Vodafone
Country: Egypt
Vodafone’s enterprise environment is segregated into 6 sites, each site has one or more virtualization providers from multiple vendors (Redhat, Oracle, VMware and PowerVM) providing thousands of virtual machines to the Vodafone employees.
Vodafone’s environment makes the administration of the virtualized infrastructure is time consuming and affects the CAPEX and OPEX. In addition to that, you have to go through multiple teams For example to provision a MySQL DB, you would have to go through the Virtualization team to create a virtual machine, the network team to provision IP addresses for the machine, the system team for any operating system task and the security team to open up the required firewall; this would normally take 5-10 working days.
Our target was to manage and automate the administration of the virtualized infrastructure. We managed the virtualization infrastructure by using Cloud forms to manage the current virtualization providers by creating a catalog of IAAS services for each site. Next in line was automating tasks that were performed by various teams; for example, the open source solution PHPIPAM was used to keep an inventory of available IP addresses in each subnet and cloudforms was integrated with the PHPIPAM to automate the process of provisioning IP addresses to newly created machines. In addition to that, multiple Ansible towers were configured in all sites to automate network device tasks such as opening firewall ports; they were also configured to enable the automation of arbitrary tasks as they arise. Finally integration with the currently existing infrastructure was performed to ensure cloudforms is able to utilize the users that already exist within the environment via integrating with active directory and to enable the sending of notifications via e-mails by integrating with Microsoft exchange.
Vodafone Corporate has different teams, to manage Vodafone IT resources including systems, Storage, Network and Security resources. The environment is continuously changing, a lot of change requests are issued daily in which all infrastructure teams are involved.
Most of change requests made daily is considered as routine tasks to related teams. These tasks are time wasting, requiring specific flow to be done with every change request In Vodafone, Infrastructure teams raised that they take time before configuring their devices in order to determine which one should be configured. For example, the security team has to determine which firewall will be on the path of the packet flow between source and destination IPs, and then configure the involved firewalls; this also is a time, resources wasting.
Our target was to manage and automate the daily tasks which are time wasting. We managed the infrastructure related resources, such as servers, routers, switches, load balancers, and firewall appliances by Using Ansible Tower. Ansible Tower is a friendly Web Based application, based on Ansible Engine which is able to connect to different platforms, pushing desired configuration in an automated way. End users now can submit their requests on Ansible Tower UI, Ansible Tower takes their parameters, customizes the configuration to suit user input parameters, determines involved device, and pushes the configuration to the chosen platform.
Vodafone’s enterprise environment is segregated into many teams in different sites; each team is responsible for Development and Operation of a certain applications / service. Providing much services and flexibility to Vodafone customers.
Vodafone’s environment makes the administration and the developers tasks is time consuming and affects the CAPEX and OPEX. In addition to that, you have to go through the application development cycle from the beginning and building the testing environment from the beginning. As well as the development environment is not a like the production environment and if the application development is finished the staging process is time consuming. For example to provision a multi tired app, you would have to go through the Application development cycle, then the testing phase for the developed applications with DBs and other applications with the Production environment requirements , the required operations and development needed this would normally take 2-3 Months at least for optimized testing and developed apps.
Our Target was to build DevOps Environment to facilitate the Application Development Cycle and self-service for Developers, Also to provide the full power administration and features for operations team. This was offered by implementing OpenShift Containerized Platform (OCP) providing PaaS. We implemented many PaaS Clusters regarding Vodafone sites as well as building test and staging environment to provide to identical environment for testing and production environment. Giving the ability to developers to build containers to test their in house developed applications and to migrate and clone them to the production environment without the issues facing them building the environment from scratch, by customizing and using images provided by red hat and Linux Plus. To make the environment more flexible and effort consuming Ansible core is deployed providing the automation of the developed applications as well as defining scaling rules for workload periods. As for our use case many applications mainly Databases deployed were storage dependent workload we integrated with EMC storage providing the back end storage for Containers. And by making a high available environment we integrated with the Available physical Load balancer.
Vodafone’s enterprise environment has many zones. In each zone include huge numbers of RHEL (7,6,5) so customer need to solution to manage RHEL hosts also we need to manage Hosts through remote execution
Red Hat Satellite is a systems-management product by the company Red Hat which allows system administrators to deploy and manage Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) hosts. A Satellite server registers with Red Hat Subscription Management, mirrors all relevant software like security errata and bug fixes, and provides this together with locally added software and configuration to the attached servers. The managed hosts register against the local Satellite server and access the provided resources like software packages, patches, configuration, etc. while they also provide information about the current health state of the server to the Satellite Satellite support remote execution to manage hosts remotely