Product rationale:

DIGS is developed to enable self-service and process automation on IT infrastructure and service management. Traditionally, infrastructure management was manual driven with heavy reliant on operation teams to logon systems and run commands for service delivery. This has induced delay to project delivery and introduce misunderstanding on requirements as a result of multi-team’s handoffs. Through DIGS, application developers and service owners can manage their infrastructure and operation on their own without dependency on other teams, which significantly improves work efficiency and reduces risk of service interruption due to human errors from manual operation. The ability to seamlessly deploy consistent automation capabilities to all globally connected services through DIGS is also critical to the organization as we aspire to drive consistent usages of platform-based automation, reduce duplication of effort across the organization, and drive down the overall operational costs in technology.

Product innovation: 

• Customizable change automation – This function provides end users with an easy-to-use interface to customize change automation jobs. New Jenkins pipelines can be dynamically generated based on the set of change actions defined by users. The task options and functions are fully customizable, users can easily plug in the functions they need and create the customized automation jobs. This is unlike the usual ways of pre-defining automation steps within a Jenkins pipeline, which usually lacks the flexibility to cope with changing requirements and the inability to scale out for enterprise-wide use cases.

• Infrastructure operation through Chatbot – This offers technology teams a transformational self-service experience to manage their service operation through Chatbot, empowering application owners and developers to perform real-time infrastructure healthiness check on their own and at any time. There is no more dependency on operation teams to gather system information and status, which usually requires a service ticket to be raised and queued for actions. This also eliminates the need to manually logon systems to perform operational tasks such as logs gathering and process status check, reducing operational risks due to human mistakes.

• Automatic daily system data refresh – This capability has resolved a long-standing challenge of manual maintaining system inventory data, which usually results in data inaccuracy and requires huge administrative efforts to maintain data at scale. The automatic data retrieval mechanism will gather system information and configuration directly from all connected hosts on a daily basis and automatically consolidate into a central database. This ensures the changing information such as software patch versions, disk usages and system configurations can be refreshed automatically, the data accuracy and quality can be assured, and the administrative overheads can be eliminated.

• Zero touch certificate renewal solution – A fully end-to-end automated certificate renewal solution designed to eliminate manual effort on certificate management. Throughout the years, certificate renewals are heavily reliant on people performing specific manual change events, this has proven to fail on numerous occasions due to unattended certificate expiry or human error when performing changes, causing service outages. This solution will run the certificate renewal in the background and remove the need for a specific renewal event close to the certificate expiry, avoid service outage due to certificate expiry and achieve multi-millions of dollars savings per year.