Minimize technical debt with orchestration actions

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Why technical debt accumulates

Technical debt is the trail of digital breadcrumbs left behind as infrastructure is decommissioned. When a server reaches the end of its lifecycle, it is deleted. But the other dependencies that supported it, most commonly firewall rules, often remain. Cloud Management Platform (CMP) provides orchestration actions to clean them up.

Prerequisites

Access to and understanding of orchestration actions.
Understanding of the provisioning job.

Use the delete trigger points

For every provision action, there is a delete counterpart. While provisioning, CMP stores data from provisioning actions that later trigger the counterpart action, removing technical debt.

Network address translation

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Do this with a custom orchestration action. CMP ships with an example, Sample NAT IP Translation Action, at the Pre Server Refresh trigger point.

Enable the sample action

Go to Admin > Orchestration Actions.
In the tree on the left, expand Synchronize VMs from Resource Handlers and select Pre Server Refresh.
Set Sample NAT IP Translation Action to Enabled.

How the sample action works

The sample action uses the NAT Info field on CMP networks. Set NAT Info on the appropriate network to a string following the pattern 192.168.25.x. For any NIC associated with that network, the first three octets of the discovered IP address are replaced with the first three octets of the NAT Info pattern, and the original IP address is stored in the NIC’s private IP field.