Background:

Chip manufacturers have been moving towards developing software to run on vertically integrated chips.

As part of this transition, a major device manufacturer tasked its ITOps teams to scale their software development initiatives without incurring additional capital expenses. Their workflow included utilizing cloud environments and resources, including storage, server, networking, and native services, to provide the environments necessary for software development.

Challenges:

The ITOps teams faced a skills gap challenge, with few cloud technology experts who operated in siloes. A simple ticket for database provisioning took weeks to approve as the request made its way through security, networking, storage, and server request queues that swelled with thousands of tickets. With so many requests to oversee, managing cloud resource use and cost visibility became difficult, if not impossible.

What were they looking for?

The ITOps teams struggled to efficiently provision infrastructure with the necessary controls, straining innovation. Their critical operational mandates were:

• Provide developers with access to their required environments as quickly as possible
• Implement governance to ensure security is maintained
• Gain infrastructure cost visibility
• Discover existing IaC assets
• Utilize their existing tools and assets, including NetApp Ontap and Ansible scripts

The Impact

• Time to create complete environments reduced by up to three weeks
• Developers gained self-service access to deploy infrastructure through their CI/CD pipeline tools
• ITOps gained control of environments at the user/role level
• Cloud expenses reduced by more than 50% ​
• Automatically discovered all IaC assets
• Integrated with existing tools and systems (CI/CD, IaC, NetApp Ontap, Ansible, IPAM, and CMDB)

The Benefits of implementing Quali Torque

• The manufacturer can efficiently accommodate thousands of requests for development, test, and production environments
• Cloud spend has decreased because Torque automatically provisions the right-sized environments and shuts them down based on policies and governance
• Automatically create Torque blueprints using Git repositories assets and modify as needed
• Resource use is classified and auto-tagged, making it easy to measure resource use by project
• Development and test teams can launch self-service environments through their existing CI/CD tools
• Torque is API first and integrates with existing tools and systems