Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from November, 2015

Provisioning For What Purpose? (Part 2)

In part 1 , we discussed how provisioning is part of the overall process of releasing an application, and how application release is a specific case of process automation.  In this part, we are going to look at the general capabilities of an automation platform with the overall view of applying those capabilities to application release, service orchestration / provisioning, and workload / job scheduling. The earliest use of automation can be traced back to IT Operations where Run Books were used heavily to "begin, stop, supervise and debug the system(s)" ( from Wikipedia ) in the Network Operation Center (NOC).  Run Books were initially index cards containing a set of instructions to accomplish a certain task; these were then listed on 8.5" x 11" paper; and ultimately moved to huge three ring binders due to the complexity of the underlying systems with which the operator interacted. At some point, companies such as Opsware, RealOps, and Opalis recognized that we