Developing Fully Automated Infrastructure Policy and Trust Systems

Modern infrastructure management serves to run applications, but in many cases, all attention is spent on micromanagement of elemental details with no focus or understanding of the applications. This breaks down in two fundamental ways. First is the explosion of number of application service definitions, all hardwired for specific use cases, environments, and circumstances related to the stage of the application life cycle. Second is the dependency chaos resulting from lack of mechanisms to control consumption of application services. These problems are closely related. The missing piece is how service resources are allocated to their consumers and how such allocations can be controlled in a consistent, secure, abstracted way devoid of understanding of instance, architecture, and environmental detail. By introduction of automated policy and trust systems, the administrative overhead of managing infrastructure is reduced by putting operations on autopilot consistent with and governed by specified service-specific policies and consumption rules.

Speaker: Mike Dvorkin, Cisco