If you haven’t worked on an Agile project then your team or client will probably consider attempting to design the infrastructure that’s needed for the entire life cycle of your solution up front. Everyone tends to accept that even with a costly up front design phase you’ll be asked to squeeze another terabyte in or extend your UAT environment to cope with x thousand concurrent users. Question: was the design phase really worthwhile and are you being Agile without even knowing it?
Agile will promote efficiency within your organisation because you’re limiting time and materials to what you need for the ‘job in hand’ and in infrastructure terms, you design, build and deploy what you need to get your project off the ground. For example, you have a team of developers and testers that have their tasks organised and need to get to work, so the immediate requirement is environments for both teams. This ensures your client is getting maximum value for money i.e. no one is sat around waiting to work while you spend time on a design phase with an unrealistic aim to include anything and everything you’ll ever need!
Traditional data centre provisioning, server hardware, storage and operations is a timely and costly exercise for any company, so finding or building a shared environment is key to Agile Infrastructure. Virtualisation is probably your first choice for development and test environments with UAT, Staging and Production possibly being a hybrid of both physical and virtual. VMware is an excellent server virtualisation choice but not the only one, Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and their new and improved Virtual Server platform ‘Hyper-V’ is an alternative if your Operations team aren’t skilled in supporting VMware estates or you’re on a tight budget. Short term hosting contracts are an ideal choice for organisations that don’t have an existing server platform.
Agile infrastructure will also help to empower your development and test teams to manage their environments, therefore removing potential ‘blockers’ They need to be free to develop and change without the fear of any permanent damage. Giving your teams a ‘roll back’ point that they control will ensure their environment can be refreshed in minutes rather than hours and in turn give your client maximum value for money...again!
