Standardized network automation at scale
Microsoft has used its staged Ansible environments to automate routine engineering tasks, such as delivery of logic-based changes to ensure services are available to customers. Events in the network trigger other workflows, such as advanced telemetry, ticketing, logging, and analytics. Ansible-based IT automation also helps the company follow a phased, iterative approach to code creation that protects code quality with scheduled releases of tested, verified network configurations.
Standardizing on a user-friendly automation solution has not only helped Microsoft solve complexity by creating a single source of truth for services, dependencies, and integrations, but also made it easier for nonengineers to focus on service creation with peer-reviewed code. DevOps teams can now work more efficiently to create new, valuable features and services for end users while maintaining production performance.
“Digital transformation is really changing the way that we think about how we solve problems. In the past, we had to manually do the same deployment again and again,” said Dworak. “With Ansible, we can create blueprints to deploy it multiple times. And every time we deploy, it’s exactly the same. Instead of redoing work and having a lot of different, single-use versions, we can continually fine-tune this shared code.”
This approach creates opportunities for Microsoft to continue scaling to support customer demands at a much faster pace.
Microsoft embraces a collaborative, automation-focused development approach
To support its adoption of modern automation technology, Microsoft also underwent a cultural shift. There is an organization-wide commitment to learning new skills and technologies: developers are learning networking, while network engineers are learning software development, version control, and automation tools like Git and Ansible.
This DevOps approach to both work tasks and professional development has led to greater understanding and collaboration between teams. One engineer created Zero to Hero, a training series on automation concepts and writing Ansible Playbooks. Additionally, there are now self-hosted Python learning groups, and more than 100 active participants discuss and share information in an internal automation community. Equipped with new skills and confidence, Microsoft’s teams are finding new, creative ways to solve business challenges using code and reusable, human-readable playbooks.
“Teams are coming together to solve engineering problems in a shared environment of co-creation,” said Sonika Munde, Remote Access Services Engineer, Core Service Engineering, at Microsoft. “We are truly seeing One Microsoft in action.”
In turn, Microsoft can contribute back to the open source Ansible community. “From the beginning, we’ve used a lot of the ideas and available code from the community, but now as we are moving faster and developing solutions, we can contribute our own ideas back,” said Dworak.