Automation Through IT Abstraction Layer

The complexity of infrastructures is increasing with all the IT initiatives being run by organizations today, from digital transformation to data management and artificial intelligence. With technologies ever more complex to manipulate and integrate, an opportunity resides in using coding as a base principle for infrastructure management, normal operations, and incident management. But the multitude of products and solutions in the infrastructure that need to be more integrated into the rest of the IT ecosystem, requires API links in between. Using a middleware kind of approach, via an automation abstraction layer, is one way to simplify operations and interoperability. Within this layer, the role of DDI is key as it brings: rich IP data, automation of core network services, expandable ontology, and event-driven architecture.

Business Challenges

Creating and maintaining software as part of an Infrastructure as Code initiative (IaC) is very complex. I&O teams are automating their operational tasks and exposing various APIs to the other IT teams and tools, but with infrastructure solutions always evolving this requires permanent adaptation and refactoring. It becomes even more challenging when there are a lot of components in the portfolio, from networking to storage, compute, or security, to list just a few. In order to ease Infrastructure as Code progression, using a coherent and standardized dataset and an evolved solution architecture are fundamental pillars.

Abstraction Layer Overview

It is fairly evident that development and scripting in infrastructure as code are simplified by the usage of a DDI solution. The IPAM repository stores all the IP and network-related information, from the address plan to VLAN, VRF, and devices and their logical links and can be even more powerful with the use of metadata attached to these objects. In addition, DDI automation brings simplicity to the provisioning of the core network services that are DNS and DHCP. To move a step forward in the IaC journey, it is necessary to architect and use proven methods from other software and application industries. A good approach to bring into the IaC world is the abstraction layer principle. By decoupling how things are done technically at a low level (near the infrastructure solutions in place) and the services exposed to upper layer tools, we automatically gain flexibility and obtain a nice way to change one half of the connection whenever adjustments are required.