The pace of software delivery continues accelerating as businesses demand greater agility and flexibility. However, methodologies like DevOps and continuous delivery help meet these demands through increased collaboration, automation, and rapid iteration.
With this, manually provisioning infrastructure and environments for each update creates bottlenecks that slow deployment. But luckily, this is where automated provisioning comes in.
Automated provisioning dynamically provisions resources on-demand based on templates and policies. By treating infrastructure as code, you can remove tedious and error-prone manual work. Environments can instantly spin up or down to meet changing requirements. This agility and scalability lay the foundation for implementing DevOps and continuous delivery.
With automated provisioning, developers can self-serve the resources they need for coding, testing, and deployment. Entire stacks can be provisioned on-demand without waiting on IT tickets.
Automated provisioning also enables continuous delivery pipelines to deploy iterations seamlessly across multiple environments. Resources scale up automatically to handle more frequent code pushes. Ultimately, coupling infrastructure automation with deployment automation allows teams to deliver value faster.
Automated provisioning eliminates the friction of manual processes to provide the speed and flexibility needed for rapid innovation. As we explore further, it’s clear how these capabilities enable organizations to deliver better software continuously in a DevOps ecosystem.
The Role of Automatic Provisioning in a DevOps Ecosystem
Automatic provisioning delivers computing resources on demand without manual intervention. It dynamically provisions infrastructure and applications based on templates and policies. This eliminates the tedious and error-prone process of manual provisioning.
By providing infrastructure-as-code, automatic provisioning lays the foundation for a dynamic and extensible environment. Resources can be spun up or torn down on demand to meet changing requirements. This agility and scalability underpins the entire DevOps toolchain.
The Intersection of Automatic Provisioning and Continuous Delivery
Continuous delivery builds continuous integration by automating the deployment of code changes to testing and production environments. This facilitates rapid feedback and release cycles.
Automatic provisioning is crucial for achieving continuous delivery. It provides the environments needed for frequent deployments. Developers can instantly spin up test environments for new features without waiting on IT tickets. Staging and production environments can also scale seamlessly to handle more frequent code pushes.
By coupling infrastructure automation with deployment automation, continuous delivery pipelines can push code to users at the pace of business change. Automatic provisioning provides the fuel for this high-velocity software delivery.
Case Study: VMware Leverages Automatic Provisioning for Agility
VMware transformed its internal IT delivery model using automatic provisioning capabilities within its own vRealize product suite. VMware deployed a private cloud to provide infrastructure-as-a-service for internal groups. While this improved agility, one key tenant group needed additional speed and flexibility.
The application operations team (AppOps) added self-service automation and management using vRealize Automation (vRA) and vRealize Code Stream. These tools enabled AppOps to quickly provision infrastructure and deploy applications via reusable blueprints.
With vRA, developers could provision entire stacks for development, testing, and staging without waiting for IT. vRealize Code Stream allowed continuous delivery pipelines to push iterations faster. Together, these capabilities allowed AppOps to deliver innovations at the pace of public cloud services on VMware’s internal private cloud.
Benefits of Automatic Provisioning for DevOps and Continuous Delivery
There are several key benefits automatic provisioning provides for DevOps and continuous delivery:
Faster Time-To-Market: Automated provisioning and deployment enables organizations to release updates continuously to meet business demands.
Improved Efficiency: By eliminating manual work, teams can focus on writing code rather than infrastructure management.
Greater Consistency: Auto-provisioning from templates leads to standardized environments.
Enhanced Scalability: Resources can be dynamically spun up or down based on application load.
Increased Uptime: Automated recovery processes reduce downtime from outages.
Together, these benefits enable organizations to deliver better software faster.
The Future of Automatic Provisioning
Automated provisioning is poised to evolve in exciting ways to further accelerate delivery and flexibility. As DevOps and continuous delivery become mainstream, automated provisioning capabilities will advance to support more complex environments and scenarios. There will be deeper integration between provisioning tools to deliver seamless end-to-end pipelines.
Platforms will expand provisioning across multi-cloud infrastructures encompassing on-prem and public cloud. Analytics and AI will optimize provisioning decisions for efficiency and costs. Servers will become fully disposable resources provisioned from pre-configured images.
Ultimately, the future points to full application stacks and configurations defined entirely in code and spawned instantly on demand. The capabilities on the horizon promise to further revolutionize software delivery by taking infrastructure automation to the next level.
Deeper Integration Across Tools: Provisioning and deployment tools will interface seamlessly as part of unified pipelines.
Multi-Cloud Support: Platforms will provision resources across private data centers and public clouds.
AI-Driven Optimization: Analytics will guide provisioning decisions to maximize efficiency and cost.
Immutable Infrastructure: Servers will be completely disposable, with templates spinning up pre-baked images.
Everything-As-Code: Full application stacks and configurations will be defined in code and provisioned on-demand.
This bar chart illustrates the significant acceleration in provisioning times from automating the process across development, testing, staging, and production environments.
Automated provisioning tools can reduce wait times from days or weeks down to hours as shown by data from the DevOps Research Institute’s recent survey. The increased speed enabled by automatic provisioning supports more rapid iteration and continuous delivery.
Bottom Line
Automatic provisioning delivers the agility and scalability needed for modern software delivery. By automating provisioning and leveraging infrastructure-as-code, organizations can improve speed to market and efficiency.
This accelerates the DevOps toolchain and enables continuous delivery of innovation. As technology evolves, expect to see automatic provisioning play an even greater role in supporting DevOps and continuous delivery.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does automatic provisioning enhance the speed of application delivery in a DevOps ecosystem?
By automating the provisioning of infrastructure and environments, automatic provisioning removes manual bottlenecks that can slow down development and deployment cycles. This enables rapid provisioning of resources to support faster iteration.
What are some real-world examples of companies successfully utilizing automatic provisioning in their DevOps and continuous delivery strategies?
Netflix, Etsy, and Amazon are tech giants that have invested heavily in automatic provisioning and infrastructure-as-code to enable rapid development cycles. Spotify also credits extensive automation in their platform called Helios with supporting fast production deployments.
What are the potential challenges or drawbacks that organizations might face when implementing automatic provisioning in their DevOps and continuous delivery processes?
Challenges may include upfront investment in tools and infrastructure, cultural resistance from teams accustomed to manual processes, lack of expertise with automation, increased complexity to manage, and over-automation leading to new issues. Maintaining governance and oversight is also critical.