Automating workflows is one of the biggest bets for a CTO, and for a good reason; Getting bulky processes to run at a click of a button eliminates the possibility of human error, saves their team a lot of time, and their company a lot of money. The most effective way to achieve this — in the Cloud — is through a well-rounded Cloud Management Platform (CMP), like Cycleops, that can provide popular catalog items, service units, and code-ready stack templates.
Utilizing the aforementioned capabilities, allows a team to create, update, and manage service catalog items; then, deploy them automatically, as a single service unit, using stack templates.
Simplify service delivery with ready-made service units
Without a doubt, service units are at the core of service delivery, containing a centralized list of services, from the catalog items available. Within the catalog, you’ll find a collection of the IT services a company can provide.
Through this list of services, teams can create, manage and deploy the necessary service units for a job. In simpler terms, it’s the storefront from which users request services, drawing from the items listed in the catalog.
In this context, service units are critical components of your architecture, since they provide an overview of the infrastructure. To point out, not only do they help you and your team achieve control, and consistency, but also ensure compliance.
All things considered, ready-made service units are a great tool for seamlessly managing and delivering services. Going a step further, they help align the services provided by your IT department with the company’s business goals.
Create your Cycleops services easily, with popular catalog items
Cycleops comes with baked-in catalog items, provided by Stackmasters, containing a set of service units that your team can request to deliver a project. In this respect, the Cycleops Catalog acts as the ordering interface for service provisioning. Among other items, the Cycleops units include:
- Operating Systems
- Load Balancers
- Containers
- Application Servers
- Proxies
- Databases, etc.
The best part is that its self-service look-and-feel allows your team easy access to any components they need; that is, in order to build a custom stack template and host the required software applications, with minimum time and effort.
Automate service fulfilment with Cycleops pre-built stack templates
Stack Templates is yet another Cycleops feature that users can make the most of, for free. To elaborate, it’s an integrated stack builder — designed upon service units — that enables your team to automate the provisioning and management of related cloud services, as a single unit — a stack.
In essence, Cycleops’ stack templates are code-ready items and components that can be configured, deployed and reused in any task and project. And, as they provide a blueprint for the creation of cloud services, they are the launchpad for a holistic digital workflow.
What’s more, Cycleops stack templates are created based on popular use cases and deployment patterns; while, at the same time, following the industry’s best practices. However, the functionality doesn’t stop here; apart from the standard available templates, you can also create your own stack templates.
In addition to easily composing units to services, in Cycleops you can combine your stacks with hosts to manage your inventory, and optimize your environments. You can also manage multiple hosts together, by putting them in a group; for instance, under ‘web servers’ or ‘database’.
By extension, Cycleops’ stack builder helps in stack standardization and, in effect, a much-improved team collaboration. How is that achieved? By simplifying processes and workflows which, in turn, allows teams to quickly find and deploy approved IT services, at will.
Another factor that adds to your efforts, as a CTO, to streamline team collaboration is the fact that your people can finally share the same technology to perform their tasks, which improves their learning curve and eliminates compatibility and compliance issues.
Why use pre-built stack templates?
To directly answer this question, in conjunction with what we’ve mentioned so far: Developing your own templates from scratch is usually a long process; not to mention a challenge, for many teams. To that end, pre-built stack templates are created to facilitate and speed up your team’s workflow.
Instead of setting everything up ‘by hand’, your team can quickly build a stack template and use it to automatically deploy the necessary services; that is, to as many environments as they need. So what are the benefits a company can get, when using stack templates, on a practical level? At a glance:
- Codeless approach
- Self-service capabilities
- Seamless integration
- Streamlined DevOps
- Improved team communication and collaboration
- Automated workflow
- Standardized application environments and service delivery
- Centralized services lifecycle management
- Simplified infrastructure
- Reduced IT costs
Key takeaways
When it comes down to it, a stack builder is a key driver in a CTO’s effort to automate their team’s workflow and achieve quality of services. Specifically, with well-implemented service units acting as a bridge between available catalog items and stack templates, Cycleops allows for smooth stack orchestration and efficient service delivery.
Cycleops comes with easy-to-use service units and stack templates, designed to suit a wide range of common scenarios; that is, in order to quickly set up and control workflows, at a self-service pace. Utilizing Cycleops, your team can create custom stack templates that meet their setup requirements for optimal service fulfillment. From this point on, building tech stacks for scale becomes easy as 1-2-3, opening the door for new opportunities.