Cloud: Managing Workloads in a Hybrid IT Environment

The change in organizational IT landscapes demands new approaches to managing workloads. Hybrid environments have become a new norm for enterprises but they bring a different set of challenges and force them to juggle traditional on-premises resources with those housed in the cloud.

What is Hybrid IT?

The term "hybrid" has evolved over time in the IT landscape. Initially, it denoted mainframe and distributed systems. However, it now primarily refers to the combination of on-premises and cloud infrastructures, where mainframes typically belong to on-premises infrastructure. As cloud applications grew in number and significance, the need for integration with legacy applications running on-premises has become critical. 

Application teams, being early adopters of technology, develop new applications using platform-specific automation tools. However, at the time of moving these applications to production, they tackle issues surrounding governance, auditability, and security. These platform-specific automation tools are good for small organizations or dev and test environments, but lack the comprehensive capabilities that today’s enterprises need. Enterprises expect automation tools to provide robust, scalable, and reliable automation across diverse platforms and applications. Furthermore, they demand visibility into operations, compliance, and integrations with both on-premises and cloud infrastructures.

This shift in trends has led to the use of enterprise schedulers, capable of managing both on-premises and cloud workloads, driving automation while also providing the additional layer of governance that every organization demands across various IT platforms.

Hybrid IT Automation Strategies

Consider the scenario of John, an application owner at a large financial firm who manages critical business applications. As he plans to deploy a new application across his hybrid IT infrastructure, including various cloud providers and on-premises systems, he faces a significant challenge.

While hybrid IT brings flexibility, it also comes with the possibility of fragmented automation if the application is not architected properly. John must ensure that his application runs flawlessly by crafting a feasible automation strategy in this complex environment, a challenge amplified by the availability of a multitude of workload automation tools across these platforms.

Additionally, if John opts for a cloud scheduler for the parts of the application hosted on mainframes, he faces the additional task of recalibrating job definitions and, perhaps, refactoring code for compatibility with the cloud, meaning more work for his team. Thus, deploying applications in a hybrid IT environment brings both opportunities and challenges for application owners like John.

Broadcom Workload Automation Solutions 

The Broadcom Workload Automation solutions offer feature-rich capabilities that work seamlessly with a tight cloud-native integration. These solutions allow enterprises to automate, regardless of the platform. Our vast array of integrations take care of all sorts of use cases.

We have been discussing this topic quite a bit as of late with many customers. Our key takeaway for customers is that, without exception, cloud-native scheduling tools offer very limited capabilities.

Despite this being the case, we recognize that there are good reasons for taking advantage of these alternate options as they are easily accessible to the application development community and are tightly integrated with cloud applications, services, and platforms.

Thankfully, Broadcom’s Workload Automation agents, agent plug-in extensions, and web service integration capabilities are here to make that task more manageable.

Imagine effortlessly executing related web services and facilitating data exchange through a simple, user-friendly interface. Broadcom’s Workload Automation integration capabilities make this a reality. These integrations provide support for broad authentication standards, like OAuth, and flexibility in passing parameters via query parameters, request body, or HTTP headers.

Without these out-of-the-box integration capabilities via agent plug-ins, you could spend time and money building custom integrations for popular cloud platforms and services, but building these integrations require specific skill sets. Besides, who wants to manage multiple custom scripts?

With Broadcom Workload Automation tools, you won't have to write custom scripts–at least not for popular SaaS platforms. What's more, they allow for data sharing between web services and enable you to trigger jobs in response to particular events on the agents. This event-driven pattern brings relevance to your existing batch processes in the business context.

Key Capabilities

Let's delve deeper into these native capabilities:

1. Workload Automation Agents: Workload Automation Agents are components of Broadcom’s Workload Automation solutions that extend automation capabilities to a wide variety of processing platforms to integrate business processing with workload management. They reduce dependencies on scripting, coding, and creating artificial procedures. These agents allow Broadcom schedulers to automate, monitor, and manage workload across a range of platforms. They can integrate workload automation processing across all leading operating system environments such as UNIX, Windows, and Linux; support major ERP systems including SAP, Oracle E-Business Suite, and PeopleSoft; and enable automation with a wide range of Application Services, Web Services, and Databases.
2. Agent Plug-ins: Extend your agent's functionality by installing one or more agent plug-ins. Whether you're working with Oracle or other relational databases, you can easily install a database agent plug-in to query and monitor the database.
3. Agent Plug-In Extensions: The Broadcom Workload Automation agent comprises several application services plug-in extensions; each plug-in extension extends the capabilities of the agent. These plug-ins are required extensions for basic functionality. The plug-in extensions are Java libraries that extend the built-in capabilities of base POJO job types. Installation on an agent is all it takes to tap into these capabilities, making your workload automation solutions more versatile without any patching or upgrading. You can find and download agent plug-ins from the Broadcom Automation Marketplace website.
4. Agent Jobs: There are several Agent Jobs available to take advantage of agent capabilities. The most important one from the web service orchestration perspective is the POJO job type, which requires Workload Automation agents. If you're into Java, POJO jobs will pique your interest. Use them to invoke custom Java code, instantiate a class, create a Java object, and invoke a method on it.
5. Web Service Orchestration (work in progress): Currently, the CA 7 and ESP engineering teams are building a new job type to support SaaS applications. It's fully REST-enabled, supports JSON and XML data types, and caters to a wide variety of HTTP methods (POST, GET, PUT, DELETE). Once live, it will empower your scheduling team members to create jobs orchestrating SaaS applications without needing to learn scripting or coding.

Keep in mind that all these features require Workload Automation agents. If you're still on UUJMA, now is a great time to consider upgrading.

Broadcom’s Automation Marketplace

Now, let's introduce Broadcom’s Automation Marketplace–a one-stop shop to download plug-in extensions for agents. We are expanding and rebranding it to cover more of our Workload Automation solutions that include both ESP and CA 7 on the mainframe side.

The relaunched Automation Marketplace makes it easier for you to browse, search, and download plug-in extensions for these products, allowing them to extend the reach of enterprise workload automation solutions. Moreover, these purpose-built integrations simplify integration with new cloud technologies and remove the need for you to write new code.

One of the biggest benefits? Customers can take advantage of these extensions with any supported release of their current Broadcom workload automation solution, eliminating the need for costly upgrades. This means extending your solution to the cloud has never been easier, while still benefiting from all the proven enterprise-grade workload automation features and functions you rely on.

We have a broad range of integrations that span across multiple cloud providers (e.g. AWS, Azure, and GCP), as well as ERP SaaS environments and cloud applications. We support a number of ETL solutions, including:

• Databricks
• Azure Data Factory
• Google Cloud Data Fusion

You can integrate with cloud storage solutions like Amazon S3 storage and workflow automation tools like Apache Airflow or Google Cloud Composer. And, you can easily keep your Oracle and SAP SaaS processing integrated with on-premises processing using these plug-in extensions.

Streamline Your Hybrid IT Strategy With Broadcom

Hybrid environments have become the norm for the majority of Broadcom customers. There are various ways to automate these environments, there are a lot of options that are available, and of course, there are complexities in implementing these solutions. But whatever choices you make as an organization, one of the key components should be that you maintain the manageability of this environment regardless of how it's split. 

This is where Broadcom’s enterprise schedulers, CA 7 Workload Intelligence and ESP Workload Intelligence, along with Workload Automation agents and plug-ins, play an important role. They provide automation, versatility, scalability, security, and auditing capabilities that every modern organization needs. Please get in touch with us today if you’d like to learn more!