Introduction
In a typical telecom operator environment, infrastructure Life Cycle Management is highly complex and error-prone. The environment, with its multiple vendors and products, is maintenance expensive (both in terms of time and costs) because of the need for complex planning, testing, and the out-of-business-hours execution required to perform disruptive maintenance (e.g., upgrades) and to mitigate outages to mission-critical applications. Processes and tooling for infrastructure management across hybrid environments create additional complexity due to the different levels of access to infrastructure: hands-on access to the on-premise infrastructure but only restricted access to consumable services offered by public clouds.
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- Hybrid, Multi-Cloud support, that is, LCM works across physical, virtual, and cloud environments, supporting on-premise, cloud, and distributed environments (like Edge)
- Complete system life cycle control (Plan/Design, Build, Provision, Operate/Manage, Retire, Recycle/Scrap)
- Enablement for automation of most system maintenance tasks
Key benefits of the Infrastructure LCM Automation are:
- Agility: stadardisation of the LCM process by writing and running IaC allows to quickly and easily develop, stage, and produce efficient environments
- Operational Consistency: automation of lifecycle reduces the possibility of oversights and decreases the chances of incompatibility issues within the infrastructure
- Human Resource Risks Mitigation: automation reduces risks related to human errors, rogue activities, and safeguards the institutional knowledge from leakage in case any employee leaves the organization
- Higher Efficiency: achieved by minimizing human inaccuracies and eliminating the lack of knowledge about infrastructure installed base and its configuration, using the CI/CD techniques adapted to infrastructure
- Cost/time Saving: engineers save up on time and cost which can be wisely invested in performing higher-value jobs; additional cost savings on cloud more optimal use of cloud resources using LCM Automation
LCM Automation Framework
The following diagrams provide mapping between different stages of the lifecycle automation across all layers of the stack, to owners of infrastructure and cloud and the tenant as the consumer of the cloud services, in three very different scenarios: applications running as containers within virtual machines (CaaS on IaaS scenario), application running as containers on bare metal (CaaS on BM scenario) and a more traditional view of applications running as VNFs within virtual machines (IaaS scenario). The diagrams define the scope of the Infrastructure LCM Automation for each of these scenarios. The dotted lines symbolise the interactions between the layers of each of the model.
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- take the inputs from Repositories, Available Software Versions, and Dependencies
- run the software version changes
- dynamically remediate dependencies during the change process to optimise outcome
- ensure that the system is consistent across its life cycle by maintaining it in accordance with the intent templates