https://www.sh-soft.de/tags/automation/ Recent content in Automation on Steffen Hoppe – Infrastructure Reality & Insight Hugo en Thu, 26 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.sh-soft.de/posts/sales-system/sales-system-overview/ Thu, 29 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.sh-soft.de/posts/sales-system/sales-system-overview/ 📦 The Sales System Project – Overview Link to heading This series dives into a complex, long-running engagement centered on a fragile in-house sales system. The customer hosted 1,000+ Windows systems across development, test, and production stages. What began as firefighting evolved into automation, observability, and ultimately organizational change. The Journey begins Link to heading About 14 years ago, I took over responsibility for a single, large, in-house-developed sales system. https://www.sh-soft.de/posts/sales-system/automation-boundaries/ Thu, 26 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.sh-soft.de/posts/sales-system/automation-boundaries/ 🚧 Automation Boundaries Link to heading Summary: Automation helped us move faster, reduce errors, and scale operations. But it didn’t solve everything — especially when our systems had to interact with others. Where the Boundaries Appeared Link to heading Active Directory and DNS: We didn’t own it. Scripted group changes or DNS edits weren’t possible without external coordination. Firewall Rules and Load Balancers: Managed by a different team. Automation stopped at the request ticket. https://www.sh-soft.de/posts/sales-system/setup-problems/ Thu, 29 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.sh-soft.de/posts/sales-system/setup-problems/ 🏗️ Setup and Problems Link to heading Setup Link to heading Customer Landscape: Initially ~200 Windows servers, later scaled to over 1,000 across development, test, and production as new services were added and integrated into our automation Primarily Windows-based infrastructure: IIS, MSMQ, MSSQL, and some JBoss AD integrated authentication via NTLM and Kerberos, sometimes Basic Auth, host backend integration via IBM MQ Business-critical data processed via mainframe interfaces Different teams have control over: Active Directory: DNS / Users / Groups Firewall and Security Infrastructure Reverse Proxies Virtualization platform PKI Internal traffic often unencrypted due to lack of automated PKI or cert lifecycle Problems Link to heading Initial Challenges: