To tackle the challenge of meeting growing business demands for scale and speed in IT operations, Agile methodologies have become a foundational approach for many tech teams. As a result, DevOps has evolved from Agile and given rise to various “xOps” categories that can be overwhelming to navigate. To make sense of this spectrum, InfraOps, which has a focus on automating and managing infrastructure, was introduced as a subset of DevOps. To help IT leaders make sense of this broad spectrum of xOps, global research and advisory firm Info-Tech Research Group has published its latest blueprint, Next-Generation InfraOps.
The new research explains that all xOps methodologies and approaches serve the same purpose; to increase effectiveness through automation and improve governance through visibility. The key for IT teams is to identify the right tools and methodologies that will deliver actual benefits to both the IT operation and the organization as a whole.
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“There are as many different types of ‘xOps’ as there are business models and IT teams,” says Nabeel Sherif, principal advisory director at Info-Tech Research Group. “To pick the approaches that deliver the best value to an organization and that align to its way of operating, it’s important for IT leaders to understand the different major categories in the xOps spectrum and how they may apply to their approach.”
Info-Tech’s blueprint explains that InfraOps is one of the major methodologies that address a key IT problem at cloud scale by eliminating friction and errors in deliveries and outputs. Architectures, tools, and frameworks are available to make adopting this approach easier for IT departments and organizations.
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Although infrastructure architecture is usually a binary choice, an automation approach should use any and all tooling that helps. Info-Tech’s research blueprint places InfraOps tools into the following categories:
- Infrastructure Architecture
- Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) – HCI is a disruptive departure from traditional IT infrastructure provisioning and management, while also being a logical progression of infrastructure convergence. It virtualizes servers, networks, and storage on a single server or storage appliance, allowing for easy scaling as more appliances are added to a cluster or stack.
- Composable Infrastructure (CI) – CI is a different approach from HCI, focusing on further disaggregating resources and components used to build systems. It provides virtual bare metal resources and enables tightly coupled resources to be released back and forth into the resource pool as required by a given workload. Additionally, CI systems are based on next-generation network architecture that supports the more efficient use of the application-layer resources.
- Automation Tooling
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC) – IaC is the process of managing computer data centers using machine-readable definition files instead of physical hardware or interactive configuration tools. This approach reduces costs; increases scalability, speed, and flexibility; and provides better consistency and version control. IaC also helps reduce deployment errors and enables better management of infrastructure.
- Automation and Orchestration (A&O) – Orchestration automates the coordination and management of complex computer systems, middleware, and services, particularly in service-oriented architecture, virtualization, and converged infrastructure. It aligns business requests with applications, data, and infrastructure through policies and automated workflows, allowing for scalable and application-aligned infrastructure. Orchestration enables tasks previously performed by multiple administrators to be automated, and it provides centralized resource consumption management.
“Ultimately, DevOps and InfraOps approaches should embody an organization’s governance needs via architecture and process,” adds Sherif. “As time goes on, however, both the IT footprint and the business environment will shift. It’s important to build the tools, telemetry, and governance to anticipate and adapt to change, as well as a virtuous cycle between development needs and IT operations tools and governance.”
Info-Tech advises that by defining the end goals and framing solutions based on the type of visibility and features required, IT departments can enable speed and reliability for their organizations without losing control of the work.
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