Plan, Deploy & Manage Modern Applications Leveraging vCloud Automation Center and Puppet - PuppetConf 2014

Editor's Notes

• #4: <Click> Policy based management and automation is the catalyst that empowers the software defined data center. <Click> cloud automation accelerates the end to end delivery of infrastructure, applications and custom IT services through the dynamic configuring of the virtualized infrastructure. <Click> Cloud Operations monitors the health, performance and capacity providing the guidance to take corrective action <Click> And Cloud Business Management provides visibility into cost and quality of service.
• #5: Today, the world revolves around applications. Creating, delivering and managing those applications is a formidable challenge for both Development and IT. By virtualizing all aspects of the data center (namely, compute, networking, security and storage), VMware customers are moving to a completely virtualized infrastructure. One that can be dynamically configured to meet specific application needs. <Click> Because a virtualized infrastructure is fully abstracted from hardware, workloads running in your data center, can be deployed seamlessly on the environment of your choosing: private cloud, public cloud or a hybrid cloud. <Click> However, virtualizing all aspects of your infrastructure by itself will not provide the desired efficiency improvements if your infrastructure and applications are still being delivered by siloed manual processes that take days and weeks to deliver the services the business needed yesterday.
• #6: Background info to the challenges Agility: Slow IT service delivery impacts business performance Slow implementation of service automation solutions Slow delivery of services and applications to the business Manual processes lead to differing configurations requiring rework Service consumers have no easy way to access services and applications Control: IT has insufficient control over who provisions what service and where Service and software sprawl impacts IT’s support ability Unrefined policies do not reflect the granularity required by IT and the business VM’s and applications are provisioned with the wrong configurations and service levels Un-used and over-sized VM’s and applications cannot easily be identified to eliminate waste of resources Extensibility: Inflexible automation approaches do not map into the existing infrastructure, processes and environments Automation requires time- consuming and costly rework of the existing infrastructure Hard-coded workflows and processes, which do not reflect IT and business requirements, are forced on the organizations Integration of 3rd party capabilities require time – consuming coding Limited environment support prevents organizations to optimize service delivery to reduce time and cost Inconsistencies Manual configuration of middleware, databases and applications leads to inconsistencies, errors and time consuming need for rework Manual configuration leads to inconsistencies and errors across environments (e.g. dev, test, prod), which requires time consuming rework Changes to middleware, databases and applications leads to inconsistencies across environments, which requires time consuming rework Configuration drift leads to inconsistencies across environments, which requires rework, but which typically cannot be identified or corrected due the scope of the task
• #7: Many of our customers are looking to vCloud Automation Center as the product of choice to on-board the cloud and achieve better business agility. These customers often also look to VMware to provide guidance of how to on-board the cloud. Now, every customer is different, which makes it a bit difficult to provide this guidance. For example, some customers may be highly automated, but they do not have good mechanisms for governance in place. The next customer might be the exact opposite e.g. everything gets provisioned manually, and the manual process comprehensively captures all approvals so that governance is high. However, in the end, we see a pattern how customers on-board the cloud. There are typically a few types of projects customers deploy to make this transition: Automating the virtualized infrastructure Adding the consumption side (self-service catalog) to the automated infrastructure to stand up an IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-service) Provide more value to the application teams by providing capabilities to deploy simple applications, middleware and databases with standardized configurations Provide application specific capabilities such as Application release automation and DevOps for application organizations And finally to establish IT as a broker of services It is possible to start at any of these steps and then expand the scope of the project later, or it is also possible to start at the top with a broader CIO / CTO driven initiative. For most customers, the immediate first step is to automate the virtualized environment. This is essentially adding the next technology layer on top of the existing virtualized environments. Those projects are often driven by the IT infrastructure organization and they can be accomplished very rapidly.
• #8: vCloud Automation Center is VMware’s solution for Cloud Automation. It is a strategic tool to onboard customers, who have virtualized their environment, onto the cloud.   It provides the ability to stand up an IaaS, a PaaS or a DaaS. In addition it provide the capability to create any IT service to extend and round up the existing OOB services capabilities. “Any” service can include storage-as-a-service, backup-as-a-service, or perhaps creating mailboxes to onboard new employees   Some customers may choose a smaller implementation to start with to automate their virtual environment. By adding the consumption layer and capabilities such as the services catalog, they can evolve those implementations towards an IaaS or a PaaS. Other customers may start with an executive driven, enterprise – wide implementation to establish IT as a broker of services. They may offer services ready for consumption through the services catalog and they may partner with the business to provide a choice of standardized offerings. Standardization the software stack, its versions and configurations and ultimately the catalog services is key for successful implementations.   vCloud Automation Center can provide the agility your business needs through automating delivery of personalized IT service. For Infrastructure organizations it provides Control through governance Multi-vendor, multi-cloud support for enterprise wide heterogeneous deployments Choice through flexibility to map and integrated into existing infrastructures, processes and environments   The ability to rapidly deliver infrastructure services is critical to provide business agility, but delivering applications still may be slow. It is necessary to deliver a single solution for application release automation / DevOps abstracted from diverse infrastructure services. This allows application organizations to enable existing applications to be consumed as a service and to Automate the application release / lifecycle process Automate the overarching software development life cycle process Enable DevOps through configuration management, which is delivered through partnerships with Puppet Labs, Opscode (Chef) and SaltStack    Application teams are very interested in working with the infrastructure teams. Application teams do not want to deal with IT infrastructure, but they want the infrastructure team to host the automation solution for them so that they can focus on the application itself.   Infrastructure teams recognize that application teams have the option to outsource workloads into the public cloud (shadow IT). By providing an agile automation framework to application teams helps them to stay relevant and to minimize shadow IT.   In the 4th quarter of 2013, VMware will provide major capabilities towards this solution. Multiple products are being merged to provide a single product, but more work will be needed throughout 2014.
• #9: Rapidly stand up a flexible automation platform using OOB functionality incl. a policy governance engine, lifecycle management and create pre-defined services
• #10: vCloud Automation Center has three primary policies used to implement user-centric business aware cloud management. The first are Business Groups vCAC allows administrators to define a multi-level grouping structure and associate users from Active Directory with one or more groups and have specific role based access within those groups Second, we have Resource Reservations Reservations allow administrators to allocate previously discovered (virtual, physical, or cloud ) resources to each group. As part of assigning resources to a group, you can associate costs to those physical resources. Resource reservations can be grouped by service levels as part of the reservation process. When users request machines, the will be charged based on a prorated consumption of these resources And the third are Service Blueprints Blueprints define the policies that will control the provisioning and ongoing management of a vCAC compute service from the initial request, provisioning, ongoing management and decomissioning. This life-cycle management can be unique for every blueprint defined in the system.
• #11: One of the most important capabilities our solution provides is the capability to deploy applications top down using “application blueprints. A blueprint describes the deployment topology of an application. Here you see an application blueprint within Application Director. A blueprint is based on the principle of loosely coupling and it allows you to abstract the application from the infrastructure. This provides unprecedented choice in terms of what infrastructure should be chosen to best fit the requirements of the application. The loosely coupled model furthermore is a key to provide more stable and robust applications. The process of creating a blueprint streamlines the deployment process since only the application architect, rather than dozens or people or teams are required to deploy applications. Manual steps are largely eliminated and much of the process is automated. The components of the blueprint are reusable so there is no need to re-create them over and over again. The Blueprint provides a master template so that all applications deployed into dev, test or production are configured in exactly the same way. This eliminates a big source of configuration differences, which require time intense manual rework. Of course it is possible to make changes to standard configurations within specific deployment blueprints as needed.
• #13: An important aspect of automating the application release process is configuring applications and their middleware to stand up application environments. VMware provides comprehensive capabilities to define services, which capture the configurations. Services can be created across the lifecycle, and they are parameterized to declare service properties, which renders the scripts generic. VMware provides many out of box services and customers can easily adapt existing services to create custom services to model any application. VMware also provides a marketplace and leverages partner marketplaces where a large amount of out of box solutions can be downloaded. As a result, workload deployments for large, geographically dispersed environments can be accelerated while minimizing configuration variations. In reality, no matter how hard customers try to lock down configurations and environments, there will always be change outside the control of the IT teams. VMware provides the capability to define a desired state configuration and detect drift from this desired state. It is then possible to remediate the drift towards the desired state. Those capabilities described here are available through VMware’s partnership with leading DevOps companies, such as Puppet Labs, Opscode (Chef) and Saltstrack. The first integration with Puppet is planned for delivery in Q4’13, even though it is possible today to use Puppet / Opscode / Saltstack scripts as part of VMware services. Overall automating configuration management enables IT organizations to adopt DevOps, which leads to increased agility.
• #15: CSP provides the ability to integrate into existing IT environments using vCenter Orchestrator (vCO). Common examples include updating a CMDB when a machine is provisioned, calling an IPAM system for an IP address when provisioning a machine, or calling a ticketing system like Remedy when a machine operation is performed. vCO delivers out of the box plugins and workflows to make integration with existing third-party systems easy, without professional services or customization services. vCO is built for cloud scale and enterprise availability by ensuring support for clustering vCO instances for both HA and scale-out performance. With a new workflow debugger and other usability enhancements, vCO is easier to use than ever. In addition to vCO, vCAC provides the “Design Center” which allows customers to easily integrate with 3rd party systems in the context of the machine provisioning workflows that already exist; this can be done by simply adding a script to a pre-existing workflow. Together, these capabilities ensure that customers can easily integrate CSP into their existing environments.
• #16: Release 6.0 supports a Unified Service Catalog and App Store ordering experience where users can request from a personalized collection of application, infrastructure services. In addition, administrators can use the Advanced Service Designer to automate the make available custom IT services through the new IT service catalog. Service Entitlements and optional approvals allow IT administrators to deliver personalized IT service catalog which can be optimized to the specific needs of individual users or groups of users. Each Tenant can have their own specific branding and user authentication directory services (LDAP). Once a consumer requests a service, a showback of the service cost is getting displayed. More service costing capabilities are available under the “Business Management” tab. More detail available in the backup slides
• #17: VMware’s Market Place has been open for about four months, and it’s already generating great excitement in the industry. Currently, we have approximately 50 partners, which include ISV’s and System integrators. The marketplace provides capabilities for managing real world applications. It provides easy access to 100’s of best practice application components / blueprint and accelerates building or transferring workload to VMware enabled clouds. It delivers cloud ready solutions through simple download capabilities.   The marketplace cloud – enables ISV products and it revolutionizes the industry by providing integrated cloud – ready multi-tier applications. We provide ISV solutions for many product categories. We are also working with system integrators to provide reference architectures for custom and packaged apps to reduce implementation times.
• #20: VMware and Puppet Labs have been partnering to create a compelling joint solution. Puppet Labs complements VMware’s Cloud Automation solution by increasing the level of automation, specifically around configuration management and configuration drift remediation. Puppet Labs provides 1000’s of out of the box modules, which can be used in vCloud Automation Center to describe configurations of OS, networks and storage, middleware components and applications. Those modules were created by a very active Puppet “Forge” marketplace community. Puppet Forge modules can be combined with well-tested Services and multi-machine Blueprints available from Cloud Management Marketplace. This enables businesses to build comprehensive multi-machine Blueprints using pre-built modules to simplify automation efforts and ultimately they increase agility. Configurations tend to drift over time and Puppet provides capabilities to maintain the desired state of configurations through drift analysis and remediation. This complements the vCAC governance and lifecycle capabilities to increase the level of control throughout the lifecycle. Lastly, Puppet as well as vCAC supports heterogeneous environments such as hybrid clouds. Customers have the flexibility to deploy any service into any destination. (Lastly vCAC workflows (i.e. vCO) can easily be integrated with the Puppet workflow engine.) VMware continues to tightly partner with Puppet Labs and we intend to release a series of tight integrations in the near future.