Transcript of a Briefings Direct discussion on how Sprint has made IT infrastructure orchestration and automation a pillar of a strategic IT architecture in the future.

1. Orchestration and Automation Bring IT into DevOps
Readiness for Sprint
Transcript of a Briefings Direct discussion on how Sprint has made IT infrastructure
orchestration and automation a pillar of a strategic IT architecture in the future.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app for iOS or Android.
Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the HP Discover Podcast Series. I'm
Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator for this
ongoing sponsored discussion on IT innovation and how it’s making an impact on
people’s lives.
Our next DevOps innovation case study explores how telecommunications giant
Sprint has placed an emphasis on orchestration and automation to bring IT culture
and infrastructure into readiness for cloud and software-defined data center
(SDDC), as well as DevOps.
We will learn how Sprint has made IT infrastructure orchestration and automation
a pillar of its strategic IT architecture future. Let's find out how they're going to that by
welcoming our guest Chris Saunderson, Program Manager and Lead Architect for Data Center
Automation at Sprint in Kansas City, Missouri. Welcome, Chris.
Chris Saunderson: Thank you, Dana. Very glad to be here.
IT automation is an urgent priority
Automation and orchestration can pay huge dividends
Read the report
Gardner: I'm intrigued by your emphasis on working towards IT infrastructure, getting too more
automation as a principle it’s not just tactical, but a strategic level. Tell us why you think
automation orchestrations are in fact strategic?
Saunderson: We've been doing automation releases since 2011, but it came out of an
appreciation that the velocity of change inside that data center is just going to increase over time.
We look it at as journey. We have to go to dark old days pre-2009 -- really pre-2006 for us --
where the conversation was all around standardizing. I'm going to have standard systems, and
we're going to employ in this way, and they'll be racked this way. We looked at that and said,
"It’s not really got a lot of legs to it."
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Gardner

2. You have the virtualization revolution of 2003. We had been VMware since 2003 getting into
more virtualization technologies on the other platforms we that have. But in
2009, my boss and I sat down and said., "Look, this is going nowhere. We're
not going to make a significant enough impact on the way that the IT division
works. They will spread on the whole if we just keep doing the same thing."
That’s when we sat down and looked at what the landscape looks like. We
could see the orchestrated data center coming. I encapsulated it as the "data
center of things." When you look at the journey that most enterprises go
through, right around 2009 is when the data center of things emerged. You then started to lose
track of where things are, what they are, who uses them, how long they’ve been there, and what
their state is.
When we looked at automation and orchestration in 2009, it was very solidly focused on IT
operational efficiency but -- and this is where you are leading into and I'm happy to have this
discussion -- it had the longer-term view to it that it was going to be foundational for the way that
we do things going forward, if for nothing else than to handle the data center of things. We could
also see changes coming in the way that our IT organization was going to have to respond to the
change in our business, let alone just the technology change.
Gardner: So that orchestration has allowed you to not only solve the problems of the day, but
put a foundation in place for the new problems, rapid change, cloud, mobile, all of these things
that are happening. Before we go back to the foundational aspects, tell us a little bit about Sprint
itself, and why your business is changing and, for those people who are not familiar, what the
Sprint of today is all about.
Provider of choice
Saunderson: The Sprint of today. We're number three, with aspirations to be bigger, better, and
faster, and the provider of choice in wireless, voice and data. We're a tier 1
network service provider of global IP network along with private network, MPLS
backbone, all that kind of stuff. We're a leader in TRS -- Telecommunication
Relay Services for the deaf.
The Sprint of old is turning into the Sprint of new, where we look at mobile and
we say mobile is it, mobile is everything -- that Internet of Things (IoT). That's
what we want to foster. I see an exciting company that’s growing in terms of connecting people
not only to each other, but to their partners, people who supply services to them, to their
entertainment, to their business. That’s what we do.
Gardner: So in order for your IT organization to be responsive to this fast-changing corporation
you had to take some steps. Let’s go back to that notion of orchestration. When you started that
journey for automation, getting out of those manual processes and managing complexity but
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Saunderson

3. repeatedly getting the humans out of the way, so to speak, what have you learned that you might
relate to other people? What were some of the first things that people should keep in mind as
they embark on this?
Saunderson: It’s really a two-part answer. Orchestration comes after automation, because
orchestration is there to consume the new automation services. So let’s take that one first. The
big things to remember is that change is hard for people. Not technology change. People are very
good about doing technology change, but unwiring people’s brains is a problem, and you have to
acknowledge that up front. You’re going to have a significant amount of resistance from people
to changing the way that they're used to doing things.
Now addressing that is also a human problem, but in a certain sense, the technology helps
because you're able to say things like, "Let's just look at the result and let's compare what it takes
to get to the result. Was it the humans doing it and what does it take to get to the result with the
machines doing it?" Let’s just call it what it is. It’s machines doing things. If the result is the
same, then it doesn't require the humans. That’s challenge number one, unwiring people’s minds.
The second is making sure that you are articulating the relevance of what you’re doing. We had
an inbuilt advantage, at least in the automation space, of having some external forces that were
driving us to do this.
It’s really regulatory compliance, right? Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) is what it is. PCI is what it is --
SAS70, FISMA, those things. We had to recognize the excessive amount of labor that we were
expending to try and keep up with regulatory change.
PCI changes every year or 18 months. So it's just going through every rule set and saying "Yes,
this doesn’t apply to me; I'm more restricted." That takes six people. We were able to turn that.
We were able to address the requirement to continue to do compliance more effectively and more
efficiently. Don’t lose that upward communication, the relevancy thing, which is not only are we
doing this more efficiently, but we are better at it?
When you get to orchestration, now you’re really talking about some interesting stuff because
this is where you start to talk about being able to do continuous compliance for example. That
says, "Okay, we used to treat this activity as once a quarter or maybe once a month. Let's just do
it all the time, but don’t even have a human involved in it." Anybody who has talked to me about
this will hear this over and over again. I want smart people working on smart things. I do not
want smart people working on dumb things. Truth be told, 99 percent of the things that IT people
do are dumb things.
Orchestration benefits
The problem with them is that they're dumb because they force a human to look at the thing
and make a decision. Orchestration allows you take that one level out, look at the thing, and
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4. figure out how to make that decision without a human having to make it. Then, tie that to your
policy, report on policy compliance, and you're done.
The moment you do that, you’re freeing people up to go have the harder discussions. This is
where we start to talk about DevOps and this is where we start to talk about some of the bigger
blocks that grind against each other in the IT world.
Gardner: Continuous is very interesting. You use the PCI compliance issue, but it's also very
important when it comes to applications, software development, test, and deploy. Is there
anything that you can explain for us about the orchestration and automation that lends itself to
that continuous delivery of applications? People might not put the two together, but I'm pretty
sure there's a connection here.
Saunderson: There is. I wish we had one. Don’t put me on the soap box because I will get on it,
but DevOps is a philosophy. There was a fantastic discussion from Adobe where it was very clear
that DevOps is a philosophy, an organizational discussion. It’s not necessarily a technology
discussion. The thing that I would say though is that you can apply continuous everywhere.
IT automation is an urgent priority
Automation and orchestration can pay huge dividends
Read the report
The successes that we're having in that orchestration layer is that it's a much easier discussion to
go in and say, "You know how we do this over here? Well, what if it was a release candidate
code?" The real trick there, when you go back to the things that I want people to think about is
that DevOps is a philosophy, because it requires development and operations to work together,
not one hand off to the other, and not one superior to the other; it’s together.
If they’re not willing to walk down the same path together, then you have an organizational
problem, but you may also have a toolset problem as well. We're an Application Lifecycle
Manager (ALM) shop. We have it there. Does it cover all of our applications? No. Are we getting
all of the value out of it that we could? No.
But that’s because we're spending time in getting ready to do things like connect ALM into the
running environment. The bigger problem, Dana, is that the organization has to be ready for it,
because your philosophical changes are way more difficult than technical changes. Continuous
means everything else has to be continuous along with it.
If you're in the ITIL model, you’re still going to need configuration items (CIs). How do CIs
translate to docker containers? Do they need to be described in the same way? If the operations
team isn't necessarily as involved in the management of continuously deployed applications, who
do I route a ticket to and how do they fix it?
This is where I look at it and say that this is the opportunity for orchestration to sit underneath
that and say it not only has the capability to enable people to deploy continuously, whether it’s
into test or production, disaster recovery, or any other environment.
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5. To equip them to be able to operate the continuous operation that’s coming after the continuous
integration and development and deployment, has to be welded on to the side of that, because
you’re going to enforce dis-synergy if you don’t address it at the same time as you do with
integration and deployment.
Gardner: Let’s look at some other values that you can derive from better orchestration and
automation. I'm thinking about managing complexity, managing scale, but also more of the
software-defined variety. We are seeing a lot of software-defined storage, software-defined
networking, ultimately software-defined data center, all of which is abstracted and managed.
How do you find the path to software-defined data center, vis-à-vis better orchestration and
automation?
At the core
Saunderson: Orchestration is going to have to be at the core of that. If you look at the product
offerings just across the space, you’re starting to see orchestration pop up in every last one of
them -- simply because there's no other way to do it.
RESTFul APIs are nice, but it’s not enough because, at that point, you’re asking customers to
start bolting things together themselves, as opposed to saying, "I'm going to give you a nice
orchestrated interface, where I have a predefined set of actions that are going be executed when
you poll that orchestration to make it work and then apply that across the gamut."
Software-defined storage is coming after software-defined networks. Don’t misunderstand me.
We're not even at the point of deploying software defined networks, but we look at it and we say,
"I have to have that, if for no other reason than I need to remove the human hands out of the
delivery chain for things that touch the network."
I go back to the data center of things. The moment you go to 10 gig, where you are using virtual
context, just anything that’s in the current lexicon of new networking as opposed to VLANs,
versus all that stuff, switchboards, etc., you’re absolutely losing visibility.
Without orchestration, and, behind that, without the analytics to look at what's happening in the
orchestration that’s touching the elements in your data center, you’re going to be blind. Now,
we’re starting to talk about going back to the dark ages. I think we're smarter than that.
By looking at orchestration as the enabler for all of that, you start to get better capability to
deliver that visibility that you’re after, as well as the efficiency. We should never lose sight of the
fact that the whole reason to do this is to say, "Deploy the thing."
That’s fine, but how do I run it, how do I assure it, how do I find it? This keeps coming up over
and over. Eventually, you’re going to have to do something to that thing, whether it’s deployed
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6. again, whether you have some kind of security event that is attached to it, or the business just
decides not to do it any more. Then, I have to find it and do something to it.
Gardner: Given your deep knowledge and understanding of orchestration and automation, what
would you like to see done better for the tools that are provided to you to do this.
Is there a top-three list of things you’d like to see that would help you extend the value of your
orchestration and automation, do things like software defined, do things like DevOps as a
philosophy, ultimately to be have more of a data-driven IT of strategic operation?
Development shop
Saunderson: I'm not sure I have a top three. I can certainly talk about generic principal stuff,
which is, I want open. That’s what I really want. Just to take the sideline for a second, it’s
fascinating. It’s just absolutely fascinating. IT operations is starting to become a software
development shop now.
I'm not resistant to that in the least because, just in this conversation, we've been talking about
RESTFul APIs and we were talking about orchestration. None of this is IT operations stuff. This
isn’t electrons flowing through copper anymore. It’s business process translated into a set of
actions, open, and interoperable.
Then, just give me rich data about those things, very rich data. We’re getting to that point, just by
the shear evolution of big data, that it doesn’t matter anymore. Just give it all to me, and I will
filter it out to what I'm looking for.
Gardner: The thing that is interesting with HP is that they do have a big-data capability, as well
as lead operations capability and they're starting to put it together.
Saunderson: In the same way the orchestration is starting to pop up everywhere. If you look at
their product portfolio and you look at network coordination, it’s going to have an operations
orchestration interface into it. Server automation is welded into operations orchestration and it’s
going to appear everywhere else. Big data is coming with it.
I'm not hesitant on it. It's just that it introduces complexity for me. The fact that the reporting
engine is starting to turn big data is good. I'm happy for that. It just has to get more. It’s not
enough to just be giving me job results that are easy to find and easy to search. Now, I want to
get some really rich metadata out of things.
Software-defined network is a good example. The whole open flow activity just by itself looks
like network management until it goes into a big-data thing and then suddenly, now I have a data
source that I can start correlating events to that turn into actions inside the control that turns into
change on the network.
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7. Let’s extend that concept. Let’s put that into orchestration, into service management, or into
automation. Give me that and it doesn’t have to be the single platform. Give me a way to
anticipate HP’s product roadmap. The challenge for HP is delivery.
Gardner: Before we sign off, one of the important things about IT investment is getting the buy-
in and support from your superiors or the other aspects of your enterprise. Are there some
tangible metrics of success, returns on investment (ROIs), improvements and productivity that
you can point to from your orchestration, not just helping smart people do smart things, but
benefiting the business at large?
Business case
Saunderson: So organizations often only do the things that the boss checks. The obvious
priorities for us are straight around our business case.
If you want to look at real tangibles, our virtual server provisioning, even though it’s the
heavyweight process that it is today, is turning from days into hours. That’s serious change, that’s
serious organizational cultural change, but it’s not enough. It has to be minutes not hours, right?
Then there's compliance. I keep coming back to it as this is a foundational thing. We're able to
continue to pass SOX and PCI every time, but we do it efficiently. That’s a cultural change as
well, but that’s something that CIOs and above do care about, because it’s kind of important.
One gets your CFO in trouble, and the other ones stops you taking payments. That gets people's
attention really quickly. The moment you can delve into those and demonstrate that not only are
you meeting those regulatory requirements, and you're able to report all of them and have
auditors look at it and say yes we agree, you are doing all those things that you should be doing.
Then, you can flip that into the next area which is that we do have to go look at our applications
for compliance. We have rich metadata over here that was able to articulate things. So let’s apply
it there.
IT automation is an urgent priority
Automation and orchestration can pay huge dividends
Read the report
Gardner: Well great. I'm afraid we will have to leave it there. We've been learning about how
Sprint has made IT infrastructure orchestration and automation a pillar of a strategic IT
architecture in the future. And we have heard how Sprint has gained through its emphasis on
orchestration and automation by bringing an IT culture that is about readiness and compliance
and speed.
So please join me in thanking our guest, Chris Saunderson, Program Manager and Lead Architect
for Data Center Automation at Sprint in Kansas City, Missouri. Thank you, sir.
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8. Saunderson: Thank you, Dana.
Gardner: And a big thank you to our audience as well for joining us for this DevOps and
orchestration and automation case study discussion.
I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of
HP Sponsored discussion. Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app for iOS or Android.
Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Transcript of a Briefings Direct discussion on how Sprint has made IT infrastructure
orchestration and automation a pillar of a strategic IT architecture in the future. Copyright
Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2015. All rights reserved.
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