DDI In Cloud Services

The promise of the cloud is one of scalability- of applications and services that can scale on demand according to the need, booking only appropriate compute and storage capacity. That means designing resource provisioning processes capable of handling both public and private cloud technologies, while building appropriate orchestration tools to automate them.

In the cloud, you’re not working with one or two servers deployed for years. Instead it’s hundreds and thousands of dynamic instances, providing just the compute you need, when you need it. There’s no way of managing those individual resources (not unless you hire thousands of system administrators, all with the human propensity to make mistakes). To get rid of the risk of error means you have to automate every aspect of your services’ lifecycle.

The key to managing cloud services is automation. But no matter how you deliver your services, there’s one thing they all need: IP addresses and the tools to manage them. That means using dedicated DDI servers, bringing together DNS, DHCP, and IP Address Management into a single appliance.

Automate, automate!

You can use a configuration management database (CMDB) to handle much of this, giving you a central point of truth that stores details needed to automate the orchestration process, providing information about what can be deployed and what has been deployed.

Once you’ve built such CMDB, you’re then going to need to automate the process of deploying services – which includes effectively managing your IP addresses, integrating DNS and DHCP to ensure the right IP addresses are assigned to the right devices on the right network context, and making sure you’re enforcing security boundaries and policies. You’re going to need to build IP Address Management into your orchestration layer.

Delivering IP addresses in a controlled manner is key to quickly deploying new servers and services within an application fabric. It’s also key to managing user-deployed systems from a service catalog, allowing self-service without needing IT department oversight. IP addresses need to be created and deployed quickly, to ensure that services are running as soon as you need them.

DDI Integration for Faster Service Delivery

This is where DDI comes into play. By offering a common interface to these services, a DDI service can use its own internal embedded sub-orchestration process to respond to requests from automation services. As it’s all handled by the same service, the process of registering new servers in both DNS and DHCP is fast, allowing new service hosts to be configured with valid IP addresses as soon as they are deployed- whether you’re deploying one or a thousand new hosts.

Provisioning IP addresses at speed and scale is something DDI systems are designed for, providing out of the box integration between all the elements linked to an address service into one appliance offering one single API endpoint. It’s an approach that simplifies integration with any orchestration tool, clarifying provisioning and deprovisioning processes requiring no development (but only configuration of internal mechanisms). This ensures coherent IP addresses and DNS names affectation while ensuring their release and reuse. DDI services should be able to communicate with configuration management tools and common orchestration software, through easily integrated plugins and well designed API. Relying on DDI guarantees your users are getting the best from your infrastructure, ensuring quick and agile responses to their needs, guaranteeing access to well-designed services capable of handling the scale of their business, and still saving money thanks an efficient resource provisioning process.