Enterprise IT is bombarded with buzzy trends, and most today are geared towards modern application development. On the surface, this makes infrastructure seem like it has fallen to the wayside. In my previous articles, I have shown that IT infrastructure, while it may not be the flashiest topic, it is still the lifeblood of the public and private cloud. RackN Digital Rebar brings a modern approach to provisioning and managing infrastructure in an agile and API-driven way.
Being able to answer the “how” when it comes to infrastructure deployment is great, but the true value comes into focus when you start asking “why?” Nirvana in our current app-driven world is giving developers the ability to spend all of their energy and creativity on applications.
The RackN platform allows IT Ops to bring infrastructure operations back under their umbrella, freeing developers from concern about infrastructure. This opens the door for Digital Rebar integration with self-service portal backends, allowing developers more time to focus with fewer infrastructure decisions.
IT Services at the Click of a Button
Self-service portals (AKA internal developer portals or IDPs) provide a way for organizations to request infrastructure on their terms. Even prior to the public cloud era, large enterprises and service providers used self-service overlays to ease the burden on IT Ops for delivering things like virtual machines and storage to internal users. IT Ops often had to respond to ticket queues for infrastructure requests, rather than relying on automation.
This transitioned naturally to cloud, with services like AWS Service Catalog enabling organizations allow consumption of cloud resources with business governance pre-configured on the backend. Private cloud infrastructure also requires self-service to meet the demands of modern applications. Integrating Digital Rebar with self-service dev portals empowers IT Ops with the cloud-like API benefits provided by infrastructure pipelines, all in the name of developer efficiency.
Keep It Consistent
Consumers retain a sense of loyalty when their expectations are consistently met. This rings true for shopping with your favorite retailer as much as it does for end users of IT services. Self-service dev portals allow developers to consume the infrastructure required to run their applications, but if their expectations aren’t consistently met, they will look elsewhere for easier ways to reach their end goal.
The Digital Rebar IaC catalog can integrate with a self-service frontend to provide standardized ways of defining infrastructure configurations. IT Ops can take advantage of this to win customer loyalty by delivering consistent outcomes for developers. RackN empowers IT Ops to provide high-quality standardized services, which decreases the chance for shadow IT and non-compliant configurations.
Compliance Matters!
Consistency is important to consumers of a service, but compliance is critical to businesses. Once you meet self-service needs, the top concerns of organizations shift to system security, cost control, and alignment with institutional standards. All of these concerns can increase the complexity of environments that must adhere to operational guardrails.
Self-service portals must obscure all of these complexities from a consumer. Digital Rebar’s API-driven infrastructure pipelines give IT Ops the flexibility to define IT environments within the boundaries required by organizational standards. Integrating Digital Rebar with self-service dev portals ensures that IT Ops can easily keep compliance front and center while abstracting complexity from their consumers.
Better Outcomes to the Bottom Line for Both Dev and Ops
RackN provides powerful advantages of integrating with one or more self-service frontends. Consistency and compliance are two key benefits. The flexibility, scalability and standardization inherent to Digital Rebar unlock and drive developer efficiency.
Developers can consume services from their choice of dev portals while IT Ops can guarantee compliance and consistency as consumers. They don’t need to care about security or operations. This freedom from the burdens of infrastructure sharpens end users’ focus on applications and innovation, leading to increased business competitiveness and quicker time-to-market.
RackN provides IT Ops with a powerful platform to bring infrastructure provisioning up to speed with the demands of modern enterprise IT. The ability for IT Ops to manage infrastructure with cloud-like efficiency powers innovation for the applications that drive a business. The true value of RackN isn’t just for IT Ops or developers; it’s the snowball effect of improved collaboration between groups that ultimately leads to a better bottom line. Digital Rebar is a key to unlocking that value.
RackN Tech Talks 2023
This post is part of a series of Gestalt IT Tech Talks focused on RackN. You can learn more on the RackN website or watch their presentations from Cloud Field Day. The complete series is listed in order below:
