Empowering Innovation and Agility: The Rise of Infrastructure as Code in Modern IT Management and On-Premises Storage
CXOToday has engaged in an exclusive interview with Ajeya Motaganahalli, VP, Engineering and Managing Director, Pure Storage India R&D
- How can Infrastructure as Code enable organizations to speed up application development over legacy methods for managing IT infrastructure and why is it important now more than ever?
IT management is complex and as organizations seek to adopt the latest technologies, the complexities only multiply. Rather than succumbing to the complex, highly manual and time-consuming nature of IT management, new solutions and management frameworks can help to create more simplicity and ease of use.
Modern infrastructure that emulates a cloud operating model is capable of prioritizing flexibility, agility and speed in addition to enabling reliability and performance. An Infrastructure as Code (IaC) platform integrates self-service IT experiences and scale-out, on-demand solutions that rise above physical architecture limitations. Essentially, it enables organizations to adopt a cloud operating model on top of their infrastructure to deliver a cloud-like experience for IT teams and storage consumers.
It is now more important than ever because the pace at which digital transformation is accelerating widespread adoption of cloud computing, rapid iterative development and deployment. The most efficient way is to treat infrastructure as software and in other words, IaC for efficient and agile infrastructure management.
2.How is IaC empowering CIOs, CTOs and Developers in improving automation & scalability in IT infrastructure and overall business agility?
One of the biggest challenges facing today’s CIOs and CTOs is in dealing with complexity, which often results from the way their infrastructure has evolved over time. IaC is a revolutionary approach to managing and provisioning IT infrastructure using code and automation. From embracing a cloud-like operating model for more speed and agility, to transforming the role of the developer, to achieving business objectives and managing costs, IaC offers numerous benefits.
For developers, a service like this is especially powerful. As we’ve seen organizations scale new heights amid digital transformation, it’s clear that the companies who empower their innovators are the ones that come out on top. Fast and efficient resource provisioning enables developers to maximize their time and productivity so they can focus on doing what they do best – innovating and creating. The self-service experience of the cloud plays a significant role in transforming the experience that developers live on a day-to-day basis.
Overall, IaC helps by streamlining infrastructure management. It allows businesses to adapt rapidly to changing requirements, optimize resource utilization, and improve overall operational efficiency.
3.What are the challenges of Implementing IaC in enterprises and overcoming them?
As we harness more digital capabilities, we naturally expand the usage of applications within our IT infrastructures. However, provisioning the necessary infrastructure resources to build and manage these applications can often be an unpredictable process, leading to bottlenecks and performance issues that particularly impact critical aspects such as data storage.
One of the significant challenges companies have when implementing IaC is with merging new frameworks with existing technology. Adopting IaC requires time, careful preparation, and coordination with other teams, notably those responsible for security and compliance. Proper planning and strategies to address dependencies on legacy infrastructure, cultural shifts, skills gaps, technology selection, security, compliance and governance help in dealing with roadblocks and successfully implementing IaC in enterprises.
4.What are the innovations Pure Storage is bringing to the cloud operating model to on-premises enterprise storage model?
Today, a typical IT team must be fully aware of what data is stored, which storage systems contain it, how it is protected, and who has access to it at any point in time. Likewise, consumers must be aware of the physical locations and properties of the systems that contain their data. At scale, this model requires a full range of knowledge, skills, and situational awareness from both IT teams and consumers. Managing storage in this way means slow response to requests for new resources and changes to existing ones, inconsistent performance, inadequate protection, and inefficient utilization of storage capacity.
Pure Fusion streamlines the management of on-premises storage with a consumer self service model that isolates consumers from storage system, connection, and data protection details. It provides organization wide availability, performance, and connectivity standards for storage resources and enables consistent protection of the data they contain.
Pure Fusion improves on premises storage management in four important ways:
- Self-service on-premises storage: Storage consumers create and manage their own storage resources with no awareness of their location and with no provider involvement
- Organization-wide standardization: With storage classes and data protection policies, consumers’ storage resources are both consistent with organizational policies and commensurate with data set values.
- Non-disruptive infrastructure management: Providers can add to or replace the arrays managed by Pure Fusion, relocate storage resources, and adjust template and policy properties without disrupting applications.
- Storage as Code: Pure Fusion facilities are invoked via REST APIs, so in addition to Pure’s own provider GUI, they can be embedded in user developed software tools, data center automation packages, and container orchestrators
5.What is the future of IaC and what is its role in driving innovation, efficiency, and Growth?
With the rise of machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies, data has shifted from informational assets to the core of innovation. It’s no longer enough to just be data-driven – organizations must be data-centric. Modern organizations operate in a world of rapidly evolving applications, where future success is predicated on deriving intelligence from data to achieve competitive advantage and growth. This requires a modern foundation purpose-built to optimally store, share, and ultimately analyze data in a multi-cloud world.
Pure Storage envisions the future of infrastructure to be a Data-Centric Architecture which enables customers to keep applications in place while technology is built around it, and fundamentally transforms data center design with the data as its core element. Data-centric businesses must be able to develop, scale, and iterate services on-demand, while at the same time reducing the need for IT intervention. Implementing an on-demand and automated design provides two key business benefits. First, it enables IT teams to efficiently develop and quickly roll out repeatable services to internal employees. For example, DevOps teams are tasked with creating and updating a catalog of on-demand services for the internal user community to provision resources, grant access to tools, or provide assistance. Also, product development teams could be creating more robust catalogs of services that are the business’ revenue-generating offering to external customers, such as those provided by software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers. The second key benefit is in the consumption of services: internal IT customers can efficiently point-and-click their way to the resources they need, while external customers of paid services benefit from the frictionless ability to sign up, monitor, manage, and use the services they need without a lot of overhead.
In both cases, the benefits of an on-demand and automated infrastructure are reduced cost to deliver services through the efficiency of automation and the upside opportunity that comes with the agility to innovate at speed and maintain happy customers. A data-centric architecture delivering the ability to be on-demand and automated enables technology teams to plan, implement, and orchestrate workloads across their infrastructures. As the scale of data and its potential grows, so too does the need to scale IT services with automation of both delivery and consumption.
