COMMENT
“The larger and more complex
an environment, the higher the
chances for mistakes.”
services that are outside the planned
offering or far more complex than what
was originally anticipated.
For example, after a cloud computing
environment designed to offer a few
highly standardised services becomes
highly successful, the organisation
may experience an increasing number
of requests to serve complex custom
services. Each of those custom services
includes many application tiers that must
be coordinated in terms of provisioning,
configuration, sequential system updates
and patching, migration (if necessary)
and retirement. The risk is that this newly
introduced complexity, paired with the
scale you reached, lessens productivity if
not properly managed.
Let’s use a different analogy to explain
how automation can simplify processes
by orchestrating complex systems:
the automatic transmission in a car.
In modern cars, the transmission is
managed by a computer which operates
the gearbox and the clutch, coordinating
them with the engine, brakes, wheels and
many other components. Automating
the gear shifting task reduces the
amount of work required to drive
because it simplifies the entire process,
“Automation
as a platform
builds upon the
foundational
elements you
already have in
your computing
environment.”
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INTELLIGENTCIO
In the same way, automation tools
can simplify your experience of
deploying and maintaining applications
of increasing complexity, from the
multi-tier service composition to the
configuration of ancillary components
such as networking and firewalls.
Fewer mistakes: Automation reduces
human errors
Massimo Ferrari is Management
Strategy Director at Red Hat
for example by removing the need to
monitor the tachometer.
The simplification introduced by the
automated transmission is particularly
useful when a certain aspect of driving
must be repeated over and over. For
example, thanks to automation, the
continual operation of accelerating,
stopping and re-accelerating when stuck
in traffic during rush hour doesn’t require
the driver to shift gears endless times.
Like the automatic transmission in your
car, an automation tool is designed to
deal with a large number of moving
parts at the same time, taking care
of repetitive tasks and keeping all
the pieces together while delivering
predictable results.
Moreover, to comply with regulations
and reduce emissions, car manufacturers
have introduced more efficient
gearboxes made of eight or even 10
gears. Manually shifting eight gears not
only would be complex and distracting,
but it would also almost certainly result in
highly inefficient driving.
Even the most talented member of
your IT operations team is human, and
humans are prone to mistakes. The larger
and more complex an environment, the
higher the chances for mistakes.
“Automation
tools can
simplify your
experience of
deploying and
maintaining
applications
of increasing
complexity.”
For example, large-scale environments
easily force the IT organisation to deal
with time pressure and stress. The
psychological stress comes from the
realisation that a task, even a simple
one, can’t be accomplished across all
the managed machines in the allocated
amount of time with a low probability
of errors.
It must be also considered that growing
complexity leads to more articulated
operations that need to be performed.
Highly complex tasks require constant
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