Network Automation for Modern Apps
Deploying today’s modern containerized apps and traditional multitier apps into highly virtualized and cloud environments can be complex. To improve operations for developer and DevOps teams, some IT organizations have automated the deployment of VMs and multitiered app components. However, even with this approach, faster component provisioning only partially solves business speed and productivity challenges, because most have not addressed network and security operations.
Users still have to wait for networking and security resources that are typically provisioned manually, which can add days or even weeks to the process. IT needs to be able to author individual machines and configure them together as working applications with all of the appropriate microservices, storage, networking and security resources in a complete and automated fashion. When networking and security are performed manually, it takes excessive amounts of time and introduces security and operational risk.
Network Automation is a solution that integrates VMware’s vRealize Automation (modern infrastructure automation platform) with NSX Data Center (network virtualization platform) to enable rapid app rollout with networking and security services, helping organizations enjoy faster time to market, operational savings, and productivity gains. Complete lifecycle automation of applications ensures that policy is provisioned, managed, and retired in lock step with workloads, eliminating operational bottlenecks in the application lifecycle. This allows for fast, consistent networking and security across traditional and modern containerized apps, wherever they reside, such as multicloud and modern Kubernetes infrastructure environments. Automating IT tasks, cloud-native architectures, and ongoing operations empowers IT and developers to move at the speed of business.
What’s New – vRealize Automation 8.1: Network Automation Capabilities
VMware vRealize Automation delivers a modern infrastructure automation platform which provides IT organizations and LOBs a powerful set of capabilities for self-service catalog, governance, provisioning, orchestration and DevOps-based service delivery. Re-architected on a container-based, Kubernetes-managed architecture with a HTML5-based easy to use UI, vRealize Automation provides DevOps admins and SREs a very flexible and simple platform for Infrastructure as Code (IaC), deliver infrastructure using pipeline release automation, and for managing Kubernetes clusters and namespaces. It also provides native integration with hybrid cloud environments like VMware Cloud on AWS, leading public clouds including AWS, Azure, and GCP, as well as popular 3rd party tools, such as ServiceNow ITSM, Terraform, and Ansible Tower.
The new vRealize Automation 8.1 release now also provides enhanced support for VMware’s NSX Data Center to enable customers to implement Network Automation. New capabilities include:
- Networking Day 2 actions – enabling Day 2 actions, such as reconfiguring networks and reconfiguring load balancer specific properties
- Networking extensibility events – providing new extensibility events (compute independent) in ABX for networks, load-balancers, and security groups for support of custom enhancements to deployments
- NSX-V: On-demand Security Group – enabling native support of NSX-V on-demand Security Groups in Blueprint design canvas
- NSX-T: On-demand Security Group – enhancing the graphical representations / bindings of compute networking (NICs) and on-demand Security Group constructs in the Blueprint design canvas
These enhancements bring ease of use, flexibility, and increased efficiency for both cloud admins and network admins, while ensuring standardized environments and avoiding configuration drift. In other words, it eases management for IT teams and prevents inconsistency across environments that can slow operations and increase the risk of security breaches. Even as workloads move between clouds, the configuration follows them and is automatically updated, reducing extensive manual rework, such as re-IPing.
Together with NSX Data Center, vRealize Automation 8.1 helps organizations to embrace network automation and gain the ability to extend network and security policies across modern apps, environments, and clouds.
Learn More
To learn more about network automation, visit us online at Network Automation. See how vRealize Automation and NSX Data Center can enable rapid application rollout with networking and security services, helping you enjoy faster time to market, operational savings, and productivity gains.
- Blog: Announcing vRealize Automation 8.1 (Mar 10, 2020)
- Blog: Network Automation with Cloud Assembly and NSX (Apr 22, 2019)
- vRealize Automation
- NSX
- Network Automation eBook
