Environment Provisioning
Why is Provisioning a key part of DevOps?
Environment provisioning is a key part of a continuous delivery process. The idea is simple: we should not only build, test and deploy application code, but also the underlying application environment.
Are your environments being provisioned on-demand as applications deploy? Can Devs request new environments to fit changes in how the application is built? Is environment configuration and modeling built into the application deployment process?
Infrastructure is the most important element of the environment, as it defines where the application will run, the specific configuration needs and how dependencies need to interact with the application.
Configuration is the next most important aspect of the application environment. Configuration dictates both how the application behaves in a given infrastructure and how the infrastructure behaves in relation to the underlying application.
Dependencies are all the different modules or systems an application dependes on, from libraries to services or other applications.
Business Benefits
Reduce Average Time to Provision
This KPI offers a direct measurement of the end-to-end process for provisioning new infrastructure, including both physical and virtual machines, processing power, storage, databases, middleware, communication and networking infrastructure among others. IT managers and business users can employ this metric as an indication of the degree to which IT is supporting the ability needs of the business.
Reduce Service Complexity
Centralizing all environment automation operations in one place simplifies making decisions that affect the business, permitting a quick turnover of scalability investments and impact analysis and change execution when rearranging infrastructure resources to meet new business requirements.
Get Service Allocation Insights
Measure how to and for how long infrastructure is being used, how fast it’s being delivered and disposed of and what business requirements are behind each request.
Greater service efficiency and decreased costs
Provisioning and disposing of environments following establish patterns and templates help reduce waste and complexity. Modular environments are also easier to debug and scale as changes only impact in one application instead of a cluster of applications. The bottomline is that modular environment reduce the costs of running tests and are easier to throttle in production, which also translate in applications that only consume what they need at a given time.