross-platform approach to application performance management (APM)

If the digital capabilities you deliver to your employees and your customers utilize data and application code across multiple platforms—including distributed, cloud, and mainframe—then it makes sense to unify your application performance monitoring across those platforms as well. Without that unified monitoring, you’ll have trouble maintaining the service levels that are critical for both customer satisfaction and a high-productivity workplace.

Of course, unified APM is easier said than done. True cross-platform APM requires much more than a bunch of separate platform-specific tools. It requires an integrated approach to monitoring, along with troubleshooting/trouble-preventing processes that treats the entire end-to-end enterprise environment as a single entity. Shy of that, the mainframe will remain highly siloed—much to the detriment of IT’s efficiency and ability to support the business.

Simply put, organizations who understand the value and criticality of their mainframe technology will continue to invest when faced with the opportunities, challenges, and uncertainties in today’s application economy. The challenges play directly into the mainframe’s classic strengths, and the community of mainframe independent software vendors continues to innovate to meet challenges head on.

To succeed, IT leaders must come to terms with the big irony of Big Iron—which is that digital innovation is making the mainframe more important, not less. Mainframe management strategies must evolve accordingly.

Read more: Why the resiliency of the mainframe is not a surprise in the cloud computing age