Automation has been widely promoted as a productivity tool for consumers, but rolling out infrastructure automation at scale that can potentially save tens of hundreds of hours has remained an uphill battle for adopters.
CEOs say that it is downright hard and convoluted to share and standardize automations across the board.
The solutions are typically built within small groups of engineers who use them internally or individually, and do not have the means to plug them into other parts of the business, said Wyatt Sullivan, technical marketing engineer at Itential, a network and cloud automation provider in Atlanta, GA.
It is extremely tricky for them to engage other people without getting clobbered. There are some big obstacles right out the gate. Each task is a different script – and they may be written in different programming languages – with varying levels of access. It takes learning and relearning the work over and over to gain cognizance with that amount of technical work.
“Operationalizing automation and sharing it with everyone else is its own problem,” agreed Sullivan.
Engineers are stuck in “operational hell” because of the web of operational tasks tied to it. Imagine the perils of engineers, who, besides having to do the heavy work of building automation workflows from scratch, have to train and tutor people with no initiation to use the technology in their day-to-day work.
For those outside, automation has remained esoteric knowledge, because when automation engineers leave a company, their library of automations get abandoned and forgotten.
As a result, many companies are struggling to mobilize automation in all sectors of business, and have so far used it in a stilted and constrained way within small teams.
Now the rise of operational complexity is testing the way automation is tapped into and deployed.
Automation, Self-Service Style
Itential is working to widen the reach of network operators and developers by focusing on operationalizing automation solutions, but without piling up the work for them.
““Operationalize” is kind of a buzzy word. What we are trying to say is how do I get automation beyond myself and share it with my team,” Sullivan explained.
This month, at the Networking Field Day event in Calif, the company launched Itential Automation Service, an automation-as-a-service offering that it says will help NetDevOps share, and Operations team execute infrastructure automation at speed.
The solution that is designed to help enterprises “get started quickly and scale seamlessly as needs grow”, adds a set of capabilities that reduces the amount of work otherwise needed to a just few clicks.
A cloud-delivered service, Itential automation solution has two sets to capabilities addressed individually to NetDevOps and Operations. The service, powered by Itential Automation Gateway (IAG), offers dynamic execution environments for running automation in an ad hoc fashion. These are single-use environments that can be used to execute scripts instantly, or pre-schedule for future, and can be removed after use.
It can handle any framework, any script, said Sullivan. Developers can consolidate their Python scripts, Ansible playbooks and OpenTofu plans inside the environments while operators and teams can view and execute them without any handholding.
A feature called real-time Git pulls automatically pushes automation scripts into a Git repository from where users can then pull and use them to build services. Engineers do not have to worry about how code gets passed down beyond publishing, Sullivan highlighted.
To make it easily executable for personas who do not know automation, the solutions are packaged as easily shareable self-service solutions. Self-service access ensures that NetDevOps do not have to manually share it.
The operators’ view, Sullivan highlighted, is equally feature-rich. Role-based Access Control (RBAC) allows operators to grant access based on roles. The service-based structure is offered to operators as well, and they can plug into the pipelines of third-party solutions like ServiceNow using the solution’s API-driven integration.
“It is creating a new way to deliver applications,” said Sullivan.
Check out Itential’s presentation at the Networking Field Day event to get a feel for the product from the demos. You can also sign up for a free 30-day trial to tinker with it.
