OpsMill Transforms Infrastructure Automation with Beta Release of Open Source Infrahub

OpsMill announced the beta release of its open source Infrahub platform. Infrahub unifies previously disparate automation capabilities into a single platform, enabling IT teams to transform all their data center, cloud, network, and security infrastructure operations with scalable and consumable automation.

“I’ve spent years building automation systems for infrastructure and network management across a variety of organizations. At every stop, I encountered the same challenges: Managing network and cloud infrastructure required the use of a confusing, cumbersome, costly mix of solutions. These tools were always hampered by serious technical limitations, such as inflexible data models,” said Damien Garros, CEO and co-Founder, OpsMill.

Damien continued, “With the release of Infrahub’s open beta, we’ve drawn on years of experience to solve those challenges. This is the first platform that unites the GitOps Infrastructure-as-Code approach with an extensible structured data model. By combining these two approaches, Infrahub frees infrastructure and automation teams from having to integrate and maintain a fragile set of tools. Instead, they can focus on driving innovation through better automation.”

Infrastructure automation has suffered from an unhelpful divide between GitOps and traditional infrastructure management approaches that prevents teams from gaining the critical advantages and best practices of both approaches. GitOps, an automation approach used by many software development teams, offers version control and continuous integration (CI) validation, which are critical for maintaining an accurate data model while scaling automation use. However, GitOps doesn’t offer a structured data model that most easily represents IT infrastructure components and their many inter-linkages. Traditional infrastructure management approaches offer infrastructure-friendly structured databases, but don’t include version control or CI, and are constrained by fixed data models that limit their flexibility.

Infrahub unifies the best of both worlds in a single platform, including the following key capabilities:

• Extensible Graph Database: Infrahub overcomes the limitations of source-of-truth databases that come with fixed schemas. It is built on an extensible, knowledge-graph database that is ideal for representing and querying the many interrelationships between infrastructure components. Infrahub’s flexible data model means that it can scale across data centers, clouds, networks, and security infrastructure and use cases.
• Version Control: Infrahub makes versioning possible for your entire data model and all the data populated into that model. This means that multiple members of your team can, in parallel, create a branch of the entire infrastructure database, update an infrastructure component in the database in order to generate configuration files for a network change, then merge the updates back into the database. Native versioning of a centralized and extensible infrastructure database is a key innovation of Infrahub.
• Artifact Rendering: Infrahub doesn’t leave you alone in managing the generation of artifacts such as configuration files or reporting data files. It includes native artifact rendering as a native platform capability.
• Continuous Integration (CI): Infrahub has built in the process for performing CI validations to ensure quality control over configuration and data changes.

“As someone who has engineered large backbone networks and helped build a company that relied on extensive network and cloud infrastructure, I’ve seen firsthand how much organizations struggle with scalable and maintainable automation,” said Raphael Maunier, COO and co-Founder, OpsMill.

Raphael added, “Infrastructure teams often need their own dev teams just to gather data and build infrastructure, leading to high maintenance costs and slowed innovation. OpsMill was founded to change this. Infrahub provides all the key elements for scalable infrastructure and network automation success, allowing teams to focus on innovation instead of maintaining custom software.”