Automatic Datacenter and Service Deployments Based on Capacity Planning Artifacts

When you first built services in one data center, it is always easy to do the deployments and changes. When the number of services increases, you would spend more time on service management and governance.

When we package all the services into one cloud offering and need to deploy in hundred of data centers, we have new problems. We need to evaluate all the capacity and data center or even network requirements of each services, and then initialize the new data center based on the evaluation. Normally it would need experts from datacenter, network and software development team with one or two months. How to do all these things automatically only based on the capacity planning artifacts? In this talk, I’ll share some of how we build and ship Apsara Stack, a dedicated cloud offering from Alibaba, to the data centers from different vendors.

Specifically:

1. A full datacenter capacity planning based on the measures from users' perspective.
2. A unified deploy model for network, operating systems and various cloud products.
3. Maintaining lightweight, easy-to-change production configuration instead of providing different toolsets.
4. Validate and test all changes automatically when changing any deployments