On the face of it, the term application service automation (or ASA for the sake of this blog) appears to be one of those wooly IT industry terms used to describe some element of the so-called ‘operations’ team’s daily workload.
In practical terms, ASA comes down to automating application deployment, maintenance and management, which will typically involve remediation and recovery processes. Or to put it even more simply, a serious helping hand for data centre employees.
Nolio announced that it was selected by City Index, a global leader in Contracts for Difference, FX and spread betting, to be the de facto standard for data center application deployment. “Nolio ASAP” allows City Index to deliver 25% more software releases each week.
John Vincent is a System Architect from a consumer loyalty company in Atlanta, and he’s in love with DevOps. Every #devops tweet, every SlideShare presentation, conference, keynote, or book, if it’s got the DevOps stamp on it then John has most probably read it, been there, done that.
You can read his blog post to learn more how John’s company formed the new dedicated DevOps team, and how they managed the migration from a waterfall approach to agile. John goes on to explain how DevOps effects Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), Security Controls, and Corporate Hierarchy.
What’s most amazing about it is that, I personally think implementing a DevOps philosophy across the board would make compliance EASIER. All change control is AUTOMATICALLY documented. Traditional access rules aren’t an issue because no human actually logs onto servers for instance.
John’s blog post: http://lusislog.blogspot.com/2010/07/no-operations-team-left-behind-where.html
Over at the “The abyss between dev and ops” blog, Christian has a nice post describing some scenarios that essentially creates the infamous gap between Dev and Ops (check out this hilarious Monty Python take on DevOps) . In Christian’s opinion, lack of communication is a major cause. I would also expand this to the lack of communication tools, or as we like to call it at Nolio, the lack of a common interface for development, QA, and operations.
http://devops-abyss.blogspot.com/search/label/devops
Dan Woods, the Forbes blogger and analyst wrote a nice article about servicing applications in the data center and the cloud. Dan mentions that Nolio is attacking managing the complexity of the application head on. He writes that Nolio’s product makes it possible “to rapidly configure and adapt an application or set of applications to changing circumstances. Managing such application complexity is a big part of the undifferentiated heavy lifting.”
The article can be found on Forbes.com.
A combination of forces, including skyrocketing complexity and severe economic pressure, are radically and irreversibly altering the IT landscape. New methods, new functional sourcing, and new organizational structures are needed to address this onslaught, but one theme is obvious throughout all of these approaches — a need to automate more of what you do in IT. The typical IT organization wastes a significant portion of its budget on inefficiencies that only get worse as complexity grows. Automate many of these tasks and you become leaner and more responsive to business changes. Evidence indicates an automation “tipping point” is already under way this year. All IT shops need to consider their plans for automation, including the many derivative outcomes for process refinement, staffing, tools, and the organization itself.
http://www.forrester.com/rb/Research/it_operations_2009_automation_odyssey/q/id/54531/t/2
I am excited about our upcoming webinar with 888.com’s Director of IT Operations, Ariel Pisetzky. As you might know, 888.com is one of the world’s largest online gaming networks, serving poker, bingo, and other real-time, money making applications to millions of customers every day. Ariel has kindly agreed to share with us how they moved from manual and scripting solutions to a fully automated and managed environment.
Hoping to see you on Feb 24th!
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/912658288
Driven by increased adoption of services-based computing, virtualization technologies, and mixed private and public cloud computing, enterprise datacenter applications are evolving from static and monolithic to dynamic, distributed, and multitiered. With this new application model come new operating challenges.
As organizations become increasingly reliant on integrated data center applications, deploying these applications is becoming a key business priority and a formidable operational challenge for IT teams. Responsibility for these applications – from managing release cycles to servicing lifecycles – is shifting to datacenter operations.
Traditionally, application release and deployment tasks have been performed manually, or semi-manually based on scripting. However, due to the complexity of multi-tier applications, the growing number of application environments and dependencies, and the sheer volume of operational tasks, manual approaches have become increasingly error-prone. As a result, application release and deployment tasks are resulting in delays, configuration errors, and release failures that undermine application reliability. Furthermore, this tedious manual work may result in increased operating and maintenance costs.
To address these challenges, a new application service model is needed to automate and orchestrate routine and emergency application tasks. These solutions should help IT operation teams execute and manage application service tasks and build reliable processes across application silos and the entire datacenter application lifecycle.
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Read the rest of this IDC White Paper on www.noliosoft.com
A huge pain point of trying to manipulate traditional infrastructure automation tools to work on the application layer and produce application automation, is that companies find themselves writing pieces of code, scripts, or huge numbers of nasty workflows.
These scripts then need to be continually maintained and tweaked for each lab or environment. This results in very high maintenance costs and very low efficiency. Companies simply can’t afford operating this way when it comes to data center applications uptime.
This is where the Nolio Application Automation solution becomes useful.
Nolio’s solution has a unique ability to design once, then execute in multiple environments, without the need to update and customize the automation for every new or slightly different lab, environment or datacenter.
This is achieved thanks to Nolio’s patent-pending technology [link to patent post], which focuses on multi-layer, complex application components, architectures, topologies and parameters.
As a result, Nolio’s customers achieve incredibly fast implementation time. Using Nolio’s application automation tools, dozens of workflows can be automated in a few days to a few weeks, and become fully operational in production environments and in Development, QA and staging environments.
application service automation