Improve IT Service Delivery Quality with Automation

This post is part of blog post series focusing on how a company might kickstart their automation or cloud journey.
Part 1: Improve IT Service Delivery Quality with Automation (this post)
Part 2: Build a Case for Infrastructure & Operation Automation Initiative

I delivered a session during VMware vForum 2017 Indonesia back in November 2017 about how a company can kick start their automation journey and get the value from it. Automation itself is a very extensive topic and one should choose what to automate carefully. IMO, it should start with repetitive tasks which will bring value to business if automated. Begin with something that is easy to automate, and along the journey, adds more tasks to further complete what requires to deliver a service. Quick wins built confidence. Do not try to automate everything in one go, as it will be complex, costly, and give you headache in supporting it. This post is a rewrite what delivered during my vForum 2017 Indonesia session, which would like to give ideas on where to start and what challenges it will solve by doing it.

There are 4 use cases that I presented:

• Accelerate delivery and improve consistency of application environments
• Manage VM sprawl by automated lifecycle enforcement
• Providing secure access to 3rd party vendor
• Continuous Delivery for apps and SDDC

Below I try to explain on challenges that each use cases try to solve, and how VMware can solve that challenges. The solution mainly powered by VMware vRealize Automation.

#NSXUenak: A Testimony from An NSX User

One of my customer spoke in a customer testimony session during VMware vForum 2017 held at Jakarta, Indonesia back in November 2017. One word he kept using to describe his satisfaction in using NSX is UENAK. Uenak, is some kind of an accentuate expression derived from the word enak, which is Bahasa Indonesia for good, comfortable, or pleasant. During his more or less 10 minutes session, he mentioned uenak for at least 5 times to express his feeling after using NSX. This post is a rewrite of what he mentioned during the session.

NSX uenak because it helps on the scalability. Distributed router and distributed firewall move east-west traffic from what it used to be centralized in physical device (core switch or firewall) to be processed in the transport layer (eg. the ESXi hosts). It is important to them as the nature of their business requires flexible scalability. With NSX (and vSphere), every time they add new hosts, they not only add compute (CPU and RAM) capacity, but also network capacity (in term of bandwidth and additional power to process traffic routing and segmentation/isolation.