Introducing INFRA – an Application to View Your Infrastructure

On my last two projects, I was the database architect and administrator.  Although our projects were small, we needed to maintain multiple sets of servers, each with different versions of the applications, databases, identity services, and other support services.  We had a development environment, a test environment, a user acceptance test environment, a pre-production (aka staging) environment and of course, production.  While some of these shared servers, others needed separate servers.  Most servers were virtual machines, but not all. So it became difficult to answer questions like:

• Which server is running our development Oracle database?
• Is the test application running against the test database?
• How can we quickly reset the user acceptance test environment for a new round of UAT?
• The backup files for the production SQL Server database need to be written to separate physical hardware. Which servers with room for these files meet this requirement?
• Can we take this server down for an upgrade today?
• What version of the application is on the staging application server?

I’ve been thinking about this problem on and off for several years.  I’ve done some research, and I can’t seem to find a COTS application that stores this information.  There are source control systems that can distinguish between the source code for different versions of an application, and I use this for different versions of database objects.  JIRA, which is an application that we use a lot for task and bug tracking, can list Releases of an application, lets you identify changes for each release, and can read the data in your source control system to tie releases to the source code that was changed.  Virtual Machine (VM) control software used by our system administrators, like the control software for VMWare can identify which virtual servers are running and which physical servers are hosting them.  But nothing ties all of this information together.

So, being between jobs, I decided to start writing a new application to keep the lists of servers, databases, application releases, and other services.  And especially, to keep the relationships between them – what release of the application is on this server, which databases it is using, where are the user ids and passwords that can access this application on this server. The goal is to be able to answer the questions listed above and others like them.

I call my new application, INFRA.  It is a work in progress, but I thought I’d share the process with my readers.  The initial database design is pretty much done, so I’ll start with that.  I’ll be inviting you to share your thoughts too.  Tell me where I’ve gotten it right, where I’ve gotten it wrong.  Tell me if the whole idea is stupid – I’d love to hear that someone has already solved this problem.