Cisco announced that it is integrating its cloud-based data centre management service Intersight, with HashiCorp’s multi-cloud infrastructure automation service Terraform. The integration will give Intersight customers an easy way to automate and provision multi-cloud infrastructure using an infrastructure-as-a-code model.
The companies said that the aim is to remove the gap between private and public cloud infrastructure operations. Intersight is a data center infrastructure management service that users deploy to monitor hyper-converged infrastructures like the company’s HyperFlex appliance, to detect potential issues and perform maintenance.
What do the platforms do?
In Intersight, diagnostics data is sent from every appliance to an analytics environment for processing. Machine-learning algorithms scan the activity across the installed appliance base, before offering recommendations for customers.
Terraform uses infrastructure as a code to automate the provisioning and management of cloud infrastructures and services. It acts as a unified infrastructure automation layer that covers all major public cloud platforms, allowing customers to centrally manage their resources using a common set of app programming interfaces. It helps with the problem of inconsistencies and error-prone provisioning methods used when doing manual allocation.
The efficiency of IaaC
Infrastructure-as-a-code (IaaC) entails the management of IT infrastructure using configuration files, instead of physical hardware or interactive configuration tools. Traditional methods are difficult, costly, and entailed placing servers physically and configuring every app and operating system manually.
IaaC is a more efficient way of doing things, because of consistency in IT infrastructure management and the time saved. All this explains why Cisco is keen to expand like this. This integration makes it possible for Terraform to access assets and infrastructure in both public, private, and hybrid cloud deployments. The effect will be an extension of infrastructure automation to wider use cases and with better consistency.