An Agile IT infrastructure is one that is designed to support rapid deployment and provisioning, and incremental upgrades and improvements. It takes its name from the development methodology made famous in the 2001 Manifesto for Agile Software Development. The Agile approach was created in reaction to heavyweight legacy software development practices that were proving to be too cumbersome, over-regulated and micro-managed to fit the needs of modern development teams. The Agile approach favored individuals and interactions over processes and tools, responding to change over following a plan, working software over comprehensive documentation, and customer collaboration over contract negotiation.
Agile software developers break work into small increments and work in sprints that last from one to four weeks. Working software is the main measure of progress toward the end goal. Teams typically have a daily meeting called a scrum, in which they briefly review their progress and flag any obstacles. One key difference between agile development and the classic waterfall style of development is the way they handle quality and testing. In waterfall, you have a testing phase after a build phase. Agile testing is done in every iteration, which yields learnings that inform the next iteration and can significantly boost a team’s ability to evolve and adapt the final product.
Agile IT infrastructure uses the Agile philosophy and applies it to the physical, network, and software components that make up an organization’s IT infrastructure. With an Agile IT infrastructure, teams are able to collaborate easily and securely, adapt quickly to new technologies, take advantage of lightweight deployment options, take a modular approach to updating components, and accelerate the building of modern web applications. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server was designed to help a business create and support an Agile IT infrastructure with a combination of features like modular design, container innovations, support for ARM server systems and Raspberry Pi, Rollback to enable quickly reverting to a good state, and Salt’s fast, scalable, and secure method of communicating with systems in real time.