Easy Button Software Defined Infrastructure?

Brocade just announced the acquisition of StackStorm which is exciting news in this corner. Composite IT infrastructures (best of breed, hybrid architectures) are stitched together with that wonderful slurry of software, but the follow-on challenge is to orchestrate it all (see Rainer Hersch's take on IT orchestration).

Orchestration of the entire affair through integration and automation leads us towards a consumable, responsive infrastructure that heuristically adapts through event driven models. This allows the most agile, high performance IT infrastructure, a software defined infrastructure (SDI) that automatically responds to scale, security, performance, and application/data changes.  Hūmānus Interruptus no more.

For CTOs, tasked with evolving their entire organizations - who acknowledge and embrace that IT is no longer a cost center, but a foundational key to market and financial performance - DevOps culture is an attractive path to those two things. Among the DevOps principles currently being adopted into the operations environment are the practices of 

• Self-service configuration
• Automated provisioning
• Continuous build
• Continuous integration
• Continuous delivery

As an event-driven automation and remediation platform, StackStorm is of high value. The workflow focused 'Flow' crisply ties together the atomic actions of many of the currently disparate and role specific tools your teams may use (see below). Consider this as orchestrating the orchestrators, stitching together the Puppet, Chef, Ansible and many other tools, into a single, cohesive, infrastructure-wide workflow. 

StackStorm Workflow

Brocade has a 20 year history of highly automated, touch-free, high availability networks in the datacenter. Over the past 8-10 years, Brocade has become increasingly focused on open platforms and today can boast of having the most open, programmatic infrastructure in the market, specifically with regard to our New IP portfolio.  With an increasing focus around the automation and integration of software defined infrastructures, Brocades addition of StackStorm is a significant step in those efforts. While we await the next, have a look at what StackStorm is doing and the broad adoption application of the workflow automation.