By Andrew Kramer and Matt Howe
There’s increasing interest among enterprises in IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service). Many organizations are moving their servers to cloud-based providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, among others. The promise of the cloud is fast and cheap infrastructure, but that needs also be balanced with security and control.
All cloud providers offer API integration to their services; Amazon has a vast array of services and completely documented APIs (and even a Ruby SDK), making the work of creating integration with these services fairly easy—if you have the right tools.
One of our customers, a global technology company, recently asked us to create a way to provision a Virtual Private Cloud that included their business rules—something they’ve struggled with using other tooling. There isn’t a single API to achieve this, but a series of calls that need to be strung together in a proper sequence.
We created a series of handlers that are true to the API call, then assembled them in a task tree in the Kinetic Task workflow automation engine. The entire process, from request submission through having a server up and running in Amazon’s infrastructure now takes: 45 SECONDS.
This includes creating a security role, security policy, an instance profile, a virtual private cloud, subnet, internet gateway, creating and populating a route table, a secure certificate for logging on to the new server, creating a network interface…and finally starting up a new server instance. And of those 45 seconds, 35 of them are waiting for the server to be available.
All of the objects and workflows are fully re-usable in Kinetic Task’s drag-and-drop builder interface.
Can your IaaS do that?
Next Steps
- Download the white paper Business Process Automation Anywhere and Everywhere.
- Try out Kinetic Task for yourself with a no-obligation trial.
- Contact us to discuss your workflow automation and cloud provisioning challenges.
Cassy Lueneburg