Please Welcome Infrahub Enterprise!

Today, we’re announcing the enterprise version of our Infrahub platform. Infrahub Enterprise delivers SLA-backed support, advanced integrations, and enhanced performance and high-availability to enable customers to gain the benefits of mature infrastructure automation with greater velocity and quality assurance. With Infrahub Enterprise, IT and networking teams can easily turn any infrastructure into consumable, automated services that deliver greater business agility, efficiency, and security.

Infrahub Enterprise comes hot on the heels of the 1.0 release of Infrahub Open Source. An open-source approach has always been at the bedrock of OpsMill’s technology. But Infrahub was designed from the beginning to solve enterprise-class infrastructure automation challenges.

Furthermore, most organizations require comprehensive support and other advanced features to enable them to deploy innovative software at scale and effectively change the way they’re managing hybrid infrastructure. Infrahub Enterprise is here to meet the needs of those customers, while maintaining our commitment to transparent open source software.

Our ambition with Infrahub is to go far beyond the limited scope, constrained data models, and inflexibility of infrastructure automation products that have been the mainstay of the landscape up until now. Now, these solutions have a role to play, and in particular the independent and open source products have served many well to get started with infrastructure automation. However, due to their constraints they hit a ceiling when businesses want to journey past lower-level automation and build a full lifecycle to turn all their infrastructure into a consumable service catalog.

We had the chance to share our latest updates including Infrahub Enterprise with some industry experts. Jim Frey, principal analyst of networking at Enterprise Strategy Group, had this to say: “Enterprises have faced long-standing challenges when trying to automate their infrastructure due to the long tail of legacy technology and the spread of systems across multiple clouds, private cloud data centers, and on-premises office, manufacturing, and retail infrastructure. OpsMill has created a DevOps approach to infrastructure that seeks to solve root causes of automation blockers. Addressing a full cycle of automation from design through deployment is ambitious, but ambitious solutions are needed to bring the state of the art forward.”

Enterprises Want to Turn All Their Infrastructure into Services–Not Just the Cloud

Cloud is where most automation has succeeded so far. Yet the fact is that enterprises are still investing significantly in on-premises and hybrid infrastructure and networking to support critical applications. And don’t forget that there is a lot of IT infrastructure that lives in offices, retail, warehouse, and manufacturing locations. What enterprise IT leaders want from automation is to make their own infrastructure function as consumable services, like the cloud. That may seem like an overplayed note, but it doesn’t mean it’s not true.

While the movement towards cloud has enabled repeatable and scalable infrastructure automation via Terraform and GitOps, hybrid infrastructure – especially on-premises infrastructure that includes networking assets  – has been left behind. The fact of the matter is that most infrastructure teams don’t use Git, and Git isn’t a great fit for many types of on-premises infrastructure, especially when networking is involved because it has no structured data management capabilities.

So far, the state of art of non-cloudy infrastructure automation for most organizations has been achieving some structured way of automating configuration deploys, graduating from ad-hoc script usage. But that’s pretty low-level. Getting to service-driven automation takes a lot more, and that’s where so much of the problem starts.

Fragmented Data and Processes

We’ve spoken with enterprises that can identify more than two dozen sources of truth for infrastructure data in their IT domain. That’s a great illustration of data fragmentation. What are all these sources of truth? Well, they include CMDBs, Network SoT, multiple vendor-specific configuration management databases, home-grown databases, etc. But that’s just the infrastructure data.

Before you ever deploy a service, you have to define it. Where does service definition data live? Mostly in static documents–PDFs and Visio diagrams. Last I checked, these are not terribly automation-friendly formats. Joking aside, these design documents generally get written once, then archived, never to see anything close to a “lifecycle” again. That’s a big problem.

None of the above data sets live inside of a continuous integration lifecycle. But that’s not all that belongs there. Typically when configuration-level data gets rendered, it is used then thrown away, but that’s not right. Deployable config data needs to be persistent, versioned, validated, and reusable.

The lack of design integration into automation, the diverse sources of truth, and the absence of any of that plus config deploy data within a CI process. These gaps are massive barriers to the ambition to turn infrastructure into services. That is exactly the problem that Infrahub is built to solve.

Infrahub Enterprise unifies fragmented data with complete flexibility in its user-defined data model. You can synchronize Infrahub’s dataset with any external data source via our APIs. There’s no predefined constraint on what services you can envision and design, or what type of infrastructure data you can manage. The data model can accommodate service designs, plus all infrastructure data from all the sources of truth–without needing to be canonical. As a platform Infrahub brings all of that together as well as translation logic between service models and infrastructure and intent data, to generate reliable configurations that also live in the platform. Everything is part of a CI lifecycle, which means that everything is versioned from design through to deploy.

With Infrahub, you can turn any infrastructure into services.

A Little More About Infrahub Enterprise

What sets Infrahub Enterprise apart? As of its first iteration, it includes:

• Advanced role-based access controls (RBAC) integrations 
• High-performance enhancements
• Production-grade Neo4j Enterprise database with high availability
• SLA-backed support
• Hardened production-ready releases

But remember that Infrahub Enterprise is always built on the foundation of transparent open-source software.

What Can You Do with Infrahub and Infrahub Enterprise?

By delivering hybrid infrastructure automation as a consumable service, Infrahub Enterprise supports diverse use cases across a variety of industries. Here are a few examples:

• Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Platform Engineering: More enterprises are building or repatriating infrastructure to on-premises data centers due to cost, data sensitivity, and regulatory requirements. Furthermore, many applications function on a hybrid cloud basis, with heavy dependencies on both on-premises and cloud-based infrastructure. With Infrahub Enterprise, platform engineering teams can now create infrastructure automation self-service catalogs that allow developers and operational teams to spin up end-to-end infrastructure that includes cloud resources, cloud interconnect, and on-premises networking, security policies, and servers.
• AI GPU Data Centers: Financial institutions and other enterprises are building large-scale GPU data centers to develop their own AI and ML models. Traditional network inventory software isn’t flexible enough to model Infiniband and AI-specific infrastructure. Infrahub Enterprise uniquely possesses the service creation, data management, versioning, and CI capabilities to automate such large-scale infrastructures as a set of service offerings, allowing enterprise IT leaders to maximize return on investment in AI data center infrastructure.
• Retail Location Infrastructure-as-a-Service: Retail stores’ IT infrastructure needs have grown steadily, increasing the complexity of deployment. When businesses expand and build new stores, or revise infrastructure to meet the demands of digital transformation initiatives, the only way to keep pace with the business is to apply repeatable automation processes. Using Infrahub Enterprise, retailers can create retail infrastructure service automation catalogs to roll out or upgrade stores, even accommodating different store sizes, regions, and other variables.

Learn More
Infrahub Enterprise and Infrahub 1.0 are available now. Visit OpsMill.com to learn more about how Infrahub can help you up-level your infrastructure automation and make a big positive impact on your business.