The automation of Infoblox

Automation. A fancy term often used in the world of technology. You have heard it many times before. ‘We need to automate to gain efficiency.’ True, although this statement makes it sound simple and easy. Which is almost never the case. Automation is an intensive and time-consuming project, taking up a lot of resources, before eventually becoming profitable. You don’t start to automate overnight. It takes strategy and defined goals.

How spotit automates

Spotit acknowledges the many benefits of automation. It all starts with a well thought out strategy. The first step is to validate the business case and to define the success criteria, so everybody knows what we’re aiming for. It makes it possible to adjust the way of working during the process, and to evaluate the success of the project upon finalization.

When the strategy is approved, the DevOps team maps the different steps of the current manual processes. We define which steps can be replaced by automation, both at the customer and at spotit, and keep in mind the existing available tools. This way, we strive to keep costs as low as possible, and to maximize the efficiency.

A success story: the automation of Infoblox

We noticed a remarkable trend: our customers increasingly used the CI/CD principle (Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery) to develop their own business applications. As a result, the amount of change requests for DNS changes went through the roof. Because spotit puts the customer first, we went looking for a time-efficient solution to better serve our customers. And we found it: the automation of standard change requests. We integrated this automation in the processes of both our customers and spotit, to guarantee optimal speed of the customer’s CI/CD process, and to make sure our spotit engineers can focus on advanced challenges.

But that’s not the end of the success story just yet. Spotit implemented the possibility to execute those automated standard changes in bulk. A win-win situation for both parties! Right? Unless a problem occurs during the execution of said changes, and everything goes wrong. But spotit wouldn’t be spotit if we hadn’t thought about this beforehand. We integrated an extra safety feature to roll back all previous changes if necessary. This way, we can guarantee the data integrity of all DNS records.

Automation versus secure development

Security is key for spotit. That means we work by the ‘Security by Design’ principle and develop according to the CIA model (Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability). All available data is processed securely thanks to the implementation of strong authentication and correct authorization. De DevOps infrastructure guarantees our integrations are always available for our customers and our spottees. By building in sufficient controls and roll-back functionalities we always ensure the correct information on these systems. This way, spotit stands for the development of safe and reliable automation solutions.