Summary

Actuator is an application topology modelling and orchestration tool that liberates the information in the model for use in related enterprise processes, enabling these processes to become as agile as the creation of cloud resources.

This not only allows Actuator to use these models to create and destroy application systems and their attendant infrastructure, but to make the models available for forecasting, automated review, CMDB updating, auditing, and a host of other enterprise processes. Actuator makes it possible to increase the agility of the parts of the enterprise that rely on the information that describes the resources and composition of your application systems.

The Problem: Unintended Consequences

Enterprise IT management processes surrounding the core activity of provisioning a physical server have long been based on the provisioning timeline. The speed and volume of manual provisioning has always kept the demand manageable on related activities such as licence audits, security/monitoring system updating, CMDB information capture, or business line chargeback for infrastructure; most server-related enterprise processes only had to be as good as the enterprise’s ability to provision and de-provision physical servers.

However, with the arrival of virtualisation and cloud systems, related enterprise processes are now experiencing unfamiliar stresses. Now that whole systems can be brought to life in a matter of minutes rather than months (and disposed of just as quickly), the demands on these related processes have changed. Infrastructure blinks into and out of existence in minutes:

• ...increasing the update demands on monitoring and security systems, lest they yield false positives/negatives regarding the availability of resources.
• ...changing the required chargeback granularity of financial control systems and getting this fine grained details out of the automation system.
• ...making it trivial to allow CMDBs to become poor reflections of current deployments, lowering their usefulness to operations staff and their use in ITIL processes.
• ...complicating the ability to audit and report to software vendors the ‘amount’ of licensed software that has been consumed.

These management processes have to become more responsive and able to record data at a finer granularity than previously required, and businesses often don’t recognise this impact prior to virtualisation/cloud adoption.

Most automation technologies are almost entirely focused on the core automation activity, and don’t concern themselves with the impact that automation brings to the rest of the enterprise. Similarly, enterprises often focus on this aspect as well and only later come to grips with the changing demands on their associated management systems, resulting in a patchwork quilt of solutions and manual reconciliations that attempt patch the gap between the core automation system and the management systems.

Actuator: Freeing the Information in Your Automation

With the exception of configuration drift, the most authoritative resource an enterprise has regarding the composition and relationships in an application are the descriptions given to an automation system that provisions that application. Making this information readily accessible is the core idea behind Actuator. Actuator provides a declarative modelling environment in a mainstream programming language (Python) that is used to create models of different aspects of your application in code artefacts. These artefacts can not only be used to automate the provisioning and de-provisioning of the application they model, but can be used outside of the provisioning process for a variety of other IT management purposes.

Actuator modellers create Python classes  (models) in their favourite IDE that represent different aspects of an application system:

• Infrastructure, where the IaaS resources such as servers, networks, load balancers, etc, either existing or to be provisioned, are defined.
• Namespace, where the logical structure of the service or application are defined, including the roles in the application system and any variable information relevant to each role.
• Configuration, where the tasks required to install, configure, and load software and data on the infrastructure resources are defined, as well as the dependency relationships between those tasks.
• Execution, where the software to run to bring the system up is defined, along with any execution-time dependencies between each component.

Being Python classes, instances of a model can be created for a variety of purposes:

• The resources in a model can be acquired and priced against a pricing resource, thus allowing the model to provide costs estimates before being used to provision the model’s resources.
• Resources and their relationships, in particular security relationships, can be extracted and reviewed to ensure compliance with security policy.
• A report on the logical components in the namespace can be created, including any variables that have yet to have their value defined. This provides a means to create data-driven front ends to automation and orchestration.
• Provisioned instances of a model can be inspected and their contained information retrieved for updating related systems such as CMDBs, security monitoring, or health monitoring. This can be done both for provisioning as well as de-provisioning, greatly improving the fidelity of these systems with what is actually in use.
• Model information can be exported to a JSON document and stored in a variety of document databases for later query for processes such as chargeback computations or auditing of the use of licensed software.
• As the models are regular Python, integration with other systems is easy, as the whole Python software ecosystem is available to extend and enrich the use of Actuator models.
• And of course, automating the orchestration of creating and destroying the resources in the model.

These are just some of the benefits that Actuator allows enterprises to accrue. Contact us for a demonstration where we can show you more about the capabilities of Actuator.