The question is one we hear a lot, “What is your Cloud agenda?”. We have started getting tired of hearing the question, and the complication that is all the clouds out there. What to do first? Where to go? What application is ready? These are all questions that we go through when the rabbit-hole pulls us into the cloud discussion. Then Shadow-IT comes in. You find out a developer has everything already deployed under his free account with less resources and is already working perfectly in the cloud. So what do you do? The first thing I would suggest, is to look into a solution that covers all different clouds in both automation and maintenance. What this means is a solution that can allow you to deploy resources as necessary, but also maintain and adjust those solutions as needed. There are different solutions out there with different capabilities. For this blog lets review vRealize Automation 8.0
vRealize Automation allows you the ability to deploy machines to multiple cloud providers. This includes the automation for deploying full infrastructure with the connection of the cloud account. This is accomplished with a three-step process. First, you connect your vRealize automation application to the public cloud account (or private could) with the needed credentials. Once you have that connection you can start to carve the resources available in the public or private cloud. This includes, IAM setup, load balancing, storage, as well as many more solutions depending on the Cloud that you are connected to. All clouds will utilize Cloud-Init to run scripts for application solutions on startup. Also, you can connect your configuration management within Ansible or Puppet to run configuration management as needed.
On top of all of these solutions, you can allow your developers direct access to the cloud resources by utilizing the blueprint solution on vRealize Automation known as ABX. ABX is a yaml based code solution so its really easy to read and understand the resources that you are deploying. This gives you a mapping of those solutions and connections to each resource you deploy. Engineers can utilize this for infrastructure deployment, policies, networking, etc.
Once you have the infrastructures setup for the needed cloud accounts, you can work with your developers and find the solution for the needed software so that the goal of idempotency can be reached. This allows the industry to build solutions from start to finish and deploy holistically. If the application dies, you can redeploy and be back up in a small amount of time. This process allows container utilization in a VM.