Introduction
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- 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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The following principles should guide best practice in the area of the Infrastructure LCM Automation:
- Everything Codified: use explicit coding to configure files not only for initial provisioning but also a single source of truth for the whole infrastructure lifecycle, to ensure consistency with the intend and to eliminate configuration drift