Tata Consultancy Services, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India: TCS Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC)

Written answers to the questions

1 Nov 2021

Total 339 words used.

TCS is spearheading its way towards transformation, leveraging Business 4.0 technology pillars, Cloud, Automation, Robotics and AI. With Cloud providing a robust foundation for automation, TCS’ Corporate IT Unit, Ultimatix exercises its core strength in Engineering, to use Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) for provisioning automated infrastructure.

Large organizations like TCS deploy multiple applications at the same time and need loads of servers to achieve critical business objectives. Thus, it becomes imperative to control costs and act with speed, paired with lowering risk. IaC makes all this possible using Automation.

IaC is an approach to infrastructure automation based on practices of software development. It focuses on consistent and repeatable routines for provisioning infrastructure to be fully automated, requiring no manual intervention.

Features and Functions

The Purpose is to enable Ultimatix Teams to build a culture of "Programming" Infrastructure as part of Product.

• Self-service: Minimum handoffs involved as environments are directly created using “Self-service” portal, by committing IaC templates into systems, instead of being created by specialized teams.
• Standardization: The process is streamlined with standardized templates for public cloud provisioning across all tiers, easing the entire process.
• Independent: Testing neither depends on availability of external entities nor on other product’s environments, reducing time and efforts required for testing.
• Governance: Established boundaries with an enhanced Governance model, following zero-trust network policy and frequent checks for avoiding over-provisioning.
• Secure Platform: Using privileged identity management tools, secure access provided at run time.
• Availability: Following blue-green deployments, scale set deployments have been automated for high availability.

Benefits

• Speed and Simplicity: . Parameter file needs to be verified with required parameters, and a fully functional environment is available within 2 hours.
• Configuration Consistency: As code is always checked in Version-controlled system, executing the same template results in identical environments, removing snowflake server issues.
• Accountability: Version-controlled files aid in traceability and accountability
• Increased Efficiency: Create, launch, and destroy environments at will.
• Cost Savings: With help of self-service utility for scheduling start and shutdown of VMs, non-production environments are kept running for a specific period, saving cost for the organization.

Total 289 words used.

With continued focus on reducing operational effort, IaC works on streamlining the infrastructure provisioning process with pre-built templates and process optimization.

1. Following an agile approach for infrastructure provisioning process optimization, by incorporating Lean Agile techniques like Value stream mapping, sprints, and SAFe practices,
   1. TCS has drastically reduced provisioning time from 12 weeks to 1 week, resulting in 55% reduction in delivering solutions with enhanced experience.
   2. ~24% savings on infrastructure deployed in Production.
   3. ~39% savings on infrastructure deployed in non-production.
2. While automating the overall infrastructure provisioning process, IaC has accrued benefits like:
   1. Creation of reusable reference architecture for standard stack of applications.
   2. Certified and verified images created with no vulnerabilities to be directly deployed, eliminating vulnerability assessment and penetration testing activities.
   3. Automated middleware configurations reduced the time to market for business and enhanced the overall user experience.
3. Around 1000 people hours per month saved for Operations support team with automated scale set deployments, which altogether eliminate multiple handoffs and human errors. These deployments helped in maintaining zero downtime as well as led to 50% reduction in user efforts.
4. With IaC, Log4j vulnerability of CVSS Score 10 was mitigated within 4.5 hours, by upgrading affected Log4j versions, without any outages.
5. The in-house talent is being groomed by setting up a dedicated Community of practice on Cloud and IaC, to train associates on Cloud computing aspects as well as designing pre-built templates and running definition files for infrastructure provisioning.

Engineers will have more control over provisioning of infrastructure, managers will see a big leap in productivity, with improved reliability and consistency in environments. All such advantages will greatly increase the speed and accuracy at which TCS deliver solutions and cater to ever-demanding market with enhanced customer experience and significant cost savings.