Every IT leader knows that digital infrastructure (data center, cloud, network, IT, OT) is the foundation for modern, innovative organizations. That’s why infrastructure automation has been rising in importance and visibility.

Outside of the cloud, however, infrastructure automation has been challenging to say the least.

But now, advances in how we manage infrastructure intent data, and the adoption of core DevOps techniques like version control, are making agility a realistic prospect for all IT and OT infrastructure.

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Agile hybrid infrastructure is critical for keeping up

Hybrid infrastructure is the foundation of digital business.

Much of the attention around infrastructure in the past decade has been paid to cloud infrastructure. Rightly so, as a vast cloud transformation has taken place in that timeframe.

Yet even after such a massive shift, the majority of digital infrastructure remains solidly in the physical world. Across data centers, office, retail, industrial, and other sites, IT and OT infrastructure is the bedrock on which businesses build.

Despite its continued importance, physical infrastructure has heavily lagged behind the cloud in its own agility and efficiency: too much manual configuration, too many bespoke and vendor-specific tools, too many disjointed processes.

Constraints like these hold infrastructure back from the velocity needed to keep the business moving forward at the pace of global digital competition.

The realization that we’ve been short-changing physical and hybrid infrastructure all this time is now driving a surge in infrastructure automation investment.

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Automation turns infrastructure into structured data

When organizations first look at automating their hybrid infrastructure, much of the focus is on improving efficiency, accuracy, and speed of motion. These are all absolutely important goals.

But in the legitimate endeavor to drive towards those outcomes, it’s important not to miss that what’s happening in infrastructure automation is more than a process improvement.

Automation fundamentally rearranges the organization’s relationship with infrastructure.

Without automation, infrastructure is primarily driven by human interactions, which are supported by human-consumed documentation and human change management decisions.

But when you automate, you no longer have a human-to-infrastructure relationship. Instead, you have a data-to-infrastructure relationship, where software-driven interactions are guided by structured data that represents the intended, policy-compliant state of complex infrastructure inter-relationships and interconnectivity.

Another way to state this is that intent data is like the source code for your automated infrastructure.

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Gaining DevOps agility for hybrid infrastructure

No modern enterprise would consider taking on application development without a sound DevOps process, because the DevOps pipeline ensures proper source control, change control, validation, artifact generation and storage, and deployment.

Without such a thorough and automated process, development and release velocity risks delivering poor quality software outcomes that set the business back instead of driving it forward.

As a result, organizations invest significant resources into creating a robust DevOps toolchain that can sustainably run an automated pipeline. The result is better software and better business outcomes.

Given the critical importance of hybrid infrastructure, there should be no less rigor in creating a DevOps-like infrastructure automation process. Unfortunately, in the haste to start automating, too many organizations overlook the pipeline setup or leave it in a very immature state.

If we consider intent data to be the source code for automating hybrid infrastructure, then it follows that the same kind of automated change management and validation process needs to be applied to infrastructure intent data as to application source code.

Practically speaking, what this means is that the source of truth database that holds the intent data needs to support robust version control and continuous integration so that engineers can use branching to change the database schema and the data within the schema, and continuous integration to validate those changes before merging back into the main line.

When you create a DevOps-style pipeline built around structured intent data that can dependably and repeatably generate accurate configuration data for deployment across your infrastructure, you’ve attained agile hybrid infrastructure.

Getting started with infrastructure versioning

One of the first steps you can take in cultivating this sort of agility is to start building a versionable database of infrastructure intent. Begin by understanding the requirements for infrastructure version control, which combines a versionable database with GitOps principles.

For a broader contextual view on maturing infrastructure automation, you might also want to read Building Trust in Automation: The 6+3+3 Framework for Success.

Finally, if you know you’re ready to get your team going with a natively versioned data management platform for infrastructure automation, start learning about Infrahub or request an Infrahub demo for your team.