Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud

As cloud and virtualization reach maturity and cloud-based service delivery continues to expand beyond infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) models, organizations continue to issue mandates to reduce costs while increasing IT and staff efficiency. In addition, the desire to advance from IT productivity to business productivity through technological innovation is prompting organizations to expand cloud-based service delivery to advanced use cases. With one-year product release cycles, cloud management platforms are lagging behind in supporting these advanced use cases with evaluation and release of solutions into production.

Cisco^® cloud accelerators solve this problem with predefined content cartridges that support these advanced use cases immediately upon installation. Cisco cloud accelerators follow the API strategy and vision of Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud (IAC) and snap directly into the Cisco IAC self-service portal. Cloud accelerators speed up evaluation and release to production for these advanced use cases while allowing end users to consume their functions through the self-service portal of Cisco IAC.

The Cisco Application Stack Accelerator Pack delivers development and operations (DevOps) or enterprise platform-as-a-service (PaaS) functions to Cisco IAC, allowing end users to order complete application or platform stacks from the Cisco IAC self-service portal. Using standards and automation, the accelerator stack delivers an application blueprint from which end users can order fully configured, multitiered cloud applications.

The creation of a blueprint starts from the Stack Blueprint Management page (Figure 1) in the Cisco IAC stack blueprint designer. From Cisco IAC, design wizards provide guidance through the creation, review, and publication processes. The result is a blueprint that follows a process similar to software development. From the blueprint management page, developers can create, test, revise, review, get approval for, and publish their designs (Figure 2).

DevOps is a combination of development and operations in support of the business: a business partnership in the definition, design, and deployment of multitier application stacks and platforms through automated blueprints that accelerate the implementation of these applications and stacks in a structured manner.

Today, multitier application stacks (web, application, and database servers) are constructed using hundreds of golden templates. Management and maintenance of these templates is cumbersome, and manual intervention is still required to complete "last mile" provisioning, further increasing costs and time-to-value.

Today, 23 percent of enterprise organizations have a cloud-first strategy for all new IT initiatives. IDC estimates that this number will reach 70 percent by 2016 as the pace of IT service orientation continues to increase in organizations.

Chief information officers (CIOs) consider PaaS, in which DevOps plays a large part, the next-generation platform for innovation and improvement to satisfy the increased desire by line-of-business managers to consume services through the cloud.¹

The Cisco Application Stack Accelerator Pack allows enterprises to create application stack blueprints so that applications can be requested through a simple-to-use self-service ordering experience. This approach bridges the gap between developers and operations and facilitates the collaborative deployment process needed to achieve the goals of DevOps.

System requirements for Cisco Application Stack Accelerator Pack include:

Cisco IAC must be completely installed, configured, and operational with the Cisco Multicloud and Configuration Management accelerators.

Accelerators can be downloaded from the Cloud Accelerator Community.

Visit the cloud accelerator website at http://www.cisco.com/go/accelerators.