August 27, 2016
by Chip Copper
I’ve seen it over and over again.
A user puts in a simple request. Nothing elaborate or unusual – just a standard request. It goes into the queue, generates a ticket, and then… nothing.
Days or weeks later, an overworked, tired engineer in the back office operations room finally gets to the request, opens a process document, and begins the laborious task of doing the same thing that he or she has done dozens of times before each time that this type of request comes in. Ok, maybe the IP address or the user name has changed, but the process is the same as it has always been. And it is slow. Very slow. And the engineer may make a mistake. And, quite frankly, it’s frustrating for the user and boring for the engineer.
It’s 2016. We can do better. And many have through workflow automation. And the best news is that you can too!
Networks have, until recently, required a lot of hands-on care to get them set up and reconfigured. Brocade saw the advantage of having an automated workflow doing the job of walking through common networking workflows, and so recently acquired StackStorm. Yeah, that StackStorm. If you have any experience with DevOps and event driven automation of workflows, you will recognize StackStorm as the leader in open source event driven automation. StackStorm has a rapidly growing fan base—including Netflix, who has leveraged StackStorm in their remediation platform called Winston. The community has leveraged the StackStorm platform to automate all kinds of workflows and is showing strong support for building even more integrations into other tools and platforms including (but not limited to as they say on TV): VMware, Cassandra, Microsoft Azure, Docker, Ansible, Github, Jira, Kubernetics, Google, Linux, generic email, mqtt, OpenStack, Puppet, Splunk, Yammer, MS Windows…. (My fingers are getting tired. Go read the entire list at https://exchange.stackstorm.org).
For customers wanting enterprise level support and advanced features such as LDAP , User Authentication, and next gen visual workflow design -check out Brocade Workflow Composer(BWC)—the commercial version of StackStorm. Looking for network automation? Tap into network automation suites developed for BWC.
Begin automating your workflows today. Join the community and install StackStorm. Want to see a demo of StackStorm and chat about how to apply event driven automation to your networking environment? Check out the StackStorm demo at VmWorld. I’ll be in the Connecting the Future zone of the Brocade booth-Booth #935.
Or do you just want to wait. And wait. And wait. And wait….