Write The Future: What Nike Can Teach us About Environment Configuration
The little differences can make all the difference.
"The time has come for players to carve their name in history," the caption of the Nike ad tells us, highlighting World Cup players like Didier Drogba, Wayne Rooney, and Cristiano Ronaldo. Each fantasizes about what will happen to them about whether or not they score a goal, showing us that one small action can result in unimagined success or horrible failure.
The same is true when it comes to IT environments and how even minor actions can result in unexpected different outcomes. IT environments are complicated consisting of thousands of different configuration parameters, where even a single mis-configuration can reek havoc and lead to a production outage and even a severe disruption to the business. The challenge is finding the smallest changes and differences BEFORE they create a negative impact.
Granular Configuration Automation is a framework and IT strategy about being able to automatically find even the most minute changes in an IT environment , then alerting the IT team. This includes both changes that are supposed to be there and changes that are not, risking the stability of the environment. Taking a Granular Configuration Automation approach to managing an environment helps to identify those differences so that IT personnel can act on those changes before they turn into problems that will harm the environment.
Under Granular Configuration Automation, you can compare environments with each other or with their historical baselines, focusing on pinpointing every little difference between environments. After all, its those little differences that will eventually make all the difference to the outcome. Distinguishing those crucial differences holds the key to success, and will mean the difference for environment stability.
So as you prepare to write your own future whether planning your next release, or preparing to investigate the latest incident to hit your IT environment, think about how one small action can mean the difference between being a hero or being forgotten.
