Archive for the ‘Application service automation’ Category

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Application Automation vs. Infrastructure Automation

Monday, August 17th, 2009

Infrastructure automation is far from being simple. It involves integration of many types of actions, on many types of devices such as routers, servers, storage, switches, load balancers, laptops, and desktops.

However, there are several tools and methodologies available today to service infrastructure, including software distribution, server provisioning, network management automation, virtualization, virtualization management software, and storage configuration and management.

In contrast, no platform exists today to help with application operational tasks – also known as Application Service Automation. These tasks include complex application deployment, application configuration changes, troubleshooting and recovery.

There are three main areas that make application service automation different from infrastructure service automation:

Task Complexity

Many of the infrastructure automation tasks involve repetitive tasks on many devices, usually on same-server types or devices, or according to domains. The nature of automation in this case is perform the tasks on a group of servers together, or according to domains.

In contrast, application services usually involve multiple server types/domains. The processes needed to service applications are complicated, involving numerous steps, strict procedures, and a variety of machines.  Anyone who has gotten the “checklist” for an application release process knows how complicated this can be, and how unlikely it is for two people to actually do every step in exactly the same way, regardless of how well documented the process is.

Dependencies

With infrastructure service automation, the focus is on updating the device.  With application service automation, teams must understand the application architecture – which servers are mapped to each other and how all servers depend on each other. In order to automate a process, they need to understand which particular application servers connect to precisely which database servers.

Order

When servicing infrastructure, it doesn’t matter if this router gets its new configuration first or which server gets its security patch first.  But for application service automation, order of operations matters. To update an application, the application logic is important.  You might need to take down the database server first, then the application server, and finally the Web server, before making changes. And if you do not have maintenance windows, you may need to bring down a very particular part of the application first, make your changes, and only after that part is back up and running, do the next group of servers in a rolling update.

Today’s application service teams require automated tools that understand the architecture and logic inherent in the applications they service.  To learn more about how Nolio supports task complexity, grouping, dependencies and order with Nolio Automation Center, please visit www.noliosoft.com.

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Scripts vs. Automation

Tuesday, August 11th, 2009

For many companies, their first attempt at automation is to develop in-house scripts in whatever language (Python, Perl, Tcl, etc.)

In fact, scripting is almost always a stepping stone to automation.  Which brings up several questions about scripting and about Nolio Automation Center that I’d like to address here.

 

Is scripting bad?

Of course not.  Most customers get their toes into the waters of automation with some level of scripting.  Our best customers are the ones that have gotten some benefits from scripts but have really reached the limits of what they can do with scripting and need something that is more effective and less prone to human errors.

 

Is the Nolio tool a GUI for creating my scripts?

No, it’s really not. Scripting has certain limitations – particularly around maintainability, mutltiple envinorments/ labs/ datacenter synchronization, documentation, and troubleshooting.

Most importantly, scripting does not provide you with management of the execution – reports of what was done, by whom and where in the Datacenter, so that later on you can use that information in a user friendly and timely manner.

Nolio automation completely avoids these limitations. In fact, no script is generated in Nolio. Instead, there’s a distributed workflow engine that “knows” how to run the Noio automated processes, and adjusts to any environment. This gives you the benefits of automation without the downside of scripts.

 

Do I need to recreate all my existing scripts?

No. In fact, I can’t think of one customer that hasn’t integrated in-house scripts into their Nolio implementation.

One of the major benefits of using Nolio is adding the following layers, which do not exist in scripts, on top of existing scripts:

1.  A communication and synchronization layer. Scripts usually run on a single server, so you need to write additional code to manage scripts on multiple servers, and you need to write additional code to execute different scripts on different server types in multiple data center environments. You need to have the ability to synchronize and run scripts in stages. Using scripts, you need to write an additional layer of code to achieve this. Nolio platforms allow you to get all of the above for your current scripts without writing additional code.

2. Permissions – The Nolio permissions mechanism allows you to get now-active directory integration and provide roles and authorities to your scripts’ activations and design.

3. Notification and scheduler abilities – extend your scripts’ power, by using Nolio to provide a scheduler and advanced notification mechanism. Be alerted when your scripts are activated, stopped, failed, and completed.

4. Reports – This is the most important part. Automation is only one part, but the real management of data center activity is to KNOW what was running, when and status.  Empower your scripts to have a full reporting system for your script activation, including management reports, which enable you to show your managers your achievements!

As you can see, the Nolio automation solution does not come instead of scripts, but in addition to them. It adds layers that significantly enhance your scripts’ power. Learn more at www.nolio.com

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“Service Unavailable?” Servers normal. Now what?

Monday, July 20th, 2009

What happens when you get a service unavailable alert but all your server monitors show normal state? How can you respond to such an alert?

When discussing this with one of Nolio’s customers, a large online bank operation, they told me that in the past, in cases of a ’service unreachable’ alert with green servers, they didn’t really know what the source of the problem was. The first thing they would do when troubleshooting this type of problems is look into their monitoring system and check if there are problematic servers, but in most cases the issue is in the application layer, where some services or processes are stalled.

Next, they would start manually going into each server to try and figure out where the application failure was – a time-consuming task since they had over 350 servers to check! They would go into each application tier and simulate an application connectivity to the next relevant tier. They needed to know exactly which application tier on each server was connected to each of the other servers from the next tier. It was very complicated to go through dozens or hundreds of servers to find the problem, especially when the operations team was under heavy pressure to get things up and running.

These days, using Nolio, they have created an automated process that “travels” through their different application tiers and initiates connectivity to the next appropriate tier. For example: “go into all the web servers and open a web service (URL) located in the relevant application server that services that web server. Then go into all the application servers and query the relevant DB servers.” This way they test where the problems are so they can find them in minutes.

Nolio Automation Center enabled this customer to create an automated process that discovers where the problems are, but they still needed to go into each problematic server and reset the problematic service. They wanted to automate that as well, so they modified this process to fix this problem automatically.

The addition was very simple. All they needed to do was reset the next tier of service. For example: if the automation process has found that a web server cannot initiate a web service from its relevant application server, it resets the web service in the application server. So when the URL initiation action fails in the web server, the other action that resets the web service is triggered in the application server.

Time savings to this customer by using automation in their problem resolution process are dramatic. The overall time it took the customer to create such a process in Nolio was just 20 minutes. Now the time it takes them to solve this situation automatically is 5 minutes, over all 350 servers they have! Before they started using Nolio, the entire operations team usually spent 1.5 hours of hysteric work doing the same thing. Now this process is handled by just one person

What’s next? They are now integrating this process into their application monitoring system. They want it to be activated automatically when the ‘service unavailable alert’ is triggered. This is also very simple to do, since the Nolio system exposes a web service and command line APIs to enable that.

Once this is implemented, they will get an email from the Nolio system that the process was activated and finished successfully and then they can close the alert ticket within few minutes after it was triggered, without any manual work or team hysteria.

Post written by Alon Eizenman, CTO, Nolio

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Nolio Application Service Automation is a software platform for designing and executing automated application service workflows across the data center, enabling reliable, effective processes for the management of application change.

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SaaS ISVs and Application Management Automation

Sunday, April 19th, 2009

We are pleased to welcome back guest blogger Dani Shomron, a SAAS industry veteran. Dani has held development, management and executive roles in multiple verticles and geographies. He holds a BSc. in Computer Science from the Hebrew University and an MSc. in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh. Dani is an expert in SaaS Operations and ISVs transition from on-site to on-demand.

“When you look at yourself from a universal standpoint, something inside always reminds or informs you that there are bigger and better things to worry about”. (Albert Einstein)

The trick is focusing on what you do best. This is a well known truism and it is the premise for SaaS. Beyond the cost savings - opex vs. capex and all that – the reason SaaS is such a successful model is that it allows the enterprise to focus on its competitive advantage and leave the rest to be handled by a competent service provider.

What is true for the enterprise should be true for the SaaS ISV. And if you look around, you will notice that most SaaS providers are also SaaS consumers. From CRM to Marketing generation, to financials, to you-name-it – SaaS companies are adopters of SaaS technology. (Of course most SaaS companies are even greater adopters of open source; hey, it’s free!).

Still, most on-demand providers are running their own data centers, the network, the servers, the storage, and I would dare to say, not excelling in that department. SaaS technologists are product people. Innovative, creative, not harnessed by process or procedure. The typical data center is a product of evolution gone haywire. You start up with a couple of servers, and slowly build up, slapping a switch here, a database there, buying a cheap router, until it becomes quite unmanageable. And they probably do not have the right staff to design and maintain the infrastructure.

SaaS companies are finding it hard to let go of their infrastructure assets, but more and more are realizing that they simply suck at the job. Especially if they are big enough for it to matter, but too small to do a good job.

Networking, hosting, storage and server management have become a commodity. And as such, shouldn’t you let someone else do the job?

Enter the managed service providers. They will take care of every tier that you will allow them access to. From hosting, to networking, servers, storage, database monitoring and management, and many are interested in taking over the application management, if you just let them. It is the next tier and probably most lucrative.

This is the point where the guy with the funny pajamas, pointed ears and the cape appears in a flash and says “enough!’

Nobody does it better than you (the SaaS ISV). Your application will never become a commodity. You built the app, you know it intimately, understand the domain and can react quickly when something goes awry.

You should build your operations team around application and domain expertise, not around networking or server configuration. And you should equip your ops team with the tools to monitor and manage the application. This includes instrumentation, end-user-experience monitoring and application management automation.

The domain of infrastructure management tools is so well developed, with so many solutions abound, that SaaS operations usually tend to invest there and not where it matters most – the application.

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Nolio Application Service Automation is a software platform for designing and executing automated application service workflows across the data center, enabling reliable, effective processes for the management of application change.

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Application Service Automation, Explained

Tuesday, February 17th, 2009

Application Service Automation is the automation of the tasks and services required for operating applications.

Data center applications are complex. They are made up of many components, they are distributed across large volumes of servers, and they undergo constant change. Relying on error-prone manual and scripted processes to service and maintain data center applications often translates into costly application downtime caused by configuration errors.

In the high-stakes world of application availability, your business simply cannot afford failures and downtime. Operations must gain control over application services, minimize downtime and eliminate service errors. Fully automating data center processes is the answer.

Nolio Application Service Automation is a software platform that automates application deployment, maintenance and auditing. IT process automation simplifies the process of managing the application op-cycle across your data center, heightening application quality, improving time-to-market, and dramatically reducing operational overhead and costs, delivering immediate productivity gains.

By automating application service tasks and eliminating all human intervention, the time and resources needed to manage application change are dramatically reduced, and application downtime is minimized, ensuring business continuity of mission-critical applications across the data center.

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