business automation - cloud automation orchestration service - nordea

CAOS – Cloud Automation Orchestration Service.Business Automation

Jesper Fonager Christensen, Chief IT infrastructure Specialist

About Nordea• The largest financial institute in Northern Europe

• Market value EUR 39 bill.

• Total assets EUR 669 bill.

• Core tier 1 capital ratio of 15.7 %

• 29397 employees (FTEs)

• Eight different home markets

• Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia and Russia.

• G-SIB – Global Systematically Important Bank.• Identified by FSB as one of the 29 most important banks in the world. Other banks on the list – Deutsche Bank, Citigroup,

HSBC, JP Morgan Chase, Santander, ING Bank.

• If a G-SIB fails it will effect the global economy.

• 11 mill. active customers• 10 mill. Household customers

• 0.6 mill. Corporate customers

• 800 branches

Jesper Fonager Christensen • 03/11/20152 •

About NordeaHistory

• In 2001 Nordea was born out of a merge of three banks. The result is an extremely complex and heterogeneous IT environment.

• Going 30 years back Nordea is a merge of more than 40 financial institutes – banks, insurance, life and pension, mortgage institutes etc.


About Nordea and AutomicHistory

• Nordea started using Automic for Work Load Automation 2008.• Automic was brought in to replace a homegrown scheduler on out OpenVMS platform. 2

OpenVMS agents and 2 Automic managers.• Same year it was decided to replace our existing Unicenter/TNG environment with Automic. To do

this we needed 80 Windows agents and 10 Unix agents.• Since then the system just kept growing to the current status:

• Five year all you can eat license agreement.• Version 9 sp.11.• Four different environments – sandbox, test, preproduction and production.• 44000 executable objects and190000 executions pr. Day (production only)• Automic OS agent part of base line installation on Windows, Red Hat and Solaris.


About Nordea and Automic.


• Approx. 10200 Automic OS agents in production/preproduction• Windows (7061)• Solaris (1271)• Red Hat (1792)• OpenVMS (4)

• Application agents.• Webservice• BMC Atrium CMDB• BMC Remedy• FTP Manager• Database agents

• Oracle• SQLServer• DB2

• JMS• Tomcat• VmWare

IT Service Orchestration.History

In early spring 2013 it was decided to insource all services except mainframe provided by our outsourcing partner – Nordic Processor (IBM).

• Originally 8000 Unix/Linux and Windows servers to be insourced.• No automated procedures for provisioning and software distribution.• Normal delivery time between 3 weeks and 3 months.

• IT services and support to be insourced• User admin, VDI’s etc.• No automated procedures for user admin, VDI provisioning etc.• Normal delivery time for server access > 2 weeks.

We had to do something…


Ideas behind CAOS• To deliver IT services within minutes.

• Server provisioning – going from weeks to minutes.

• Help desk services – going from days to minutes.

• Make it possible to test ideas faster.

• End to End process.

• Ready to use services – no need for further installations or access requests.

• Both automated and manual tasks.

• Simplify and standardize.

• One consistent and agreed way to do things.

• Repeatable and reusable procedures.

• Auditable.

• ITIL based procedures – Remedy integration.

• Audit trail - who did what when.

7 •

Service Orchestration – the Caos project • Objectives:

• More then 200 IT service and support and server provisioning services were identified as candidates for automation.

• Server provisioning.• Create and decommission Windows VMs.• Create and decommission Linux VMs.

• End user services• Create users, ad user to group and other AD related services• Create and decommission VDI’s• Increase mail box• Etc.


• Orchestration tool and back end engine:• Most software and hardware vendors claim to have an orchestration tool. VMware can

orchestrate inside VCenter, UCS Director can orchestrate a little more then VMware, but none of them can orchestrate an end to end process. They are all silos.


VMWare

Service Orchestration – the Caos project

SCCMPuppet Oracle

UCSCentral

Service Orchestration

Service Orchestration – the Caos project • Orchestration tool and back end engine:

• Why Automic as back end service orchestration engine.• OS agents for all OS platforms in our service catalog.• Web services – both SOAP and Rest.• Other Rapid Automation agents such as Remedy, FTP and Database.• Orchestration – already handling 66000 dependencies in the batch environment.• In house skills both on the development, operation and admin side.• Good relations between Automic and Nordea.• A proven history of supreme support from Automic.


Service Orchestration – the Caos project


Service Orchestration – the Caos project A few definitions:Services:A service is ready to use IT service like a new user or a new server. Services are defined in the CAOS database.

Services components:

A service component is an reusable object inside Automic. The service component can be a service but in most cases it will be orchestrated with other service components into a service. A service component could be ‘Disable CD drive on Windows VM’ or ‘Create disk share for new user’. Service components are defined in the CAOS database but there is a one to one relationship with an object inside Automic.

Attributes:

Most service components have a set of attributes or parameters. They are predefined inside the CAOS database with a set of default values.

Orchestration:Service components are orchestrated into services inside the CAOS database. When a service request is made, a workflow for the service is generated inside Automic.



Service Orchestration – the Caos project Example: A user requesting a new SQL server database

1. Attributes from the request form are stored in Remedy as a work order.2. Automic triggers for work orders assigned to CAOS. 3. Automic stores the work order and parameters in the Caos database 4. Based on information from Caos, Automic generates the workflow for the service. 5. First component in every workflow updates the status of the Remedy work order to “In progress”6. When a service component completes it updates its status into the Caos database.7. The last component in every workflow updates the status of the Remedy work order to “Finished”, and the requester gets a notification.

Service Orchestration – the Caos project• The IT Service Request module built on top of Remedy.


Service Orchestration – the Caos project• Service Orchestration Monitor – on top of the Caos database


Service Orchestration – the Caos project • Service builder module


Service Orchestration – the Caos project What does Nordea get from this:

• Fully described and repeatable processes.

• Full audit trail on all deliveries.

• Delivery of IT services not depended on key personnel.

• Less personnel doing manual routines. More personnel to develop the future Nordea.

• Less lead time from idea to production for business IT.

• Better use of hardware

• And and and…


Service Orchestration – what has Gartner to say about this.• Key Challenges

• Lack of IT organizational maturity and the absence of appropriate skills are key inhibitors to ITPA success.

• Cultural resistance to process definition and automation remains a significant barrier that must be addressed by IT leadership.

• Nonstandardized or highly diverse IT architectures (software and hardware) impede theachievement of cost-effective automation.

• The value automation promises is evident; however, the cost of developing, implementing and administrating it is not.


Service Orchestration – what has Gartner to say about this.• Recommandations

• Analyze your process and organizational maturity levels, and identify the skills needed to be successful.

• Target six primary areas of readiness: value, objectives, cost, organization, workflow IQ and standardization.

• Standardize as much as possible to enable automation to be designed, developed and executed with lower risks and at a lower cost.

• Keep your automation projects narrow, simple and focused initially, to minimize the risk of scope creep and demonstrate value.


Service Orchestration – Lesson learned from Caos. • Top management attention and support.

• Automating manual routines will cause changes for some employees.

• Automation is a journey.• Changing the way “we use to do things” requires a change of mindset.• Involve the employees who did the manual tasks as much as possible.

• Service owners for all services.• The Service Orchestration team should not own any services.• Services can be owned by both the Business and IT Operations.

• Component owners for all service components.• The Service Orchestration team should not own any service components.• Service components should be owned by Engineering Domains inside Infrastructure.

• First small then big• Start by automating small and simple services. It will probably be possible to reuse small services as components inside bigger and

more complex services.

• Both manual and automated tasks in services• Ensure that it is possible to have both manual and automated tasks in services from day one.


Thanks.If you need to know more feel free to contact on mail or on LinkedIn

Jesper Fonager ChristensenChief IT Infrastructure Specialist

Email: [email protected]: https://www.linkedin.com/pub/jesper-fonager-uhre- christensen/3/6ab/218

mailto:[email protected]

https://www.linkedin.com/pub/jesper-fonager-uhre-christensen/3/6ab/218




business automation - cloud automation orchestration service - nordea

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