Build automation and orchestration
Build automation is a two-part change. While there’s a technology angle—with advanced deployment engines like Red Hat Ansible®—a change in process is also required. Many organizations have strict processes in place around change and risk management; without adapting those processes into more agile methodologies, it would not be possible to take advantage of automation technology.
Bringing it all together
If you want to successfully utilize automation and a self-service infrastructure together, there are any number of approaches and technologies that can help.
You can learn more about how automation works with self-service infrastructure by downloading the “Teaching an elephant to dance” e-book.
Elastic infrastructures can mean cloud (public or private), virtual machines, or containers. Automation can mean a component within the infrastructure system, or it can be an external tool, such as Red Hat CloudForms or Kubernetes with Linux® containers. There are different technological avenues, depending on your organization’s skill sets and existing infrastructure.
"There is no single architectural pattern or technology platform that works flawlessly in every single environment."
– Teaching an elephant to dance
As a first step toward automation, set a baseline for the current status of your organization to feed into your automation strategy. Steps include:
- 1 Defining relevant metrics
- 2 Visualizing or diagramming your current workflows
- 3 Identifying key participants at different steps
Automation and orchestration make it possible for you to make incredible improvements to efficiency, which include the rapid and iterative capabilities found in stage 4: CI/CD pipelines.
