A systems thinking approach to IT process automation gaining efficiencies in very large multi-service data centers

Abstract

Keeping up with the Joneses, in an Information Technology (IT) sense, is not a feel good activity, it's a necessity to remain competitive. Building and maintaining a relevant, reliable, and scalable IT service infrastructures, without crushing the bottom line, is a necessary undertaking to avoid obsolescence in the marketplace. This is particularly true for very large scale IT Service and "Cloud" providers. At the very top of many CIO's wish list is to obtain, or create, an effective and efficient IT Process Automation (ITPA) framework. Use of ITPA or Run Book automation is a requirement to efficiently manage increasingly massive pools of systems and services under any particular IT Service Provider's management domain. A successful process workflow, run book, automation, and orchestration framework implementation requires a high degree of flexibility and scalability to be successful. It also requires an intuitive command and control structure to manage today's massive scale deployments and their increasingly demanding customers and service level agreements. This paper explores a new applications of a "publish-subscribe" messaging paradigm and how it can be leveraged to construct a core ITPA framework. This ITPA framework will scale to match the various needs of very large IT service infrastructures. The overarching intent of the paper is to discuss this ITPA framework, at a level of detail sufficient enough to provide a well-trained IT practitioner the ability to construct it themselves within their organization. This paper is however abstract enough to give the practitioner a high degree of choice with regards to the specific technologies and implementation details that must ultimately be tailored to their organization's specific needs and requirements.