Cloud Foundry Integration for AutoSys: Streamlining Cloud Automation

Within most enterprises, the journey toward digital transformation is well underway and only continues to get more important to the organization’s long-term prospects.

As development teams look to support this transformation, cloud-native development approaches have grown increasingly common. Within the cloud-native application delivery arena, Cloud Foundry has emerged as an industry standard. Initially developed by VMware, Cloud Foundry is an open-source platform that provides a modern, highly efficient model for cloud-native app delivery.

Cloud Foundry relies on containers to virtualize operating systems, which enables them to be run seamlessly in any environment, whether a private data center or public cloud. Workload automation efficiently starts and stops containers as part of normal operations. In effect, these containers can be viewed like a traditional batch process.

To successfully run complete business services, automated workloads from across several different platforms, in addition to Cloud Foundry need to be orchestrated. When Cloud Foundry workloads are only managed within the Cloud Foundry environment, there is a lack of coordination and visibility across the full business service

Therefore, as the organization expands the use of Cloud Foundry, it runs the risk of establishing a new automation island that isn’t centrally tracked or governed. That’s why there is a need for an enterprise automation platform that can provide visibility and orchestration of workloads across the entire application landscape.

Manage cloud automation with maximum efficiency

As long as automation has been around, the potential for costly, brittle islands of automation has also been around. While decision-makers want to continue to adopt cloud offerings, enterprise automation teams don’t want to have to start from scratch in managing automation in cloud environments, and in the process create new islands of automation.

That’s why the use of AutoSys continues to be so essential. AutoSys provides central management of automation workloads across a range of environments and platforms. AutoSys is essential in enabling teams to adapt to evolving requirements driven by cloud environments.

Introducing AutoSys integrations

The team at Broadcom has developed several integrations to support a broad range of environments:

• Public cloud services, including AWS, Azure, and GCP.
• SaaS-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) environments, such as Oracle and SAP.
• Extract, transform, and load (ETL) solutions, including Azure Data Factory, Databricks, and Google Cloud Data Fusion.
• Cloud storage solutions like Amazon S3 storage.
• Workflow automation tools, such as Apache Airflow and Google Cloud Composer.

You can see all our AutoSys cloud integrations and Cloud Foundry integrations with other Broadcom Automation products, like dSeries in our Automation Marketplace.

The Cloud Foundry integration

With the AutoSys integration for Cloud Foundry, teams can leverage the power of Cloud Foundry in streamlining application delivery. At the same time, they can continue to employ AutoSys as their central, unified platform for managing and orchestrating automation workloads across their application landscape. AutoSys can issue commands to Cloud Foundry to start or stop a container and execute commands on the container.

AutoSys offers a rich set of capabilities that are invaluable for IT operations teams. With AutoSys, any process dependencies can be modeled. The solution offers centralized operational control, and it offers 360-degree visibility of all services running in production.

Cloud Foundry integration for AutoSys: how it works

The AutoSys integration or plug-in for Cloud Foundry uses the Cloud Foundry public API. The plug-in enables workload teams to execute tasks directly in Cloud Foundry.

In the AutoSys environment, teams can start by creating new jobs or selecting specific jobs that have already been created. Job definitions need to include a base URL, user ID and password, and application name. In addition, they should specify whether a client secret is required to enable authentication.

Those jobs are used to automate tasks in Cloud Foundry, such as starting or stopping an application. In the Cloud Foundry environment, there will be different namespaces defined and specific apps within those areas.

Within AutoSys, the job can be started, which will initiate an application. Operators can look at the spool output within AutoSys to see what the job did. This includes tracking the start request, the login and authentication process, and the end output.

In AutoSys, success criteria for the job will also be established. When jobs are completed successfully, they can trigger subsequent jobs. For example, if one job starts an application to execute a function, and the task is completed successfully, the next step can be to shut down the application.

If a job doesn’t complete successfully, details will be available in the spool file, including the error type. Here too, an unsuccessful job can initiate a subsequent job, such as alerting an administrative team.

Conclusion

While the use of Cloud Foundry can offer AppDev teams several advantages, it takes an enterprise automation solution to make the most of these capabilities. With the AutoSys plugin for Cloud Foundry, the organization gets the best of both worlds. Cloud Foundry streamlines cloud-native application delivery and, at the same time, AutoSys provides a unified platform for managing all automation workloads, including those running in Cloud Foundry.

To learn more, be sure to read our primer on why AutoSys is so important for cloud automation.