Author: Naveen Kumar
Automating IT operations has become increasingly crucial in today’s fast-paced Public Sector digital landscape. As organisations transform digitally, their IT infrastructure becomes more complex and manual management of systems, networks, and applications becomes time-consuming, error-prone, and inefficient. The need to automate our IT operations has become an expectation from stakeholders, given the scale and complexity of our digital infrastructure supporting numerous services.
By embracing automation, we can better fulfil our mission of delivering innovative public services, while maintaining the high standards of reliability and security expected of IT systems.
Adopt “shift left” infrastructure to automate delivery of infra configuration securely
Compared to using cloud service provider’s console (CSP portal) to manage cloud configurations, the same tasks can be performed through Infra-as-Code (IaC). This “shift-left” practice in configuration management leverages on GovTech SHIP-HATS platform to offer the following advantages:
Consistency: Ensures that the cloud infrastructure is deployed consistently every time, reducing human errors and configuration drift.
Version control: Changes to cloud infrastructure can be tracked over time, making it easier to roll back if needed and understand how its setup has evolved.
Automation: Allows to automate the provisioning and management of resources, saving time and reducing manual effort.
Documentation: The IaC scripts serve as living documentation of the infrastructure setup.
Change Management: Team members can review and contribute to infrastructure changes using familiar DevOps software development practices. Authorised personnel to approve the requested deployment.
Disaster recovery: In case of a failure, can quickly recreate the entire infrastructure from its IaC definitions.
This “shift-left” infrastructure practice leverages on the same setup that is described in Automate Environment Setup:
- Use Self-hosted Runners Only When Necessary and Secure Them
- Use Single Parameterised IaC Module/Template for All Environments
Automate Patch Management
CSP provides native tools to apply patches and keep workloads up-to-date with the latest security patch level. Examples of native tool are AWS Systems Manager Patch Manager, Azure Update Management. Using cloud native tool offers the following advantages:
Consistency: Ensures a uniform patch process is applied consistently across the entire infrastructure.
Automation: Automates patching processes that are configured once thus reducing manual effort and human error.
Integration: Potential to integrate with other cloud services and monitoring tools.
Minimal downtime: Supports rolling updates hence minimising service disruption.
Rollback capabilities: If a patch causes issues, cloud-native tools usually offer simple rollback mechanisms.
Visibility: Provides a detailed reporting and logging of patch statuses.
