Benefits
Shorter Provisioning Lead Times and Lower Costs
Manual installation and configuration of applications is time consuming, error prone and expensive. Using Genesis to automate the creation of application packages reduces the configuration errors associated with ‘hand cranked’ environments.
Environments can be provisioned quickly even when project requirements are not well understood or defined. Deployments based on Standard Builds provide the ability to modify configuration data as and when required.
Integration dependencies between applications are captured in the Genesis Enterprise Specification and Application Archetypes reference shared configurations from the Configuration Hierarchy. This approach significantly reduces the time spent on ‘system integration’ tasks as the application packages created by Genesis will be configured correctly.
Consistent and standardised environments are easier to manage, support and troubleshoot compared to heterogeneous environments. Less documentation is required to describe the environments and service teams will have a high level of familiarity with all new environments. All of these factors work to reduce provisioning and operating costs.
Simplifies Management and Organisation of Infrastructure
ABC provisioning ensures that enterprise wide and project specifications for application builds are translated into functioning application packages that fully meet engineering specifications.
A naming convention for infrastructure artefacts helps to standardise infrastructure and improves serviceability by encoding valuable information (e.g. the specific project and environment an application services) into the artefact’s name.
Logical and physical configurations are separated into a simple hierarchy making it easy for users to manage and use configuration data. Applications provisioned by ABC provisioning use this single centralised Configuration Hierarchy.
One Build Tool
Maintaining vendor or bespoke build tools for all the applications in an enterprise stack can become a burdening task. In many cases infrastructure teams retreat in silos preoccupied with maintaining their build tools and act in greater isolation from each other which leads to integration pains. Using Genesis to build the configurations of all applications based on a shared Configuration Hierarchy not only removes the inefficiencies of managing multiple build tools but can change the working culture of your department. Genesis facilitates interdisciplinary skills among infrastructure teams.
With Genesis, emphasis is placed on process and simplicity rather than application and features. ABC provisioning is a light-weight process designed to make it easy to check and test configurations as well as making dependencies visible. The implementation engine (Genesis) is easy to use and maintain.
Standard Builds enable the reuse of proven architecture and configuration. This ensures an efficient and effective reuse of knowledge and expertise. New environments inherit the qualities of the Genesis Enterprise Specification, which itself is continually validated and improved.
By using a single Application Archetype for all environments from development to production application defects are uncovered early in the testing cycle, rather than later-on in ‘live like’ environments; this de-risks application promotion between test environments and the production deployment.