Originally posted on IBM Developer blog “Exploring PureApplication System, Software Service and more” by Marco Mantegazza on 17 October 2013 (8614 visits)
While contributing to the Redpaper “Cloud Computing Pattern of Expertise” I focused my attention to the lifecycle management of patterns. Managing pattern lifecycle means not only managing the pattern components, but also managing the deployed instances of a pattern.
It is quite easy to understand that adopting a pattern based approach helps you gain speed and agility in provisioning a new IT environment by leveraging the expertise done in the past. But being quick and agile in creating an environment is just the tip of the iceberg! IT specialists spend hours every day in managing the lifecyle of those systems.
IBM Workload Deployer based technologies, like IBM PureApplication System or SmartCloud Orchestrator, help you not only in gaining speed and agility, but also to be more efficient in these day-by-day and time consuming activities, allowing your IT specialists to focus on more important and critical tasks to support new business requests.
Adopting a pattern based approach helps you in different ways in the lifecycle management of your environments. Some examples are (differences exist between the IBM different offerings):
- You do not need high level skills to complete most of the activities, but you can complete them through a simplified console.
- You can manage the deployed pattern as a whole.
- You can consistently move and promote configurations to different stages.
- You can leverage pre-integrated monitoring features
The console allows you to administer the deployed instances with very basic skills. A number of them can be done in an automated fashion through the workload deployer console. As an example, you can start and stop the whole system by clicking just a single button. Or, you can apply a fix to the middleware automatically and in a consistent way on each of the images composing the deployed pattern just by clicking a button! And the system creates automatically a snapshot of the environment before applying the fix, which allows you to roll back quickly and easily if something goes wrong!
Check out this Redpaper to discover other advantages of leveraging cloud computing patterns of expertise in the day-by-day lifecycle management of your IT environments!
Feel free to comment or share any thought on this topic!
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