Chris Boos on Automation

I should be the last person, to say that automation is a simple concept - I make my money on automation. And often people really think that “a technical concept behind automation” is the hard part - well let me tell you: it is not. The technical concept of automation is something deeply embedded in the binary way our It works. The technical principle behind automation simply is

IF (a complex condition) IS TRUE THEN (do something)

So does that sound familiar? And we have not even introduced the concept of ELSE, ELIF or CASE yet J. Well we can put this into a little more technical terms by saying:

Automation is the condition based execution of actions to ensure the quality of service of an IT environment. Where conditions can be combined from expressions covering all aspects of the IT environment in question and actions can be one or a serious of command execution in one or many locations of the IT environment regarded.

So to go back to the divide and conquer there that was so useful in solving many IT problems we have to ask ourselves three questions:

1. What is the IT environment and what are the interdependencies within this environment?
2. What are the expressions “a complex condition” is composed of and what is the data evaluated in these expressions?
3. What are the actions to be taken and where are they to be executed?

So let us try to answer the three questions. First the IT environment and its interdependencies can be modeled. The entities the environment s composed of all “configuration items” that are part of the environment in questions. The interdependencies are relations between these entities. The “detail questions” to be solved are: At what level of detail do we model, and what kind of relationship model will we use? Well answering those will take us into a specific implementation of IT automation, and we are right now looking at the concept behind all these implementations, so let us stay at this level of abstraction.

Second the expressions evaluated in order to know which actions to execute are embedded in the knowledge of the administrators doing exactly this job today. So the expressions and conditions could be classified as the knowledge database put into machine readable for. The data needed to evaluate the expressions - after we know what they are - is all data available on the IT environment we are looking at. This includes technical monitoring data, end-to-end monitoring data, data processing information, transaction monitoring but it also includes quality of service information, KPIs, SLA information and business impact data - basically anything we can get hold of.

And third actions are the things administrators and gurus enter via keyboard, mouse or telepathic network link in order to make the “bad condition” go away. An action can be a simple command on one system but it can also be a series of commands (maybe with conditional execution) or even scripts of commands distributed to many systems. So an action can be as simple as /etc/init.d/apache restart or it can be something as complex as a 10.000 line program, some SQL scripts and a shell script executed on a dozen machines. But in the end these actions are put together today - as scripts and How-to in the system administrators’ dens of the world.

So you see. Automation is something simple: We should know about our IT environment and the interdependencies of its entities anyway. We know about the conditions - or at least we can find out - and then execute actions (some of which we have already put into scripts or programs to make life easier). So automation is just a centralization and connection of things we are already doing.

Often automating IT is handled as an obscure Art. Maybe some regard it as the black magic of the 21^st century. When I don’t understand things, I tend to divide and then conquer them, so in this case why black and why magic? Maybe black, because automation is regarded as something evil by quite a few IT people. Good techies could lose their jobs or at least their “God” status, when automation actually works. And maybe magic, because automation is clear to us viewed on a single system - i.e. things you didn’t want to do manually are put into a script and voila the system does them automatically - but in a large IT environment, all of a sudden things seem to happen by themselves.

But let me tell you, IT automation is neither black, nor magic. It is not magic, because after all it can be broken down just to that simple script example above. So if you divide the automation of a large IT environment you will in the end arrive at one - or maybe more - scripts being executed under certain conditions. So the question - I guess we will be talking about that in a little while - is which script or scripts to execute under what condition. And automation is not black, because “people losing their jobs or their current status” is nothing evil but the way our world works. Change is the driving force of everything and anybody trying to position himself against the power of change will definitely loose in the long term. So I would recommend embracing the ideas of automation rather than putting it down there with devils and demons - and by the way we do have enough of the latter around in IT anyway.