Usecases

From Autodrive
Jump to: navigation, search

This chapter describes use cases that are often depending on the need for automation.

Service-oriented architecture is an excelent example because it is often delievered in a highly distributed environment calling for governance.

Configuration management

Configuration management is simply put knowledge about hardware and software and how they relate to each other. Automation is the tool which makes it possible to maintain and provide data. This occurs in an iterative approach where collection of configuration data is automated in layers. Each layer is a foundation for new automated layers in the cmdb.

Automation in this use case follows the pattern:

  1. Initialization, where automation scripts are produced
  2. Excecution, where the automation is carried out
  3. Finalization, where the results are processed

Deployment

Deployment is an interesting area in so far that it requires in depth knowledge of the install taget. This suggests to use some sort of cmdb. It should be possible to produce templates that describes the install target sufficiently. Automation is then using these template information to perform the actual installation.

Test

Test could benefit from establishing the automated deployment process. This increases the quality of the environment in which test is performed by rebuilding the test target in a well defined approach.

Test heavily relies on the state of the test target. This state and the actual test should be automated. To lower cost, concepts like the data-driven approach and the approach of transformation could be used. Please refer to Architecture.

Test data and credentials etc. fits very well into a cmdb strategy.

Automation is about orchestrating this with the lowest cost possible.

Monitoring

Monitoring can be acheived in number of ways. Monitoring is the decipline where state information is collected. This information could result in alerts or even self-healing automation.