Minimize technical debt with orchestration actions
2 minute read
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.
Add an action at a delete trigger point
- Go to Admin > Orchestration Actions.
- In the tree on the left, expand Delete Server.
- Select a trigger point. Post-Delete is the one used most often, because it runs after the server record has been deleted from CMP.
- Select Add Post-Delete Action, or select an existing action and set it to Enabled.
Free up a firewall rule automatically
When a user deletes a server, CMP should automatically free up the firewall rule that served it.
To address this use case, add a plugin at the Post-Delete trigger point that calls the firewall’s API and removes the server’s rule.
Automatically clean up failed servers
When a provision job fails, the server it was building can be left orphaned. CMP ships with a sample action, Automatically decom server when provisioning fails, that deletes the server from the resource technology when its provision job ends in FAILURE or CANCELED.
- Go to Admin > Orchestration Actions.
- In the tree on the left, expand Provision Server and select Post-Provision.
- Set Automatically decom server when provisioning fails to Enabled.
The default delete script does not touch the firewall or clean up related configuration, so pair this with an action at the Post-Delete trigger point.