Progressing to Multi-Cloud Deployments with Automated Workflows

Automating Beyond IST with ICO

With the accelerated digital transformation of businesses, the pace of innovation and movement to the cloud has only increased after the pandemic. Most enterprises are just getting started with the modernization of their deployment tools and applications. Enterprises will possibly pick a particular cloud provider that best meets their current requirements. Considering that enterprises are more agile than ever, requirements around applications and deployments are expected to change as well. Though enterprises may get started with a single cloud provider, deployments are mostly going to be complex going forward with the inclusion of multi cloud and private clouds. Automations around infrastructure and app deployments become imperative in such complex deployment scenarios.

Automation is an iterative process

It is best done when you start with a well exercised, documented manual process that you know works as designed and then methodically automate sections which are best suited for automation. Complex multi-cloud deployments can definitely benefit from automations leveraging IST (Intersight Service for Terraform) and ICO (Intersight Cloud Orchestrator). Let’s explore these Intersight services with some sample use cases.

Before we move on, a brief note on ICO and IST. There is a great deal of literature out there around these technologies if you would like to explore them further.

ICO basically deals with workflows in Intersight. An old adage comes to mind here, “you cannot manage what you cannot measure.” Breaking down a complex IT task with a workflow not only provides insights to find your weakest link, it also helps manipulate your workflows to meet the ever changing business requirements. You can build a library of your workflows and use these as building blocks to build a workflow that works for you, swapping blocks from your library per your requirements.

IST deals with the integration of Intersight and Terraform Cloud for Business and provides that single pane of glass for Data Center operations. More details on ICO can be found here.

While IST provides a step towards automation by its integration with TFCB (Terraform Cloud for Business), ICO takes this a step further by building workflows around these foundational automations.

In my previous blog, “Hello IKS”… from Terraform Cloud!“, we talked about IST and TFCB (Terraform Cloud for Business). It describes provisioning IKS infrastructure and deploying a sample cloud native application with IST.  You can find the repo for this project on DevNet Code Exchange.

Over the forthcoming series of blogs we’ll look at the following use cases, leveraging IST and ICO:

1. “Hello IKS”… from Intersight Cloud Orchestrator!
   Description: Provisioning IKS infrastructure and deploying a sample cloud native application with ICO
2. Ease your legacy Tomcat App Deployments with IST
   Description: Deploy a legacy micro services Java app on VM based infrastructure with IST and AppDynamics
3. Step up your legacy Tomcat App Deployment with ICO
   Description: Deploy a legacy micro services Java app on VM based infrastructure with ICO and AppDynamics
4. Modernize both your Apps and Deployments with IST
   Description: Deploy a cloud native micro services Java app on IKS leveraging IST and AppDynamics
5. Step up your Cloud Native Deployments with ICO
   Description: Deploy a cloud native micro services Java app on IKS leveraging ICO and AppDynamics

Let’s get started now with the first use case. Here you’ll see how you can leverage the same Terraform workspaces, but now use ICO to stitch together a complete deployment.

“Hello IKS”… from Intersight Cloud Orchestrator (ICO)

While TFCB workspaces automate infrastructure resources provisioning, there is still a need to execute these workspaces manually, or by using the API. With ICO workflows and its integrations with the TFCB API’s, it becomes pretty straightforward to not only build the blocks but also stitch the building blocks together to create any masterpiece that you desire!

Let’s take a look at how ICO builds on top of what TFCB provides. In the diagram below, the left hand side lists the TFCB workspaces that account for the terraform resource provisioning. The right hand side lists the corresponding ICO workflows that captures not only the stitching of these workspaces for an end to end deployment but also accounts for the dependencies between the workspaces.

For example, in the above ICO use case, the workflow IKSICO.json sets up the workspaces in TFCB, assigns the variables to each of the workspaces and captures any dependencies between the workspaces. An execution of this workflow will set up the IKS policies and cluster.

The workflow, IKSICOAppDeploy.json, is a sample of deploying a cloud native application on the IKS cluster created in the previous step using Helm.

The workflow, IKSICODestroy.json, is a sample of how with a single workflow one can clean up all resources and TFCB artifacts.

For further details on this use case, please review this entry on DevNet Code Exchange.

Additional Resources

Please watch for the next blog in this use case series, “Tomcat Application Deployments and AppDynamics Insights with IST.”

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