Automating and modernizing IT infrastructure is the key to implementing functional information systems. But automatic does not mean simple, on the contrary: as in a watch, any gear is the result of skills and evaluations on materials and processes.
Let’s take a look at the three main evolutionary elements of modern IT infrastructure: cloud, IaC, and containers.
Cloud and multicloud
The cloud is a virtual and self-service operation management approach. By going to the cloud, the company gets rid of a large number of infrastructure issues. By then deciding to operate directly on the cloud, therefore in cloud native mode, the benefits increase and above all the resilience reaches its maximum level.
The importance of what resilience, this term in new Italian reimported from English, implies for companies, should not be underestimated. When it comes to digital transformation, it often presents itself as a single-stream process with small or medium changes in direction and refresh rate. But this is not the case: digital transformation involves real paradigm shifts, similar to the English disruption, which are neither soft nor linear and often impose new physics and new rules, precisely by reversing what had been done up to that point.
An example from the past is solid-state drives instead of classic hard drives. A situation that is developing today is the introduction into the production process of AI/ML solutions for optimization at all levels: those with a non-resilient IT architecture in this direction will certainly be left behind.
But even staying in the cloud as such, there is a need for resilient approaches like multicloud. At an early stage, it was thought that migrating to any cloud was already synonymous with success in itself. Time has shown that this is not the case, and that a correct approach is an evolutionary one. There are several cloud providers of comparable average quality, although not always, but whose actual service delivery may show characteristics unsuitable for some activities, sometimes temporarily, other times structurally
The company must set up the business with high resilience on this point. Typically, this type of assessment must be done with the help of an external consulting firm, because the expertise involved is significant. There is a need to evaluate the current information assets and their evolution in terms of objectives, compare them with what is known about each provider’s proposals and evaluate a multicloud strategy in which we know what will remain on a specific (possibly private) cloud, what one or more migrations between providers might require and what imposes fewer constraints and will therefore not be a problem in the period considered.
This type of resilience assessment must be completed at least within the core of the IT infrastructure, otherwise the risk of finding the core business on technically or economically underperforming clouds (poorly rated rates) could materialize.
IaC, resilience in infrastructure
One system used to make IT infrastructure resilient is its definition through specific languages. In this case we are talking about IaC, infrastructure as code. Data center provisioning and management are entrusted to definition files that are automatically readable and therefore immediately replicable and simply editable in bulk.
The IaC operates on both bare metal, virtualizations of any kind, and the cloud, and also includes related configurations. A correct resilience approach related to IaC is evaluation based on imperative-type languages versus declarative-type languages, although in most cases both approaches yield most of the necessary results.
It is perhaps needless to say that IaC is not IaaS, infrastructure as a service, which is a broader cloud paradigm.
Containers and orchestrators
Containers are complete, portable, and consistent systems across all environments, immediately replicable and simply scalable for future application modernization.
Relying on a containerized structure immediately makes the entire software heritage that stands on them resilient.
Speaking specifically of scalability, if a certain part of the business were to grow beyond expectations, if correctly chosen, containers would provide a higher level of automation in the orchestrator family, management systems for thousands of containers with extremely high automation. For example, if a company has developed self-checkout software for a small supermarket chain and the idea appeals to global chains with thousands of stores, a container structure chosen with an eye to orchestration is completely resilient to the leap in quality.