Decentralize NetScaler configurations by integrating with Self-Serve infrastructure

With the increase in no of apps and growing NetScaler infrastructure to support them, App delivery teams are burned out with NetScaler config request from the app teams across organization. This drives NetScaler team to decentralize app-centric NetScaler configurations to respective app owners. But with decentralization, NetScaler admins faces other concerns on losing control, auditing changes, and enforcing best practices across teams on the shared NetScaler infrastructure.

NetScaler provides end to end solution to above challenges spanning across teams. It comprises of below components: -

• NetScaler– Partitioned NetScaler for respective app teams for delivering their apps to end users.

• Citrix ADM – Centralized control plane to manage, monitor and troubleshoot your large and distributed NetScaler infrastructure.

• ADM Stylebooks – Declarative approach to drive config updates to NetScaler.

• ADM Ansible Modules – Ansible modules provides IaC approach to configuration along with strong integration capabilities with rest of IT components such as CI/CD and self-service infrastructure.

All the above components can be integrated in below sequential fashion to form end to end solution :

Benefits of the solution:

• App developers are already familiar with Ansible tool, hence there is no learning curve and can use it to provide app config inputs to NetScaler

• DevOps can easily integrate our Ansible modules in CI/CD workflow because of pre-built Ansible integrations available with ServiceNow or Jenkins

• Stylebooks provide a declarative approach to NetScaler configs abstracting the underlying NetScaler architecture

• NetScaler when partitioned into logical entities provides segregation and RBAC to different App teams

• NetScaler owners get the benefit of Citrix ADM centralized control plane – 

  • Onboards partitioned NetScaler and is tenant aware. It ensures that API activity does not cross tenant boundaries.

  • Fine-grained RBAC that ensures app teams can only make changes to their own Stylebook or Config pack.

  • Visibility into all the NetScaler changes and a single source of truth to track entire NetScaler configs state.

  • Monitor and audit your NetScaler infrastructure from single pane.

Above solution empowers app owners to release apps faster to end user and reduce maintenance overhead on NetScaler admins without compromising on security, compliance, and best practices.

Wanna try this out ? Check out our hands-on lab with NetScaler Automation with Ansible and also find below Ansible scripts to create and apply ADM Stylebooks to NetScaler.