By Ross Maurer
With many infrastructure vendors promising to deliver more and more API driven capabilities and functionality from their platforms, customers are often left facing the challenge of identifying value in the myriad of often loosely documented API function calls and data sets on offer.
Once a process has been identified as a candidate for automation, the design of that process is usually mapped out in a structured way to determine input, outputs, validations and operations to achieve the desired goal.
The most complex part of automation is often the translation of this process mapping to vendor API functions and capabilities. How valuable infrastructure data is uniquely identified, mapped, accessed and updated varies from vendor to vendor and often from platform to platform – a regular symptom of software vendor mergers incorporating a broad range of platforms under a common vendor umbrella.
Often it is the Infrastructure SMEs who understand the various platform capabilities and API mechanisms but rarely do these experts also have programming skills to develop large integrations and automations, so DevOps has stepped in to fill this skills gap. But a DevOps engineer rarely understands Infrastructure and vendor platforms to fully appreciate the intricacies of the process being automated.
By leveraging an automation platform that represents vendor API capabilities in a visual drag and drop interface enables your Infrastructure SMEs to define, develop, test and provision best practice process automations. This delivers repeatability, reliability and speed of process automation from the best source possible – the infrastructure SMEs.
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