Automation is widely viewed 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.
Automation solutions are typically built within small groups of engineers who use them internally or even individually, without plugging into other parts of the business, said Wyatt Sullivan, technical marketing engineer at Itential, a network and cloud automation provider based 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.
“Operationalizing automation and sharing it with everyone else is its own problem,” Sullivan emphasized.
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 remains esoteric knowledge. Libraries of automations get discarded and are never used again when their engineers leave.
As a result, many companies struggle 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 deployed .
Automation, Self-Service Style
Itential is working to widen the reach of automation solutions designed by network operators and developers by focusing on operationalizing them 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 elaborated.
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, the Itential automation solution has two sets to capabilities addressed individually to NetDevOps and Operations. Powered by Itential Automation Gateway (IAG), the service offers dynamic execution environments for running automation on ad hoc basis. These are single-use environments that can be used to execute scripts instantly, or 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 all inside the environments, while operators can view and execute them without any handholding.
Real-time Git pull automatically pushes the 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 not involved in building automation, the solutions are packaged as easily shareable self-service solutions. Self-service access ensures that NetDevOps people do not have to share it manually.
The operators’ view, Sullivan highlighted, is equally feature-rich. Role-based Access Control (RBAC) allows operators to regulate access based on roles. A service-based structure is offered to operators as well, who can also 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, or sign up for a free 30-day trial to tinker with it.
