Adaptive Applications and Event-Driven Infrastructure as Code

Digital transformation is a business journey accompanied by a technology evolution. In the course of that journey, digital business is enabled by an operational move from manual methods to automated execution.    

While security-related technologies may be at the forefront of this automation due to the constant evolution of attackers, operations are not actually all that far behind. Consider, for example, our reliance on auto-scaling to expand digital capabilities on-demand. At one time there was contentious debate over whether external systems should manage capacity for digital assets.

Seriously.

Today, this isn’t even a question. We not only accept but expect auto-scaling capabilities as part of our infrastructure stack.

So to assume that greater automation will eventually be embraced as table-stakes seems quite logical. At some point, the value of manually managing the resources that deliver and secure digital experiences will reach a point of diminishing returns and demand a shift to trusting technology.  

We know there is value in an infrastructure as code (IaC) approach. Our research showed significant benefits in terms of deployment frequency based on the adoption of IaC. More than half (52%) of organizations treat infrastructure as code, and those that do are more than twice as likely to deploy more frequently. Even more valuable, they are four times as likely to have fully automated application deployment pipelines.

That’s an important relationship to note, as it becomes a critical capability for organizations that want to reap the business benefits of adaptive applications.

Event-Driven Infrastructure as Code

The difference between infrastructure as code and event-driven infrastructure as code is essentially what triggers a deployment.

Most organizations move from manual methods to automation with infrastructure as code but still retain control over deployments. That is, an operator is still required to trigger a deployment. It’s a push-button deployment.

With an event-driven approach, the trigger is automated based on an event. Consider auto-scale, again, as an example. The actual deployment of the configuration changes and additional workloads is triggered by an event, often when the number of concurrent connections has surpassed some pre-determined threshold. That event—going over a defined limit—triggers an automated workflow.

Imagine now, if you will, that this process is expanded to include an entire application. That means all the workloads and associated technology services that deliver and secure it. The event is now performance falling below what defines an acceptable digital experience. That event signifies a need to deploy, automatically, an "application" on the other side of the globe and triggers an automated workflow that does that—in a completely remote location.

This is not (computer) science fiction. This kind of automated deployment of an entire application—its workloads, infrastructure, and supporting services—are often deployed to a public cloud via orchestration tools like Terraform. Configuration artifacts are pulled from a repository, containers from a library, secrets (certificates and keys) from a secure vault. Automatically. This is the essence of infrastructure as code, that configurations, policies, and secrets are treated like code artifacts to enable the automation of the deployment pipeline.

What isn’t automated today is the trigger. The event now is "operator pushed the button/typed the command." The event in the future will become the time of day, the demand in a particular location, the performance for a geographic region.  

This is a significant part of what will make applications adaptive in the future; the ability to react automatically to events and adapt location, security, and capacity to meet service-level objectives. Edge 2.0—with its unified control plane—will be the way that business can use resources across multiple clouds, edge, and the data center to achieve that goal.

Event-driven infrastructure as code will be a critical capability for bringing the benefits of adaptive applications to the business.