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Version: 10 - Vanillekipferl

Governance with Cloudomation Engine

Corporate governance are all the processes and rules that are in place in a company. Their purpose is to ensure consistency, and reduce risk.

Engine supports governance with several features.

Reliability​

For customers of our SaaS offering, our SLO guarantees uptime of the Cloudomation Engine platform.

Cloudomation Engine can be set up with a mirrored instance through the linked workspaces feature, which allows failover to a backup instance in case the primary instance fails. All license packages from Standard upwards include a license for a second workspace at no additional cost. The second workspace can also be used as a test instance.

The unique Python implementation developed by the Engine team and used by Cloudomation Engine enables the creation of savepoints, which make it possible to recover a process without data loss even if an automated process is interrupted (e.g. even in case of loss of electricity or sudden system shutdown).

A common issue with automated processes that integrate several different systems is that even one failing system can impact the reliability of the entire process. Cloudomation Engine has a number of features that allow dealing with this reality:

  • Retries can be specified for any part of any process. Standard cases like number of retries can be easily configured, but also more complex and intelligent retries can be set up, e.g. with a back-off in case a number of retries don’t work.

  • Test processes can be set up which can be used to continuously monitor and check availability of involved systems. In addition, these test processes can be used to check the system after each update of the Cloudomation Engine platform.

  • The connection test feature allows to individually test the availability of an external system. These checks can be scheduled. This can provide an early warning in case the API of an external system changes or an external system is unavailable.

  • The validation wrapper allows to validate inputs and outputs of each step in an automated process. The schemata of the input and output data can be learned automatically by the wrapper, and enforced afterwards. Logic can be added to convert data to a schema if the validation fails. This makes it possible to deal with one of the most common causes of failure in automated processes: missing or incorrect data.

  • The timeout wrapper ensures that a process starts and/or finishes within a given time. Custom logic defines what should happen if the process exceeds the timeout: e.g. canceling the process, triggering a rollback and sending notifications.

Monitoring​

Notifications can be set up to monitor any aspect of any process. The standard case is notification in case of failure, but also intelligent checks can be specified which can trigger a notification even before a process fails, e.g. if it is running for an unusually long time. Escalation paths can be defined in the notification logic, e.g. to notify a specific set of people at first, but at the first failed try, or if failure happens at specific times, a different or additional set of people should be notified etc.

Rollback​

The rollback wrapper allows to specify a process that should be run to roll back any changes to third systems in case a process fails.

Quality​

A linter is available for the online code editor in the Cloudomation Engine platform. This ensures basic code quality.

The open architecture of Cloudomation Engine allows to define any type of check processes that check existing processes for any custom quality criteria that the user defines.

Role-based access control (RBAC)​

RBAC allows to define roles that have access to specific types of resources and projects, and to assign users these roles.