Due to technological advancements and better accessibility, businesses are better equipped to handle service disruptions. However, an infrastructure with capabilities that can detect anomalies and take necessary action is the new reality. A self-healing IT infrastructure is critical for companies that deal with large volume of data on a daily basis. A self-healing IT infrastructure eliminates the need for any kind of manual processes or human intervention, and it can scale any type of workload.

What are the important aspects of a Self-Healing IT Infrastructure?

Self-healing IT infrastructure has two important aspects: Observability and Artificial Intelligence

Nowadays, the use of Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps) is increasing, and therefore, the possibility of creating a self-healing IT infrastructure is becoming real. Such an infrastructure will ensure that data is collected from various sources like logs, metrics, and traces. These insights are actionable and help promote visibility.

Traditional IT infrastructure relies on manual processes and is time-consuming. However, the self-healing IT infrastructure is cloud-based and combines AI with observability to automate data collection and analysis. Without these two aspects, a self-healing IT infrastructure will not be able to function properly. When both aspects are employed, one can expect positive effects on business processes.

How to Build a Self-Healing IT Infrastructure?

While most companies use some version of IT Infrastructure Managed Services, a self-healing IT infrastructure can be further beneficial. It will ensure that the business processes are reliable and consistent, particularly for end-users.

Step 1: Finding and Separating All Critical Resources

Before creating a self-healing IT infrastructure, it is important to make sure that the operations team has isolated every critical resource. Often when a subsystem fails or when there is any kind of a glitch, it will affect the rest of the systems and the resources. Therefore, this precautionary measure is necessary. At times, sockets or threads are not free and that will lead to an exhaustion of resources. Apart from this issue, if the resources are not isolated, access to them might be open to too many parties. It will increase the chances of a security breach. Therefore, operations teams and developers in charge of introducing the self-healing IT infrastructure, need to create partitions. These partitions will effectively separate all resources. So, if there is an issue with one partition, it will not affect the other resources. Isolating critical resources will also ensure controlled access, better security, and the availability of audit trails.

Step 2: Creating Opportunities for Load Levelling

Applications can experience glitch or may have to deal with spikes due to heavy network traffic. Such issues may occur within internal systems or in applications that are customer-facing and front-end. When this particular problem occurs, the back-end systems suffer. A lot of pressure is put on these systems which often leads to system outages. To avoid these problems, developers will have to start queueing workloads in such a way that they can be run asynchronously. There are queue-based load-level techniques available for this purpose. The intermittent workloads will be leveled, and the back-end systems will not have to deal with too much stress.

Step 3: Making Use of Infrastructure as Code

In the traditional IT infrastructure, most processes are manual, and this leaves room for error. It also slows down the system and makes it difficult to ensure accurate server provisioning. To introduce automation in infrastructure provisioning, operations teams can choose to use the immutable infrastructure as code. It will help to eliminate manual stacking of networks and configure several dashboards. Infrastructure as code will also reduce the risk of manual processes by introducing cloud-based applications and services. Since the code cannot be altered, this method increases security.

Step 4: Leveraging Code Automation and Testing

Usually, developers start all processes at the application stage. However, in a self-healing IT infrastructure, before the development of a process, developers write out the automated test codes. Depending on the applications, these codes are constantly updated. Operations teams conduct test runs on a daily basis and this eliminates the need for any kind of manual testing. The code automation and testing ensure that the systems are performing properly and will not glitch when new services are released.

Step 5: Building Subsystems to Handle Difficult Issues

Certain applications can become unmanageable at times. If that happens, they should be broken into subsystems. The subsystems help to separate different parts of the application and separate those parts that are not dependent or crucial to the application. It helps to prioritize and optimize processes. It also helps to avoid system failures. The application may malfunction, but it will be contained within a specific subsystem. Therefore, the system at large will stay protected. It is far easier to manage such issues than it is to deal with a complete system outage.

Step 6: Introducing Logging and Monitoring Systems

Advanced logging and monitoring systems help to introduce certain triggers or smart alerts. Through logging and monitoring, companies can thoroughly check all potential issues and have them prioritized before an alert is given to the operations teams. The teams then know which problem to tackle first, instead of wasting time and resources to manually filter through several problems at once. Logging and monitoring systems also help to determine the appropriate course of action for high-priority technical issues.

Step 7: Maintaining Technology Standardization and Alignment According to Company Needs

Every company requires a different kind of IT infrastructure. The company should ensure that the self-healing IT infrastructure is aligned with the needs of the business. To do this, it is necessary to understand the demand and how self-healing IT infrastructure can benefit the business. It will help to provide standardized technology, scalable architecture, resources, and a homogeneous environment. It will also allow developers and operations teams to manage stack vulnerabilities efficiently.

Conclusion

Management overhead costs are significant and self-healing IT infrastructure can reduce them. Through IT Automation with AI, the infrastructure is far more robust, and workloads are extremely scalable. Thus, there is better security and complete visibility, especially in cloud environments.