People Process Technology: Automation Challenges
Transcript
[Music] hey how's going - Steve mm from the CTO of Iser calm and we're at Interop again wit Brett Johnson brett has hope on my infrastructure track really appreciate you coming down and speaking on infrastructure it's cold right yet part the infrastructures code but practices around using your code changing it from just a basic script to getting to the point where could be accepted by change control to be part of the change process so all of that requires automation when I was just across the street
earlier this week at Dell world they talked about IT modernization and the key to IT modernization is automation so with that said automation is really hard like if we if automation was easy we would have done it a long time ago and we'd have eight server administrators for every thousand servers or some crazy number like that what are the top two or three challenges you encounter in your practice in helping customers to automation well it looks when you look at the difficulty of implementing any sort
of automated solution you should the code and the logic there can be complex but they're usually fairly simple compared to working with the business side of things because technology generally is fairly logical you know the syntax or thing you know provision a VM VMware has API is that that that piece is pretty straightforward yes and where it's not stripe for this when you say okay well to fit this in your current business process has these one to a hundred points where it doesn't fit well with
an automated process and some of those points may get the discussion or are they still required for this new way we're doing it why are they required and sometimes that why are they required it it's not logical it can be we have to do it this way it can be something that makes as much as a regulatory or yeah there have to be some form filled out every time there's a new VM provision in the in a PCI security zone it's just here's what it is
yeah and sometimes things can simply don't make as much sense as that in terms of okay so it we have to make sure that this is right on the input field because for no other reason we just don't want the workflow to fail so we need to pre validate everything before you can submit the workflow those sorts of things that business is may try to impose on you does true some what can be fairly intense or long workshops to find out that compromise between what will
optimize that automated workflow but also suit their requirements as a business alright there's old second problem that auto that you encounter and helping customers get to Artemis skill sets of big one-oh so I come in as a consultant aroma vendor I'll come in as the consultant and customers sometimes feel there is the consultant that when I walk out that it will be finished you'll be fine with automation it pushes development a bit back into the business back into the bu in so relying on this by
a pre box turnkey product we now have something where the koto rights get our bugs I'm guarantee as folks I'm not perfect my phone's not perfect and when I look at when I leave the clients need to have skill sets to be able to maintain that code right we're now it worked will you laugh but some something in the environment circuit it to be a change a patch it could be anything and now the the client has to have the skill to update the script or
create new scripts that you that support the workflow as you already frayed it foot and it could be an error event occurred while while I wasn't there like after I left a nerve event occurred this is some stranger or event for a lack of a technical time yeah the log foul on the third or a field up or whatever that you know you didn't account for were you right in the cold exactly and my default error handling may not handle that so then after the event
that needs to be added to the code and clients often have a issue coming into the grasp of what are skill sets to maintain this as along compared to just well we used was an enterprise we put it in here seven years we're going to pay our ela and then we'll go to the next version n minus one at the time compared to now we need to continually tune and work on it is there a third pointer is that pretty much top two because of what
I've heard so far is people in process is there a technology challenge technology challenge can be it can be there if you have to integrate with previous things so if you've got to integrate with a really old version of DNS for example maybe they've got bind for list pull some numbers out of the air and it may not support some default the way the command structures are sent from a plug-in I said these are technology challenges that you have to work within DNS being a core
service they're not probably not likely to really just upgrade that to the latest version a bind to make it work for you you need to find a way to work around it so generally speaking technology is normally a legacy thing right outside of that when you integrate with other parts it's more than a logic issue of I need to get this from here and this from here which manipulates this so those are things that you integrate with even have an API you know so if you're
gonna do you're gonna automate Network tell you those your network even have your physical network if you have a API so they get in a request to yes exactly another one is okay we want to use ansible for this does that answer PlayBook actually cover all those features that I need to use if I'm working on UCS manager does their ansible playbook cover service templates okay if it does or it doesn't I'd say where you can get a bit of a technology issue as well there's
not necessarily legacy and that then can come down to well if they need it then maybe they have to develop it and give back to the community so Bret I really appreciate you jumping in here and jumping on the CT dodos Lee blog in put it yeah so in Twitter Brett Johnson 0:08 and I blog at SD Brett calm alright and you can find the CTO dose CT odovacar and the blog podcast at the fitti of Viacom and of course we can you find me on
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