Workload Automation as Digital Business Automation(DBA) James J. Gingras

Transcription

1 Workload Automation as Digital Business Automation(DBA) James J. Gingras August 2017

2 Table of Contents Introduction... 3 Overview... 4 WLA as DBA... 6 Maturity Levels for WLA... 7 Level Level Level Level Level Summary Page 2 of 16

3 Introduction In an age when the value of information technologies is based on customer impact and the effect on the bottom line of the business, wise and sustainable organizations realize that IT has become a commodity in terms of how it can be created and administered. Infrastructure as a service, Workload as a service, are effective and proven IT services providing hybrid IT environments, if not completely outsourced, IT resources. The dawn of Big Data and recognized value of business analytics backed by unprecedented power and resiliency have enabled the rise of ephemeral workloads whose availability and sustainability are provided On Demand. IT and all its power can truly be event driven, based on rules and recognized patterns, analyzing streaming information in near real-time to provide instantaneous value to both the business and its customers. Consumer adoption of technology has risen dramatically over the last 10 years. Along with adoption so have customer expectations of what technology can provide in terms of information to make decisions quickly and cost effectively. This drives viability and need for business plans that take advantage of all technology has to offer. The emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT), made possible by low cost sensors and the ubiquity of the internet, enables competitive business advantage derived by turning vast amounts of sensor collected data into business information and actionable intelligence for business decisions. Determining the value of this data turned into information, the monetization of IoT, requires the ability to perform sophisticated analytics across volumes of disparate data gathered by millions of sensors and inputs. Ephemeral workloads distributed across numerous, complex infrastructure and systems, are required to perform these transformations from data to information to actionable intelligence. These capabilities require automation that can be managed and scaled On Demand (event driven). The ability to provide these services is now part of mainstream IT. Emphasis is shifting to critical initiatives concerning security and operationalization, management and quantification of IT automation. The re-emergence of development requirements to enable automated management and monitoring as DevOps is a prime example of this emphasis. Agility, the need to do this with unprecedented speed and accuracy, focuses on process efficiency through automation. Examples of this are continuous deployment and delivery. A key requirement of these initiatives is the use of the same IT resources mentioned above to provide IT with the means to clearly articulate the business value of IT services it provides. Digital Business Automation (DBA) is a term that represents the level of automation required to meet these business requirements. Enterprise Workload Automation provided as an IT services that meet the demands of businesses without requiring additional investments in time and proprietary resources required in the past. Taking full advantage of years of accumulated knowledge and capabilities and trusting experts to fulfill the incredible requirements of the information age. Page 3 of 16

4 Capability Maturity Model (CMM) for Automation (WLA) as DBA Overview This document describes a Capability Maturity Model for Workload Automation whose pinnacle of maturity can be referred to as Digital Business Automation (DBA), a term recently coined by BMC Software. CMM is used to determine the maturity of software systems and processes. Mature refers to an environment where accountability and proactivity are high and risk and reactivity are low. In other words, repeatable processes with reusable components that are well-known and supported. The model outlined in this document can be used as a tool to evaluate the maturity of an organization with regards to Workload Automation (WLA). Although the format for CMM was derived through contracts with the Department of Defense by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI), it is a framework that applies to any software system or process. It can be used to derive valuable insight into, and understanding of, the current, future and next, or desired state, of a system and its processes, in this case, for WLA. The CMM framework uses a 5-scale tier. If an organization reaches the 5 th tier it has reached full maturity. An organization functioning at this level has in place the practices, policies, and disciplines that allow the group to produce quality services/solutions using WLA in a predictable, reliable and efficient manner. Key artifacts to look for include documented and validated use of standards and best practices. There are also requirements for quality and efficiency that enable agile adoption of IT automation while continuing to manage risk and accountability. The chart below shows a 5-scale version of CMM for WLA. Figure 1: Capability Maturity Model is about managing risk, accountability and reactivity. Page 4 of 16

5 Another associated type of model that helps determine the maturity of an organization is called Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI). CMMI also accounts for how all systems and processes are integrated based on business requirements, direction and emphasis (prioritization) within an organization. In modelling terms, once you have developed a CMM for each domain/system/process the next step is to decide how to integrate them. Figure 2: Capability Model Integration considers the integration, people, process and systems The beauty of CMM and CMMI is that they provide clear and specific guidance for evaluating any system/process using a proven methodology, including maturity level descriptions of Key Performance Areas (KPAs). Once KPAs are identified, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) can be identified and measured to ensure consistent and accurate evaluation regardless of organizational preferences or understanding. The remainder of this document will describe a CMM and CMMI for Workload Automation (WLA). Specific information about KPAs and KPIs is not provided as part of this document. A separate document contains this information. Page 5 of 16

6 WLA as DBA Mature Workload Automation (WLA) that is enabling automation across the entire IT enterprise, regardless of platform or application as IT services that are tightly integrated with automation service and support processes is Digital Business Automation. Another view of WLA as DBA mapped to the CMM model is shown below. Figure 3: WLA vs DBA DBA refers to the use of all the capabilities within to enable enterprise automation through the use of Enterprise WLA. It refers to using automation over time to analyze and predict outages or changes in demand before they impact the business and adapting the WLA environment to automatically scale up or down based on changing business and/or operational requirements. As it relates to CMM and CMMI DBA is actually achieved at level 4 where these capabilities are enabled internally and used by internal IT to achieve business goals. A key difference between level 4 of this CMM and DBA is that the CMM also requires integration with existing service management and event management processes and tools. Page 6 of 16

7 Maturity Levels for WLA Level 1 A Workload refers to the automation work that is being done across an IT environment (Dev, QA/Test, PRE, PROD, DR). At low levels of maturity, it usually refers to the production environment. Like most areas within IT (IT domains), to be managed well, they require specific software designed to automate and manage the complexities of that domain, and a skilled workforce to administer it. When WLA is mentioned it is most often referring to the software used to manage the WLA environment, the availability of a skilled workforce is generally assumed. Workload Automation is a next-generation term that refers to what was traditionally called batch scheduling or just scheduling. Like most software, its roots stem from the mainframe, where processing was performed on large amounts of data once a day (thus the term batch ). Like all things in the mainframe computing environment, processing time and system resources are the major concern. Transactions and data are grouped into large files so that processing time and resource management are used efficiently, usually referred to as a daily schedule. Although this is typically a mainframe environment, today s distributed environment has the same level and type of workload. The only difference is that it will be running on a specific distributed computing system, or individual systems. Figure 4: Batch Processing - Time Based with Manual Intervention This is the first level of maturity for WLA within an organization. Managing the production environment with batch or sequential processing based on simple time-based dependencies. Where time is relevant to the availability and amount of resources required to do the automated processing. Key indicators of this level of maturity are: A central schedule and group is used to manage automated workflows for critical groups of processing that utilize the same processes and resources A centralized monitoring team manages the workload using well-defined steps and activities Page 7 of 16

8 Level 2 Distributed computing environments came online in the 80s and 90s, and new platforms and their operating systems conquered the datacenters. The need for IT to support Windows, Linux, Unix, among other Operating Systems (OS), associated infrastructure and software along no matter what OS is required. The same basic need for scheduling system and application maintenance and support tasks exists as it did on the mainframe or preferred platform, only for many more servers and operating systems. Although the need to manage the workload on all these platforms is required, most often the applications and platforms support processes and teams are not required to schedule consistently across IT domains. The focus for WLA is to ensure availability and help with common functions like FTP, Database Maintenance, running scripts and integrating some applications, usually via the command line. The IT side of the organization understands the importance of WLA and scheduling software, but the business side of organization is just beginning to see and understand its value. IT exists as a cost buried within the IT infrastructure budget. Most often, the business side understands that batch processing must complete for their major business systems to be up to date and available to the business and its customers and to get their reports. IT costs are accumulating and escalating but considered a cost of doing business. The processes to determine the actual cost of this automation and the corresponding tools and metrics, people and processes are not developed, and accountability is reduced to spreadsheets and siloed calculations from individual IT domain perspectives 1. The need for cross-platform integrated scheduling across the IT Enterprise regardless of platform or operating system emerges as a major requirement for IT departments. At the process level, a key requirement for an enterprise WLA system and software is the ability to manage the dependencies, schedule and integrate not only the business processing (e.g. back office, manufacturing, HR, or some other complex and large automated sequence of events), but also the administration and support of the infrastructure resources required to support those business processes. In IT, WLA normally existed as part of the infrastructure and the management of it was the responsibility of IT Operations and Production Control. WLA exists as an automation engine for infrastructure that automates workflows for IT Operations and Production Control to manage and react to production events reliably and efficiently. As the awareness of the value and capabilities of Enterprise WLA increases in an organization, visionaries and leaders can see the value in the platform and application independence of Enterprise WLA. Infrastructure teams know that for generations the availability, reliability and manageability of WLA as an infrastructure class level of automation is proven. More importantly, the management and support processes are well-known and impregnated into the lowest levels of the organization. Enterprise WLA software enables IT Operations and Production Control to take advantage of IT Automation for common tasks and for integration at the process level without regard for IT Domains or the technical details and complexities of the ever changing and increasingly complex IT environment. 1 There are examples in the mainframe world where charges based on CPU utilization emerged, but this model was not supportable across the Enterprise as other platforms emerged and became part of the enterprise workload. Page 8 of 16

9 At this point the in the maturity of WLA the capabilities of Enterprise WLA are available to the entire organization but most often a siloed management style and lack of specifically required integration og processes and management teams restricts the automation to infrastructure and usually only within IT Operations and Production Control. Figure 5: Level 2 Workload Automation This is the second level of maturity for WLA, enterprise WLA, where the need for centralized, platform and operating system independent system with supporting processes is in used to manage the production workload. Key indicators of this level of maturity are: WLA is managed as a business-critical application with high availability and DR support WLA is recognized as the preferred and fully-supported method for centralizing the management of the production workload. Additional standardized automation for common IT functions are included in the workload. Security and Audit processes and capabilities are implemented locally for the WLA environment Level 3 Although the business side uses different terminology and has different types of requirements (Business versus Technical). The need for the business to hold IT more accountable and for IT to meet business requirements more quickly and become a true business partner instead of an expense takes over. Transparency and accountability are now requirements for IT initiatives and projects. The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) emerged as the defacto standard framework for managing IT like a business, establishing the required transparency and accountability. Many organizations invested in training and arranging their organizations based on this framework. The main issue with ITIL is that it is not prescriptive. It is a framework that provides very thorough coverage of the Page 9 of 16

10 processes required to manage IT like a business. Each business must determine the amount of ITIL it requires to meet the business requirements of accountability and manageability while not creating so much overhead and bureaucracy as to be too expensive for the business and too onerous for those doing the work. A major milestone for the maturity of IT and WLA that stems from ITIL is the need to manage service levels based on the customers requirements. The concept of the value of service is a focal point for both the business and IT because both groups understand that the value of customer service and that it can be defined simply as customer satisfaction. The translation of how to achieve customer satisfaction and the measurements required to validate the satisfaction level of the customer are different at the micro level, but at the macro level they are the same. Customers, coming to the business for resources or coming to IT for automation desire three basic things: Availability, Reliability and Speed. Now the business and IT have common ground and can work together to achieve it with everyone in the organization understanding what matters most, the customer, and what will always differentiate them from their competitors, customer satisfaction. ITIL formalizes the processes required to manage IT and included low-level agreed upon and proven metrics for managing the complexity of IT. It also establishes Service Level Management to IT with Service and Operational Level Agreements (SLAs and OLAs) as contracts between them as customers. The SLA becomes the contract between the business and IT with a common measurement for determining accountability and value, customer satisfaction. The OLA becomes the contract between IT and other IT customers in support of the SLAs. This hierarchy and formalization enables proactive management for IT because support personnel can focus on ensuring the customer is not impacted rather than just reacting to whatever is going wrong whether the customer is impacted or not. For WLA integration with Service Management processes and tools includes automating the processes of incident/ticket, change, release and availability management. Most often this starts with incident management because it enables transparency and accountability for IT Operations and Production control. The non-functional requirements of security and audit become essential to WLA as the automation capabilities are made available across IT and expand into the business. The ability to provide security controls and auditability are requirements and enabled through capabilities like LDAP integration for authentication and authorization and automated audit reporting. Responsibility for security moves from strictly inside of WLA to enterprise level as additional integration requirements. Workload Automation software continues to evolve by addressing needs for managing at the process level, adding extensibility with built-in application integrations and including on-demand event based triggering of automated workflows. Easy-to -use and implement native application integrations based capabilities are added to the enterprise workload so that the same automation engine, management and support can be engaged with minimal subject matter expertise (SME). Third-party software vendors respond to these extensibility requirements by opening up their applications and providing native integrations using common technologies and methods in response to market pressures and customer requirements. Even the WLA software vendors opened their systems with Application Programmer Interfaces (API) allowing Page 10 of 16

11 IT architects and Software Engineers to incorporate the automation capabilities of Enterprise WLA into their in-house applications. Enterprise WLA software vendors now include simple form-based integration capabilities within their products based on these native integrations that are supported by the application vendors, including programming APIs for extensibility into their own products. The production workload can be managed and integrated at the application level, to enhance the process management capabilities already available. Likewise, event and message based triggering of production workflows on-demand, not just based on time and availability of resources and data, provide real-time response to more dynamic business environments that are focusing on accelerating application delivery and making changes quickly keeping pace with customer requirements and changes in the marketplace. The combination of service management capabilities, native application integrations, and on-demand automated workflows improves the value proposition for WLA so that it can now be exposed to the business and not just to IT infrastructure. The ability to include parameterized automated workflows and entire workloads dynamically, ondemand, enables the availability of infrastructure class automation to the business and IT stakeholders at unprecedented levels with all the security, support and management processes built-in to the automated workflows. Figure 6: Level 3 - a functioning WLA environment across the IT enterprise This is the third level of maturity for WLA, enterprise WLA that includes integration with service management and major third-party systems and processes and on-demand automated workflows. Key indicators of this level of maturity are: Page 11 of 16

12 WLA is managing the workload as automation across all platforms and major third-party applications Management of WLA is centralized with a Center-Of-Excellence and dedicated resources WLA teams participate in all automation projects to address DEVOPs issues and concerns A single enterprise class tool is in use to manage the production workload reducing management cost and improving the quality of work WLA provides. Service Management capabilities are included in production management of the workload. Security and Audit requirements become essential to day-to-day operations On-demand workload becomes available for common workflows as part of the production workload Level 4 As enterprise WLA evolves at least three things occur: 1. Enterprise Workload Automation becomes the automation that is part of every major IT effort and enables accountability for end-to-end management of the applications and services provided by IT. 2. More dynamic scalability and performance of the WLA environment becomes mission critical 3. Workload as a Service (WaaS) provided by IT becomes a reality 4. Enterprise Security and Audit standards and best practices are built-in to WLA At this level, the Workload Automation Lifecycle is formalized in the same way that the Software Development Lifecyle. The other IT environments of Dev, QA/Test, PRE, Prod and DR now include WLA and the movement of WLA artifacts between environments is automated and manual intervention is only for maintenance, approval or when the automation breaks down (catastrophic failure). The value of WLA as an engine that can automate and integrate any well-defined workflow is understood and utilized across the organization. When IT projects begin the functional and nonfunctional requirements of the design include consideration for the automation capabilities of WLA. Whenever and automation need arises for a common form of IT automation, WLA is considered as the first source instead of looking for niche products that add complexity and cost to the IT infrastructure and management processes. Integration with service management processes and systems is mature. A service model that includes WLA workflows is well defined and supported within the CMDB, Service Desk tools and service management processes. Automated Availability, Change, Incident and Release management is in place for support of the Workload Automation Lifecycle. Event Management processes are tools are engaged in monitoring events from the WLA application and supporting infrastructure due to the criticality of supporting the enterprise workload. Virtual Environment management and cloud resources are managed and consumed as part of the enterprise workload to improve performance and enhance scalability, improving the availability, reliability and speed of the enterprise WLA services and the IT services it supports. Page 12 of 16

13 Common functions and capabilities are exposed as micro-services using the APIs from the WLA vendor. Automated remediation for common issues and incidents is included in the management of the workload based on the standards and best practices of the organization. The need for SMEs to respond to common incidents and problems is very low. Predictability based on service management metrics and analysis enable the evolution of IT management to predictive from proactive. Sr. Management uses service level metrics to provide the transparency and accountability to the business in the same way they do for other IT services. Figure 7: Level 4 - Enterprise WLA with Service Level Management The figure above shows a high-level simplified view of the enterprise WLA architecture. At this level of maturity, the enterprise workload, no matter the platform, application or type of automation is integrated and managed centrally according to standards and best practices. The processes of managing the IT domains and the business processes they support are managed through automated IT service management. The status of WLA is reported on the same dashboard as the other major IT services and provides transparency and accountability to senior business management. Key indicators of this level of maturity include: WLA is managed as an IT Service The enterprise workload is mapped to the same service model as the service management organization uses to report to the business and manage notification and escalation when issues occur. All work within the Enterprise Workload is governed to SLAs and OLAs that use the same types of metrics and reporting as other IT Services. Page 13 of 16

14 WLA is recognized as an essential part of the standards and best practices for implementing IT Automation. The skills required to maintain enterprise WLA service are included in the education and career plans for specific positions in the COE and throughout the organization. Cloud computing is used to ensure scalability and performance. Enterprise Audit & Security standards and best practices are automated for Enterprise WLA. This is the fourth level of maturity for WLA and can be referred to as DBA. Enterprise WLA/DBA is managed as an IT service with the same types of artifacts and processes as the other IT Services that report to the business. Accountability reporting for the cost of WLA/DBA includes actual support and management costs, as well as, infrastructure and licensing costs (OPEX and CAPEX). As an IT Service, price models are constructed and included based on the service level needs of the part of the IT or business domain requiring automation. Level 5 At the fifth and highest level of maturity, WLA/DBA services are provided a part of the business offerings to external customers. As part of the business, these services are sold to customers outside of organization just like any other commodity or service. WLA/DBA Services are used to create business partnerships for critical IT automation services. This level requires evolving the internal workload as a service (WaaS) model and making variations of it available to external organizations, i.e. becoming a WLA/DBA Service Provider. The foundation of WLA/DBA services are in place (Level 4), as it they are already instantiated internally. The entire WLA/DBA Lifecycle, all its processes and systems, are managed as a business with margins and profits based on SLAs and OLAs. Accountability is provided through accurate reports based on the SLA adherence, automated task, and infrastructure consumption. Transparency and accountability are part of day-to-day operations. IT and Enterprise Workload Automation as Digital Business Automation are part of an adaptive capability that provides hard dollars to the business based on providing automation capabilities that use predictive analytics and measurements to manage customer in the same way as other business services. The major effort at this level is defining what types of service offerings, pricing models are available and ensuring the availability of the resources required to manage the elasticity of a dynamic workloads based on the customer requirements and dynamic demand. The focus at this level is making sure the service level agreements capture all the customer s expectations and agreed-upon reporting metrics to provide transparency and accountability a business partner requires. Careful consideration must be made to determine the variations of capabilities supported and provided and on the amount and types of services required to support the environment(s). Considerations include: Infrastructure and sizing based on availability, reliability and speed requirements of the customer Page 14 of 16

15 Types of support provided - Lvl 1, Lvl2, Lvl 3, Lvl4 2 Types of automation required based on: o Out-of-the-box job types and application integrations o types of integration with Service Management processes and tools at the customer site o types of automation and integration not built into the enterprise workload that must be created Development requirements for programming interfaces On-Demand requirements what functionality will be demanded in by the customer Security requirements non-functional requirements that consider specific regulatory and industry security requirements as well as internal security processes and tools Data requirements how to manage the data including where it will be located, any replication requirements and restrictions Geographic distribution how many locations and where are they Reporting what types of service level reporting are required The WLA/DBA service provider must scope these considerations and create a set of service offerings based on customer demographics, security and infrastructure requirements. It is essential that the service provider consolidate the functional capabilities of their service offering and encapsulate them in easy to understand and agree upon Service Level Agreements. As with all automation endeavors, the services should be based on standards and best practices consisting of patterns of automation and repeatable processes that are well-known and supported. On the technical side, service and support must rise from predictive and adaptive level where the system recognizes patterns of behavior in the environment and automatically makes the appropriate adjustments based on those patterns. From automated remediation for single incidents to pattern recognition of overarching enterprise workload behavior and enforcing workload policies to prevent incidents from ever occurring. 2 Refer to ITIL definitions of Level 1, 2 3, and 4 support for service monitoring and management Page 15 of 16

16 Key Indicators of maturity at this level include: Figure 8: Level 5 - WLA Service Provider Strict standards and documented support and best practices COE(s) with highly-skilled and certified professionals Standard set of SLAs and any required OLAs mapped to a service model Historical trend analysis of customer s business model to create workload policies Top tier tool vendor and healthy support relationship Use of Cloud computing to support elasticity of a changing workload (ephemeral workloads) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Established and automated Security and Audit capabilities Direct measurement and quantification of business value in daily business reporting based on cost and return on investment (ROI). The value of automation. Summary This document exposes, at a high level, a 5-tier scale for determining the maturity of Workload Automation in an enterprise. Next level documents will cover more specific details regarding each of these levels. Page 16 of 16