Infrastructure Automation architecture

Stand-alone Infrastructure Automation deployment architecture

Infrastructure automation is a stand-alone module within IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps. When you have a license for IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps, you are entitled to install and use Infrastructure Automation.

Infrastructure Automation consists of these components (formerly part of IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management):

• Managed services and service catalog, previously called Terraform & Service Automation or IBM Cloud Automation Manager
• Infrastructure management, previously called IBM Red Hat CloudForms.

Managed services provide the capability to automate provisioning of infrastructure and virtual machine applications by using Terraform and Ansible. It includes supported versions of Terraform that works across multiple cloud environments with comprehensive IT workflow orchestration. Using out-of-box integration with Ansible, workflows can interconnect Terraform provisioning templates with Ansible playbooks for configuration management, fully supporting infrastructure-as-code (IaC) and GitOps best practices.The service catalog allows authors administrators to publish services and users to self-service provision infrastructure and applications.

Infrastructure Management delivers the insight, control, compliance, and automation enterprises need to address the challenges of managing hybrid cloud environments, which are far more complex than physical ones. This technology enables enterprises with existing virtual, baremetal, and cloud infrastructures to improve visibility, control and compliance, and those just starting hybrid cloud deployments to build and operate a well-managed hybrid cloud infrastructure.

Infrastructure Automation enables IT Operations and Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) teams to use infrastructure as code practices to drive IT velocity and shift to the left of operations. With this modernized infrastructure management, you can perform the following tasks:

• Shorten the time to provision infrastructure (VMs, Cloud Services, Kubernetes) across on-premises, private, and public clouds
• Create repeatable templates for common infrastructure requests
• Enable self-service catalogs to avoid manual responses to tickets
• Scale infrastructure automatically based on demand
• Support day-2 operations, which include automated compliance
• You can provision, run, and manage workloads on the infrastructure of your choice.

IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps Infrastructure Automation is installed on Red Hat® OpenShift® Container Platform. For more information about the supported versions of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, see Supported Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform versions.

Infrastructure Automation with IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps deployment architecture

Infrastructure automation can be used together with IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps to support use cases that require Terraform automation and service orchestration as part of the incident resolution process. Day 2 operations like changing the size of VMs, power management, or applying a patch are supported by Infrastructure Automation and can easily be accessed through a common console. They can also be automated through runbook actions by invoking Infrastructure Automation APIs. Both Infrastructure Automation and IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps integrate with ServiceNow and can be used together to calculate the risk score of infrastructure change requests.