Overview

This basic introduction provides the background you need to understand IAG5 and follow the use cases and design examples in this guide.

Supported Tools

Automations built with many of the popular tools normally require detailed knowledge of how they work and in what environment they work in. With IAG5, they are transitioned into immutable services with common inputs, allowing operators and external teams to easily view and run them. This, in turn, lets the engineer focus on writing and managing automations instead of managing and maintaining servers, environments, and creating tooling for others to use the automations.

Supported tools currently include:

• Ansible
• Python
• OpenTofu

IAG5 Environment

IAG5 services pull code from a git repository, run the code in a virtual environment, then package that as a service to be run by users.

IAG5 Principles

Transitioning from a simple, single user automation model to a team or business oriented model requires a large shift and increased workload on the engineer. NetDevOps teams must account for and manage new infrastructure and processes based around providing production grade tools for operators who may or may not understand the underlying tools.

IAG5 aims to remove this barrier by providing short-lived automation containers and a prescriptive process to provide user accessible services. Essentially, the goals for IAG5 is to provide:

Managed Run-Time Environments

IAG5 provides well-defined, transitory run-time environments. This allows the automation to correctly run every time, where ever it runs. Each automation has its own environment and is guaranteed to be the same no matter where the service is deployed.

Service Based Structure

IAG5 creates a framework that puts automations into a service model. By classifying automations into a service, other teams can access and use these automations in a well-defined and structured manner. This allows NetDevOps to continue to develop the automation as they have been while providing team oriented mechanics. Teams can then access and use the automations without having to understand the underlying requirements to execute Python/Ansible/OpenTofu instructions.

Scalable Automation

You can run IAG5 as a single user to manage automations cleanly, or deploy IAG5 in a client/server model where each server is able to easily replicate services and scale out. As a single binary, IAG5 does not dictate the underlying infrastructure or server size.