Authors:
Naga Venkata Chaitanya Akula

Addresses:
Department of IT Operations (Ops), Hull IT Solutions and Services, Llano, Texas, United States of America.

Abstract:

Federal information technology (IT) infrastructures are undergoing a profound transformation as agencies strive to modernize legacy systems and ensure compliance with stringent security and availability mandates. At the heart of this transformation lies the need for resilient, scalable, and secure middleware that can integrate containerised services and orchestrated environments within a hybrid cloud ecosystem. This paper proposes a comprehensive middleware automation strategy leveraging Red Hat OpenShift and Microsoft Azure, driven by Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC), container orchestration, continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD), and observability solutions. The case study presented is derived from a live federal IT implementation designed to support national operations, achieve 99.9% system uptime, and accelerate deployment timelines. Key innovations include the use of Terraform for declarative infrastructure provisioning, Jenkins for pipeline automation, Prometheus and Grafana for observability, and Open Policy Agent (OPA) for policy enforcement. Additionally, cost optimization, disaster recovery, and performance benchmarking are incorporated into the design, creating a robust middleware layer for critical workloads. The integration of resilient middleware strategies has yielded tangible benefits, including a more than 25% improvement in application responsiveness, over 15% savings in cloud infrastructure costs, enhanced SLA compliance, and strong alignment with FISMA, TIC 3.0, and Zero Trust principles. 

Keywords: Cloud-Native Middleware; Red Hat OpenShift; Microsoft Azure; Infrastructure-As-Code; Terraform and Jenkins; CI/CD and Observability; Prometheus and Grafana; Federal IT; Disaster Recovery; Devsecops and Automation.

Received on: 08/08/2024, Revised on: 25/10/2024, Accepted on: 22/11/2024, Published on: 03/03/2025

DOI: 10.69888/FTSCS.2025.000378

FMDB Transactions on Sustainable Computing Systems, 2025 Vol. 3 No. 1, Pages: 46-57

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