Unlocking the Cloud Operating Model: Provisioning - Introduction

Transcript

Hi, my name is Meghan Liese, and I work with the Terraform product marketing team at HashiCorp.

Today, I'm going to talk about the cloud operating model as it relates to provisioning.

The majority of organizations out there have a cloud program or a cloud initiative, and this can be for a variety of reasons. However, the challenges the cloud team faces are common. How do we establish a new operating model to embrace public cloud as a core tenet of our infrastructure?

Static and dynamic infrastructures

Before diving into the cloud operating model, let's take a look at the landscape.

The operating model most organizations have in place is focused around the traditional datacenter, which is considered to be relatively static.

This means a finite set of resources. These resources live for long periods of time, and they are managed by a central IT team, where the operations team is the gatekeeper to the infrastructure, usually through a ticketing workflow.

For many organizations, the transition to cloud or to multiple clouds is the shift from static infrastructure to dynamic infrastructure.

With dynamic infrastructure, there's virtually an infinite set of resources available. Think about provisioning thousands of containers. These resources live for relatively short periods of time. Think about provisioning and deprovisioning multiple times per day or per week compared to every few months in the static model.

And many types of resources are offered from many types of providers now. Think about provisioning from 3 different clouds instead of just within your private datacenter. As we think about building a cloud operating model, it is now about embracing the traits of dynamic infrastructure.

Let's take a look at the 4 essential layers of infrastructure.

The 4 essential layers of infrastructure

The first of the 4 essential layers of infrastructure is the provisioning layer. This is the foundation and refers to how operators provision and manage the core infrastructure. The other 3 layers build upon that:

• Secure: How do security teams secure the infrastructure?

• Connect: How do networking teams connect it all together?

• Run: How do the developers run their applications?

Many organizations start with the provisioning layer and look at how they will build blueprints for the infrastructure that will underpin their applications and do so in a way that embraces the traits of dynamic infrastructure.

Remember, these are large quantities of services. This is frequently provisioning and deprovisioning, and it's also embracing a variety of different providers and services from many different infrastructure types.

This is the cloud landscape, as we look at all of the available options. It yields many different options, all looking to solve how organizations provision cloud infrastructure.

Many of these options aim to provide infrastructure automation and enable the provisioning and deprovisioning of many services frequently.

However, this also leaves organizations with multiple workflows to learn, to use, and to govern as they adopt different cloud providers or third-party services. So the question comes about: How can I build a consistent cloud operating model to provision any of the infrastructure—public cloud, private datacenter—and third-party services that we want to use?

Fitting Terraform into cloud infrastructure

Terraform provides a consistent approach to cloud infrastructure automation with infrastructure as code for provisioning compliance and management of cloud infrastructure. This relies on 3 core tenets:

• Code, where you define the infrastructure you want in a template

• The automation engine that allows you to provision any infrastructure

• The output, which provides an actual state of the infrastructure you have defined

This lays the foundation for 2 common solutions that organizations are looking to solve for:

• Cloud compliance and management, to manage security compliance and operational best practices around provisioning

• Self-service infrastructure to enable end users with infrastructure as code without having to write their own code

The Terraform approach is making a difference among practitioners and organizations alike, with over 100,000 downloads weekly and some of the largest organizations across the globe using it daily.

Terraform gives organizations a unified provisioning solution to provision and manage their infrastructure, across the globe and from any different cloud provider.

To learn more about HashiCorp Terraform, visit hashicorp.com/terraform.