This year, a somewhat unexpected term made its way on to Gartner’s 2023 Infrastructure and Operations hype cycle: infrastructure orchestration (reprint available). This strategic move by Gartner deserves a closer look.
How can your infrastructure and operations teams spend more time enabling innovation and less adding complexity?
The focus on platform engineering, Terraform orchestration, and other developer-focused self-service tools highlights the operational difficulties in integrating these concepts. While these tools are important, that focus overshadows smaller orchestrational functions that are required for a functional system.
Frankly, it’s refreshing to see Gartner shine a light on this essential capability. In Gartner’s 2023 Infrastructure and Operations hype cycle, Chris Saunderson defines it and it’s benefits as follows:
Infrastructure orchestration provides strategic workflow capabilities to drive life cycle delivery and ongoing maintenance of complex deployed infrastructure. These practices and tools enable agile, iterative automation delivery and execution of the processes required via self-service and API access. This investment improves the velocity and quality of infrastructure services, improves traceability and visibility of service delivery and reduces inconsistencies from manual activities.
RackN has firsthand experience of the challenges and the significance in providing such capabilities to our clients.
How Digital Rebar Delivers Infrastructure Orchestration
At RackN, we view infrastructure orchestration as the next critical step in the infrastructure automation capabilities. In fact, we’ve championed this for over a decade. We’ve labeled our approach “orchestration as code”. It interweaves the dynamic, event-driven systems of today’s infrastructure with the principles of Infrastructure as Code.
This framework empowers us to harness user, system, and external events, formulate system-focused rules, and dispatch them accordingly. Structured similarly to classical orchestration, the infrastructure aspect enables us to integrate it into the lifecycle of your systems, connecting to existing automation. Consequently, this paves the way for real-time adaptation to business requisites.
The results? Enhanced business value that grants a responsive infrastructure needed to keep ahead of the systems in place to dynamically adjust for immediate workload and reconfigure for the next demand. While many of these features have been an integral part of our infrastructure automation solutions, incorporating orchestration as a core aspect intensifies operational and business logic, minimizes delays, and empowers operations teams with newfound autonomy.
The Digital Rebar platform integrates previously isolated capabilities, dramatically reducing the effort needed to orchestrate automation. It minimizes the complexities of entangled systems while bolstering reusability and transparency for operators. Or, more plainly, your operators will finally spend time focused on end-to-end delivery.
Digital Rebar mentioned in the Gartner 2023 Infrastructure & Operations Hype Cycle
Earning a spot in a Gartner Hype Cycle is always a privilege. Our recognition in 2023, particularly as an Infrastructure Orchestration provider, underscores the impending wave of innovation headed for infrastructure operations. At RackN, we’re honored to contribute to the impressive changes of Infrastructure and Operations. A reprint of Gartner’s 2023 Infrastructure and Operations Hype Cycle is available.
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