Rapid growth in today's world is driven by data and the insights derived from it, and the infrastructure to support such ever-increasing demand plays a vital role. Enterprises are under increased pressure to deliver new digital products and services faster than ever to meet customer demands and expectations.
Before we take our discussion further, here are some of the astonishing facts
- There are more than 5 billion web searches conducted daily
- 90% of the world's data has been created in the last 3 years
- More than 3 billion people over the world use smartphones
Much recent attention has focused on accelerating development and deployment cycles, but those efforts are only worthwhile if the infrastructure is ready and available to support those efforts. The speed at which infrastructure can be deployed is becoming just as important as putting the proper infrastructure in the right place – colocation, data center, at the edge, and more. This is the idea behind just-in-time infrastructure.
The expected shorter timelines for development and deployment have led to the term "Just-In-Time Infrastructure," which emphasizes deploying infrastructure as quickly as possible.
Today, IT organizations are losing "market share" to public cloud offerings. And the main reason for this problem is the dynamic on-demand infrastructure deployment the public cloud offers. Compared to the "minutes" it takes to access public cloud resources, delivery through the traditional IT process takes several hours or sometimes days. This is a significant competitive gap. But of course, only some things will shift to public clouds soon.
Infrastructure Agility Matters
Scalability is the critical factor, which in technical terms can have two meanings: scaling out (spreading the workload across multiple servers) and scaling up (adding resources to a single server). A better term might be elasticity, which has a connotation of being able to grow on demand with minimal effort and return to a baseline once conditions allow.
The following are the three main pillars of the Just-In-Time Infrastructure model.
- Quick scaling: Infrastructure on demand when and where needed, in hours. Deploy hardware or software through UI with API to streamline implementation across multiple sites.
- Flexible consumption model: Meet changing customer demand while avoiding costly over-provisioning and unnecessary upfront capital investment or on-premises skill set.
- Regional infrastructure availability: Highly availability of infrastructure across various geographic locations may help customers with region-specific requirements.
Orchestration: Key to Just-In-Time Infrastructure
Infrastructure solution providers are responsible for managing many servers and applications, and doing so manually isn't a scalable strategy. The more complex an IT system, the more complex it can be to manage all the moving parts. The need to combine multiple automated tasks and their configurations across groups of systems or machines increases, and that's where orchestration can help.
IT orchestration also helps you to streamline and optimize frequently occurring processes and workflows, which can support and help your team deploy applications more quickly. You can use orchestration to automate IT processes such as server provisioning, database management, application orchestration, and many other tasks and workflows.
Orchestration includes the automated arrangement, coordination, and management of:
- Computer systems
- Middleware
- Services
The goal of orchestration is to streamline and optimize systematic, repeatable processes. Orchestration can be used to optimize the process to eliminate redundancies.
Here are a few tips to get started with Orchestration
- The primary goal of orchestration is to achieve speed with accuracy. You can automate the tasks that a machine or application can do faster than a human. This way, you can utilize your manhours more resourcefully and avoid any costly human errors.
- Consider business needs above everything else. Ensure that every process you try to automate and orchestrate offers some kind of value to the business. Or else you will end up automating tasks that feel good but don't help the business.
- Orchestration can free up employee time significantly and reduces the need and dependencies on human resources over a substantial period. Use this value to innovate more ideas on development and process improvement.
Because orchestration is a complex task, various tools can help you achieve orchestration quickly. Choose wisely basis on the factors like simplicity, suitability, and analytics.
At Psychz Networks, we are actively involved in continuous improvement and upgrading our processes by applying technologies built around speed, agility, and robustness. Our services portfolio includes an authoritative DNS service that offers a fast response time and significant redundancy. We also provide CDN (Content Delivery Network), which can be deployed in less than an hour. Our CDN service is a fine example of Just-In-Time Infrastructure, which can play a vital role in your business when you need to offload the incoming traffic to your website/application. Our CDN can load balance while linking several of your microservices across global data centers. It speeds up service delivery by caching the content and offers many security and performance-improving features that can boost your business.
We also offer ExpressDeploy service, which assures bare metal server delivery in just 60 mins when you choose in-stock hardware.
With our umbrella service, you can now set up all your domains under our DNS, set up CDN for these domains for faster and broader delivery, and host the applications and services using our bare metal server all under one roof via our dashboard.
