Environments as a Service (EaaS)
Ammeon System Proposition
Ammeon Ltd. O’Connell Bridge House, D’Olier St. Dublin 2. Telephone +353 1 645 2300. [email protected]. www.ammeon.com
© 2015 Ammeon Ltd. PRIVATE and CONFIDENTIAL
Ammeon Ltd. O’Connell Bridge House, D’Olier St. Dublin 2. Telephone +353 1 645 2300. [email protected]. www.ammeon.com
© 2015 Ammeon Ltd. PRIVATE and CONFIDENTIAL
1
Environments as a Service (EaaS)
1.1
Introduction
This document describes the features and benefits of Ammeon’s Environment as a Service
proposition. We have developed EaaS in response to a variety of issues experienced by our clients
who are building complex, multi-faceted services for their end-users.
EaaS is a Lean-Agile approach to solving the environment management problem. The key benefit of
the Lean-Agile approach is clear - the most efficient delivery of customer value. But the process of
adopting this approach is less straightforward. Organizations delivering software-based services
often struggle to navigate the obstacles they face as they embark on the journey to Lean-Agile
transformation; it is in response to these challenges and to enable organizations to satisfy the
demands of high-velocity service delivery that we have developed the Environments as a Service
(EaaS) solution.
1.2
Typical Challenges
Many clients struggle to make the best use of their environments Capex & Opex spend. In some
cases, hardware is procured for projects when sufficient hardware already exists, while existing kit is
underutilized and is often kept in stand-by state “in case we ever need to run some tests again”.
Clients often encounter situations where the Development and Test teams need to be able to
configure and reconfigure environments frequently to run different development and test
workloads, but the existing infrastructure is manually configured, lacks version control and is
prone to human error - resulting in very poor turnaround times and lost time spent
troubleshooting issues and problem solving.
In addition, where development and test teams work in isolation from the operations teams,
differences in environments lead to unacceptable delays in getting tested services deployed to
production.
Ammeon Ltd. O’Connell Bridge House, D’Olier St. Dublin 2. Telephone +353 1 645 2300. [email protected]. www.ammeon.com
© 2015 Ammeon Ltd. PRIVATE and CONFIDENTIAL
1.3
Benefits of EaaS
Ammeon EaaS focuses on key environment deliverables to realize return on the value of your
investment - reducing both Capex and Opex.
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Efficient use of resources reduces both Capex and Opex
Time to value is much shorter because project cycle time is reduced
Wasteful spending on underutilized resources is significantly reduced
Software features are released more frequently
Customers get faster access to new features, leading to improved customer retention and
perception
Greater freedom to plan and introduce change
Ammeon Ltd. O’Connell Bridge House, D’Olier St. Dublin 2. Telephone +353 1 645 2300. [email protected]. www.ammeon.com
© 2015 Ammeon Ltd. PRIVATE and CONFIDENTIAL
2
EaaS Solution
Our EaaS is designed to solve this and a host of related issues (see Impact of Environment
Management Issues below). The service is offered as a collection of core and follow-on packages.
2.1.1 Core Components
The Core service components are non-optional and are the minimum set of capabilities that need to
be in place to support a viable EaaS. The service functions listed below are necessary to complete an
initial environment management project:
Assessment & Design – We provide detailed design of the environments required for service
delivery, such as Dev, Functional Test, System & Performance Test, User Acceptance Test
(UAT), Staging and Production.
Replication – We deliver reliable reproduction of multiple-parallel environments and create
replication scripts to simplify environment setup and tear-down.
Demand Planning & Vendor Management – We coordinate with your delivery team to
ensure that future needs are addressed. This includes cross-vendor planning for services that
integrate packages from internal and external suppliers.
Knowledge Management - We provide knowledge management tools such as an
environment knowledge base, maps and an inventory database.
2.1.2 Follow-On Features
We offer additional features that enable you to resolve problems and focus on continuous
improvement - which is a key process for a Lean-Agile based service.
Ammeon Ltd. O’Connell Bridge House, D’Olier St. Dublin 2. Telephone +353 1 645 2300. [email protected]. www.ammeon.com
© 2015 Ammeon Ltd. PRIVATE and CONFIDENTIAL
Operations & Remediation – We implement availability checks, monitoring and incident
management to ensure that environments are operating correctly.
Continuous Improvement – Once we have your environments under control, a continuous
improvement process is initiated with the objective of simplifying and reducing costs. This
can include virtualization, cloud services and automation/tooling improvements.
Legacy Environment Management & Support – We can assume ownership of legacy
environment management and support, enabling you to free up internal resources for new
projects.
Private to Public and Hybrid Cloud Services – We can provide support, design and
implementation services for private-to-public cloud migration projects. We can support the
implementation of a hybrid cloud approach to service delivery.
2.1.3 Working with Multiple Environments
Organizations that build and deliver services must provide environments for all of their DevOps
teams, including:
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Software development
o Supporting Agile development and CI in addition to PoC and spike efforts
Testing
o Functional, integration and system
Operations
o Pre-production/staging and live service
2.1.4 Impact of Environment Management Issues
It is critical to the operation of a Lean-Agile organization that the process of accessing, building-up
and tearing down environments be as efficient as possible. This means tackling problems such as
those highlighted below:
Problem
Effect
Complex process for environment acquisition,
configuration and handover
Reduces ability to innovate new features and
service changes – limited scope for proof-ofconcept or spike work
Reduces ability to scale and support demand
Ammeon Ltd. O’Connell Bridge House, D’Olier St. Dublin 2. Telephone +353 1 645 2300. [email protected]. www.ammeon.com
© 2015 Ammeon Ltd. PRIVATE and CONFIDENTIAL
Problem
Effect
Under-utilization of purchased toolchains
intended to support automation of
environments
Capex and Opex waste
Lack of automation: often heavy manual
process – emails, forms, tests, configuration
Time wasted correcting errors and
reconfiguring to correct repeated known issues
Unknown ‘From’ and ‘To’ states
Validation issues with data integrity (test data)
and environment integrity (systems, maps,
addressing)
Increases time taken to get to ‘Ready’ or ‘To’
state
Limited monitoring and undefined or
unsupported SLA
Protracted problem resolution
Unclear description or inventory of
environments
Increases time taken to understand whether
new infrastructure is needed – Capex and Opex
issue
Leads to project delays as teams try to figure
out what is available
This is not an exhaustive list but it represents a cross-section of the most significant issues
encountered in existing organizations’ environment management function. Our EaaS solution
enables you to resolve each of these issues, freeing up time to focus on your core business and
accelerate the delivery of software-based services to your customers.
2.1.5 EaaS Architecture
The EaaS solution described below is architected around the uses of a variety of open source
components.
Ammeon Ltd. O’Connell Bridge House, D’Olier St. Dublin 2. Telephone +353 1 645 2300. [email protected]. www.ammeon.com
© 2015 Ammeon Ltd. PRIVATE and CONFIDENTIAL
2.1.5.1
Jenkins: Open Source Orchestration Tooling
Jenkins is used most-often used as part of Continuous Integration framework (see above). However,
it is a broadly useful tool and supports task orchestration which makes it ideally suited for managing
environments. Additional features include:
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2.1.5.2
Free open source license
Can be used for all levels of testing
o Unit, integration, smoke, regression and system
Support for multiple third-party testing, application and reporting tools
OpenStack IaaS
OpenStack is quickly gaining favour as an IaaS due to the comprehensive nature of its offering and
the large open source developer community contributing to its range of capabilities.
2.1.5.3
Glance
Glance is an open source image repository service. In EaaS, Glance acts as the repo for the different
OS images, application and third party packages that are deployed as part of a service.
2.1.5.4
Test Data Repo
This can be a variety of test repositories (e.g. TestLink) that contain the test data and configuration
to validate an environment or be part of a test execution cycle. Note: Jenkins has a plugin for
TestLink.
Ammeon Ltd. O’Connell Bridge House, D’Olier St. Dublin 2. Telephone +353 1 645 2300. [email protected]. www.ammeon.com
© 2015 Ammeon Ltd. PRIVATE and CONFIDENTIAL
2.1.5.5
High-Level Architecture
The figure above shows the interaction of these architectural elements. It shows a solution that is
providing environments for multiple teams, with common elements such as repositories, monitoring
and Jenkins as the common orchestration approach. In this solution the hardware (compute, storage
and networking) components are assumed to be available (racked and stacked). Thus, the solution
supports bare metal as a starting point.
The solution above references project names from the OpenStack project, these projects (in green &
blue) each provide a different piece of functionality used to deliver the complete OpenStack IaaS. It
is not necessary to understand what they all do, but it is good to know that they provide a complete
IaaS solution.
The remaining tools are also open source and are described in more detail below. They have all been
selected for their features and the way they can be easily integrated to provide a low-cost, efficient
solution.
2.1.6 Implementation Details
Jenkins is used both to orchestrate environment management by enabling environment creation and
configuration and to support various test phases. From a testing perspective, it is used to run tests
out-of-hours to ensure that the environments are available at start of day to facilitate manual testing
needs.
Ammeon Ltd. O’Connell Bridge House, D’Olier St. Dublin 2. Telephone +353 1 645 2300. [email protected]. www.ammeon.com
© 2015 Ammeon Ltd. PRIVATE and CONFIDENTIAL
The Glance repository for base images and operating systems is version controlled. It enables vendor
access, thus supporting complex services where components are derived from both internal and 3PP
sources.
It is important to ensure that issues that arise in the infrastructure are handled in the shortest time
possible and this requires the use of monitoring and incident management. Monitoring is supported
the using OpenStack Heat and Ceilometer tools. Ceilometer enables deployers to configure the type
of data collected to meet their operating requirements. It provides access to meters providing
information on OpenStack compute, storage and networking components.
If there is no existing incident management system in place, the EaaS service will include setup and
training on JIRA. Otherwise, the existing incident management system is used.
2.1.7 EaaS - Agile Delivery Plan
The table below shows the delivery plan proposal for managed environments services. It borrows
from our automated testing experience, as each environment is delivered with a suite of tests that
verify (and assure) its readiness. Ammeon delivery plans follow an Agile Methodology and the focus
is on work in sprints, where each sprint delivers working software of customer value.
Phase
Activity
Deliverable
Benefit
Stakeholder workshop
Report of implementable
recommendations
Clear understanding of
issues & plan to improve
Develop a working sample
for one identified
bottleneck
Sample working system
Demonstrable value
Environment Demand
Planning and Vendor
Management
Detailed implementation
plan
Environment Assessment &
Design
Assess
Prioritize changes
Extractable learnings for
planning
PoC (Optional)
Create detailed
implementation plan for
Statement of work
Understanding of
priorities, cost &
resourcing
Project commercials
Ammeon Ltd. O’Connell Bridge House, D’Olier St. Dublin 2. Telephone +353 1 645 2300. [email protected]. www.ammeon.com
© 2015 Ammeon Ltd. PRIVATE and CONFIDENTIAL
Plan
managed environments &
automated testing
Implement solution –
organisation specific or
select from the list below
Deliver
Environment Replication (if
required)
Environment Knowledge
Management
Handover training (o)
Support
Managed environments &
Set of automated testing
and associated scripts and
tooling
Automated testing to
ensure environment
operation and readiness
Support team
Rapid issue resolution
Managed service/solution
team
Focus on core
competencies
Improved availability of
environments for
delivery teams
Manage the
service/solution (o)
Ammeon Ltd. O’Connell Bridge House, D’Olier St. Dublin 2. Telephone +353 1 645 2300. [email protected]. www.ammeon.com
© 2015 Ammeon Ltd. PRIVATE and CONFIDENTIAL
2.1.8 EaaS Alternatives - VMWare
EaaS is also supported on VMWare infrastructure. Jenkins provides a VSphere cloud plugin and this
facilitates the creation of jobs within Jenkins to schedule the setup of VMs in the cloud. Thus, the
EaaS model is flexible in terms of the underlying IaaS. The figure below shows an EaaS solution on
tops of VMWare-controlled infrastructure.
If an alternative to VMWare or the open source and OpenStack based approaches is required, talk to
us and we’ll work with you to find the approach that works best for your particular setup.
2.2
Balance and Choice
The EaaS service can support either an open source or vendor-specific approach. There are
advantages to both and we can help you make the right choice.
A vendor specific approach (e.g. VMWare) can offer you:
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A fully integrated tool chain
Single supplier - simplifies procurement and support
Existing tools may be well understood in your organization - limits retraining needs
Some of the disadvantages of this approach include:
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Vendor lock-in (and dependency for support on a single vendor)
Ammeon Ltd. O’Connell Bridge House, D’Olier St. Dublin 2. Telephone +353 1 645 2300. [email protected]. www.ammeon.com
© 2015 Ammeon Ltd. PRIVATE and CONFIDENTIAL
 Licensing costs
 Limited ability to influence product/service roadmap (take what you get)
An open source approach (e.g. Jenkins and infrastructure such as OpenStack) gives you a number of
advantages:
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Avoids vendor lock-in, since open source solution supports multiple third party providers
Excellent and ever-improving catalogue of available plugins
Improved innovation due to the active community of contributors that continues to add
sophisticated and useful features to these platforms - you can make your own contributions
and influence the various projects
Lower cost as there are no ‘enterprise-sized’ license fees
The main disadvantages are:
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Upskilling to support ‘new’ technologies
Reliance on a community to resolve issues
Reliance on system integrator to put the solution together and develop
We believe that the benefits of the open source approach outweigh the disadvantages and we see
our customers, with our help, adopting the open source approach more and more frequently.
2.3
Summary
We have many years of experience with network equipment providers and service providers and
have encountered and solved the most demanding transformation problems. The EaaS proposition is
an essential part of the transformation from existing ways of working to a delivery model based on
Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD). It is one of a number of propositions that
we offer as part of a complete Lean-Agile transformation portfolio.
EaaS will enable any organization to accelerate the delivery of services to end customers and will
help you realize time, cost and resource efficiencies - the ultimate win-win-win for any proposition.
Ammeon Ltd. O’Connell Bridge House, D’Olier St. Dublin 2. Telephone +353 1 645 2300. [email protected]. www.ammeon.com
© 2015 Ammeon Ltd. PRIVATE and CONFIDENTIAL