Faced with a range of automation tools, many it departments are struggling to understand the difference between IT Process Automation, Application Service Automation and Infrastructure Automation. While all automation tools provide the benefits of streamlining operational processes to deliver manageability, cost savings and productivity gains, the purpose of each automation tool is different. This post will clarify the distinction between the different automation tools – focusing on what problem each solves, for whom and where each fits within the data center.
Automating Data Center Operations
Automation tools are often obfuscated by the use of ‘shared’ terminology that have different meanings when pertaining to distinct activities within the data center. Terms like “tasks”, “actions”, “workflows” and “processes” while common to all automation tools have different uses based on the operational challenges being addressed by each.
To differentiate between automation tools, it is important to first distinguish between the operational requirements and needs that each automation tool addresses within the data center, including:
- IT Process Automation
- Application Service Automation
- Infrastructure Automation
What is IT Process Automation?
IT Process Automation (also known as Run Book Automation) orchestrates between independent system management tools, to create standardized procedures for consistent incident handling.
What Processes are Automated?
IT Process Automation tools synchronize between ticketing and monitoring tools. IT Process Automation makes it possible to create workflows representing the steps, requisite actions and information transfer between disparate IT system management tools to automate incident handling.
Key Operational Drivers
If you have many discrete it system management products and you need to synchronize between them to manage incidents and enforce standardized incident handling procedures.
Benefits
Incident handling standardization and orchestration.
What to Look for?
Robust integration packages with ticketing vendors and monitoring vendors.
Users
IT Process Automation tools are owned by individuals responsible for incident management within IT.
What is Application Service Automation?
Application Service Automation automates the manual operations needed to deploy applications and keep them up and running across the data center, simplifying and creating reliable, repeatable and streamlined processes for managing application change.
What Processes are Automated
Application Service Automation automates multi-tier, distributed application deployment and maintenance tasks including handover, configurations, updates and patches, among others. Application Service Automation makes it possible to create application-centric workflows, coordinating and executing application service steps across users (bridging between development, QA and staging) application tiers, application environments and data centers. By replacing complex, error prone and uncoordinated manual application change, Application Service Automation eliminates deployment errors and reduces the time and cost of deploying and servicing data center applications.
Key Operational Drivers
If your organization relies on multi-tier, distributed applications including “home grown” data center applications, web applications, online services, SaaS or cloud services. If your application deployments and changes are frequent, they are taking too long, involve too many people, you are experiencing release failures, you need to reduce your service window or want to scale operational capacity to handle higher volumes of application services, without increasing costs.
Benefits
Increased application uptime, IT cost reduction associated with data center application deployment and servicing, gain a consistent, reliable application service model and centrally manage application change.
What to Look for?
- Extensive out-of-the-box application specific actions.
- Multi-tier application model support (including dependencies, application logic and application environments) without the usage of scripts.
- Abstracted, logical application service modeling, environment agnostic (Making it possible to design an application service workflow once and execute it across multiple environments)
- Support of physical, Virtual and cloud environments.
Users
IT/Data Center Operations managers, Data Center Application Release or Deployment Teams, Application Staging and QA.
What is Infrastructure Automation?
Infrastructure Automation facilitates server provisioning and infrastructure configuration across the data center providing server lifecycle management.
What Processes are Automated?
Infrastructure Automation makes it possible to establish a baseline of operating systems, servers and local storage in addition to patching, configuration management, script execution and compliance assurance for all managed servers including both physical and virtual servers.
Key Operational Drivers
If your server provisioning time takes too long, involves too many people and you want to standardize provisioning and server builds by enabling the execution of repetitive tasks across many servers.
Benefits
IT Cost reduction associated with server management, infrastructure standardization and compliance.
What to Look for?
- Rich out of the box HW/network/Storage actions and devices vendors.
- Scalable automation engine to handle large number of servers.
- Ability to support virtual environments.
Users
Infrastructure Managers, System Administrator teams, Network teams.
Summary
Each of the automation tools described in the previous sections address different areas of activity within the data center. The tools differ in terms of the types of tasks they coordinate along with the key operational drivers for automation. Your operational objectives will dictate what automation tool is right for you.
The fact that IT Process automation, Application Automation and Server Automation tools focus on a different set of core competencies, they are fully interoperable, making it possible to achieve full data center automation across these tools. IT process automation workflows can easily include triggers for application and server automation and vice versa, output from application automation and server automation can trigger relevant business processes including troubleshooting, roll-back or compliance for example.
If you are looking for an application automation platform, Nolio Application Service Automation is the most robust automation platform on the market. Nolio lets you automate the deployment and maintenance of web, software-as-a-service and distributed data center applications.
With Nolio operation teams can manage application service activities across users, tiers and environments, turning complex, un-coordinated, manual configurations into error-free, automated and centrally controlled processes.
The end result is that you eliminate up to 60% of application failures caused by application mis-configurations and cut the time and cost of executing and managing application operations by up to 75%.
application service automation