Introduction

Here follows advanced features for a platform. These features are often not suitable as you start to roll out automation in your organization. If automation maturity is too basic, these features will create blockers for automation adoption.

A lot of focus now goes into making sure the platform can grow on an organization-wide scale and make real business impact. To cater for organization-wide advanced end-to-end automation, we need to complete the puzzle with things such as an overarching automation strategy and advanced platform features. At the same time we need to spend increased effort on the community we have built around automation. Some final technical capabilities are put in place to ensure we can meet any type of business requirements. Important to note is to not rush these features, as they can constitute adoption blockers if done too soon.

Overview

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Overview

People

  • You may now have a dedicated service owner for the platform, that person may also be overall service responsible for automation in the organization.

Community of …?

There are many different names for this, for example Centre of Excellence, DevOps Dojo, or etc. It’s simply a community which you build around your platform. Here we describe resources related to people and your community.

  • Gamification - You have implemented gamification practices which boosts contribution in your community.
  • Contribution princes - You celebrate contribution to the degree that you have a small budget for contribution prices.
  • Chat channels per domain - Your community has grown so large that you now need to split chat channels per technical domain.
  • Re-occurring meetings per domain - Your community is too large for a single community of practice meeting. You also now have meeting specific for special technical domains.
  • SLA for responses - To ensure that people are not left in a vacuum with their problems, you aim to answer all questions in your chat channels within a specific time.

Process

AAP platform processes

Processes tightly coupled with your Ansible Automation Platform.

  • AAP Integration process - Due to the amount of incoming and outgoing integrations to Ansible Automation Platform, we now need some standard process for doing integrations. You may even be involved some type of API management platform.

Onboarding process

You will discover that the further you go along your automation journey, the more things will be about people. This is further reflected in your onboarding process, where you build your future success and reduce the time from getting onboarded to a new team delivering business value.

An overview of a common onboarding process can be viewed below. Please note that the graphics describes all three advancement levels of onboarding. Overview

  • Skill based training (Onboarding for experienced/un-experienced) There is a specific onboarding process for people who are already experienced with modern development practices and Ansible and Ansible Automation Platform. This allows highly experienced individuals to get started more quickly.

There is also a specific onboarding process for people who do not have experience of Ansible and perhaps not development overall. These people need special guidance to be able to apply their domain specialties in an automated fashion, that includes why we do automation, and things like basic development methods and tools. This can include internal automation consultants sitting together with the team as they implement their first automation use-cases.

Development process

Processes related to the development of automation.

  • Integrated Development Platform (IDP), ex Backstage - Your development process leans heavily on an Integrated Development Environment to offload what developers need to know and to speed up the time it takes for someone to become an efficient automation developer.
  • Complete test coverage (Unit, functional, integration) - Yes, every line of Ansible automation you are using has complete test coverage. This requires a lot from developers of automation and is therefor not recommended to start with, but after this, you will have supercharged confidence in your automation, as well as simplified who can contribute to automation they did not author.
  • Automated Execution Environments builds - Execution environments are built automatically and continuously.
  • Advanced supply chain security - You know that the code you run in your organization can be trusted. This as you have a process for auditing and signing any code which is not already audited and signed. Private Automation Hub is key in this process.
  • Infra.controller_configuration - You have come to the point where it starts to make sense for developers to define the automation created in Ansible Automation Platform as code. That is best done using the infra.controller_configuration collection. Having automation create automation which perhaps creates more automation is a difficult thing to wrap your head around, so this is not something which is advisable if automation maturity is not high.

Technology

AAP architecture

Architectural decisions related to Ansible Automation Platform.

  • Custom features - Sometimes it is required or makes sense to create custom features for the platform. Examples of custom features you may develop yourself are: inventory plugins, authentication features, collections and Ansible plugins.

Infrastructure design

Infrastructure related decisions.

  • Multi-cluster - Requirements on the platform are at this point so high that you need to architect your automation platform so that it is very rarely down at all, no matter upgrades or catastrophic problems. Using the infra.controller_configuration collection you keep multiple but completely separate Ansible Automation Platform clusters in-sync. The time to recover from a complete cluster failing is measured in hundreds of a second. Example setup would look like something like this..
  • Military grade security - The security of your automation platform must not fail. This means you have implemented cutting edge security measures for the complete stack involved in running Ansible Automation Platform, and the Ansible Automation Platform itself - including very fine grained RBAC configuration.
  • EDA standard source - You have standardized how Event Driven Ansible receives events from the outside world, using something like Kafka, an ITSM system, SIEM and/or a monitoring system.
  • Automation - Capacity management, availability and security is managed by automated workflows which do not require people.

AAP design

Design of how to use Ansible Automation Platform features

  • IDP/Automation - Configuration items in Ansible Automation Platform are bootstrapped using an Integrated Development Platform (IDP) or other automation. This means developers spend very little time on setting setup new development resources for automation.

Automation strategy

You are now at the point where it is very difficult to progress any further without a proper automation strategy. The strategy is owned by the highest leadership in your organization and is what ensure that the automation you do connects to your overall business strategies.

  • Performance monitoring - You measure the business impact which your automation strategy and the automation created has. This connects to key business KPIs, business outcomes and objectives.
  • Budget and ownership - The automation strategy is owned by top leadership who can back the strategy with a suitable budget. The strategy is further aligned with your organizations budget cycle.
  • Tools strategy - Your strategy sets high level requirements for the tools you use today and tomorrow. It does not dictate specific tools.
  • Skills development - Everything you do also aligns with a broad strategy for skills development.
  • Key processes - Your set high level requirements for collaborative processes needed to both run and develop automation.