Getting Fast: Moving Towards a Toolchain for Automated Operations

Without automated operations, the management burden of large-scale virtualization and cloud computing implementations quickly spirals out of control. Through the adhoc work between open source projects, the custom work inside large enterprises, and product suites designed by commercial management tools vendors, a toolchain for automated operations is emerging.

The toolchain approach to pattern solving has been proven to withstand the test of time. From the UNIX operating systems to development tools, toolchains are a ubiquitous technique in computing. Toolchains give you a framework within which you can select the tools the meet your requirements and swap out the ones that don’t. As the complexity and pressures of modern web operations have mounted, the need for a toolchain is even more evident.

In our session, we will be examining this automated operations toolchain concept and highlighting case studies where open source tools have been used to implement this toolchain.

Much of the content will build upon the next version of the “Web Ops 2.0: Achieving Fully Automated Provisioning” whitepaper that is currently being written and will be finalized just prior to Velocity.

Version 1 of the whitepaper can be found here:
http://www.dtosolutions.com/storage/downloads/FullyAutomatedProvisioning_Whitepaper.pdf

Content used for our session:
*Criteria for achieving automated operations
*Reference open source toolchains (updated from version 1)
*Case studies and lessons learned from companies who have implemented similar toolchains (updated from version 1)
*Performance indicators for measuring the need and effectiveness of a provisioning toolchain (new)
*Application architecture considerations for enabling applications to better fit into a fully automated provisioning paradigm