Labs
Dazzled about all that nerd talk about computer stuff? Frustrated that your IT infrastructure isn’t working as you expected? No one around to help you with your IT problems or is your IT guy from another planet but you have just lost your universal translator device? Is there no fun for you in digesting some hard-core IT self-learning study material but you would like to know how-to keep your IT infrastructure under control? Excellent, than you have come to the right place. Promouseus is here to help you. The last computer mouse you will ever need to get in control of your IT infrastructure!
Universal IT translator
The primary goal of Promouseus is to remove language or skill level's as communicating barrier in IT.
The knowledge gap between the sysadmin and end-user results in suboptimal communication. Reaching mutual understanding and to share meaning between these different discourse communities is problematic because both use specific lexis and have different goals. To be able to communication with each other in a meaningful way one of them needs to be able to translate to the other discourse community.
Unfortunately this is not a straightforward process due to the knowledge gap. For example, if the sysadmin translates to the end-user he risks oversimplification to make the end-user partially understand the situation. The other way around the end-user needs almost the same level of IT knowledge to translate to the sysadmin. Promouseus is researching the possibilities to use visualization methods to close this gap.
The first phase of this research consisted of a literary study on potential visualization methods. This phase is almost completed.
Software Defined Infrastructure (SDI)
The visualisation layer of the Universal IT translator is based on SDI as foundation. SDI is an IT infrastructure entirely under the control of software with no human intervention. By describing the infrastructure in a formal way the set of state changes between one configuration and another can be done automatically. When saving the configurations in a version control system it can also be use to reproduce (cloning) the IT infrastructure or go back to the previous configuration (rollback) when needed.
SDI is also helpful to calculating the set of state changes between one configuration and the other. This makes it easy to analyse the relation between new settings and (un)expected effects on the IT infrastructure.
Promouseus has a focus on the following three subsections of SDI:
- Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC)
- Software-Defined Networking (SDN)
- Software-Defined Storage (SDS)
Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
SDI can be realised with the use of IaC. With IaC you provisioning a computer through machine-readable definition files. By formal describing the IT infrastructure you create a consistent and reproducible setup. Checking for errors and security violations can be automated by the use of Continuous Configuration Automation (CCA). Examples of CCA tools are Ansible, CFEngine, Chef, Puppet and Salt. They all offer a framework for orchestrating your IT infrastructure through coding, planning, and rollout.
Promouseus is researching the following IaC types:
- Declarative (functional)
Push config settings - Imperative (procedural)
Changes needed to get desired state - Intelligent (environment aware)
Determines desired state and effect on dependencies before changing state
The visualisation layer of the Universal IT translator shows the IaC related states and offeres the ability to control them.
Research
Research findings while be published and related software while be made available on GitHub.