LAST UPDATE: 30 NOV 2024. The picture below is outdated. Actual download is up to date.
What you architect is SDDC. But what you handover as a business result to your CIO is IaaS. The transformation from SDDC to IaaS requires IT Operations Transformation. We transform from complaint-based to SLA-based, which requires fundamental process changes from alert-driven to insight-driven.
SDDC is a system, IaaS is a service. A system cares about its architecture, while a service cares about its service level. They are 2 sides of the same coin. We can assess if the architecture is good or not, based on the actual result in production. Does it result in firefighting and blamestorming? Or do you have peaceful operations where alerts are meaningful and actionable?
Many operations rely on alerts as the starting point. Actions are taken based on alerts, resulting in reactive day-to-day operations. IT Operations covers a wide area of systems. It’s common to see more than 1K alert definitions across all systems under monitoring. As the team wants to be alerted early, a conservative threshold is set up. This results in alert storms.
Since automation is perceived as the holy grail of solutions, alerts are typically set to auto close if the symptom disappears. The creates a bigger problem, common in large enterprises with a large IT team. That problem is “lazy operations”, where no alert is associated with no problem
This book is part of Operationalize Your World (OYW), a workshop that Kenon Owens and I created back in 2016. It recognizes that IT operations are like fingerprints. Two companies can have identical architecture, yet their operations will not be the same. Their processes will differ, and so are the people and policies, hence this book supports the idea that you tailor the product to your unique operations. Now you know why it comes in an editable format.
Keep the good parts, throw away the bad ones, add your unique contents, and voila you have documented your operations!