A few days ago we recorded and posted Show #4 of the Overcast podcast. In it, James Urquhart and I interview Greg Ness, a senior director at Infoblox and someone who has been blogging about IT infrastructure, often in the context of cloud computing. Greg is one of the people promoting the notion of Infrastructure 2.0.
Many areas that fall under the "infrastrcture" category are experiencing a rennaisance lately, and I expect much innovation in this area. Jeremy Geelan, chair of the Cloud Computing Conference at Sys-Con asked me to send in my cloud-related predcitions for 2009. One of the predictions I sent was this:
System Administration & Configuration and Network Management Will Become
a Sexy Field Bursting with Innovation
After years of stagnation, system
administration, configuration and network management will thrive with
innovation. New standards will emerge and people will come up with new forms of
innovation in the field. Open source projects such as Puppet will experience
incredible momentum. In a sense, for cloud computing to succeed, system
administration needs to be eliminated. Or more accurately, automated and
simplified, which creates tremendous potential for innovation.
As Greg points out in the podcast, many of these infrastrcuture areas were ripe for a major change even before the advent of cloud computing. The arrival of cloud computing on the scene will accelerate this trend. A reporter working on a cloud computing story (about
Miwok Airways use of GigaSpaces and EC2) asked me why is this the case. Why does cloud computing accelrate the need for innovation in the infrastrcuture space?
Greg discusses some of the issues in great detail and intelligence
on his blog, so I'll direct you there. But from my perspective here are a few points that I think answer the reporter's question:
Self-Service: One of the key tenets of cloud computing, at least as I view it, is the notion of self-service (after all, we do call it Infrastrcuture-as-a-Service). That is one of the key pieces that Amazon Web Services broguht to the table. Provisioning servers, a task that used to involve heavy involvement and expertise by the IT ops folks or you hosting service people, is now a realtively simple technical task that pretty much any developer can get done on their own within minutes. But as the use of cloud computing grows and becomes more sophisticated, there will be a need to enable self-service for increasingly more complex IT tasks: various config tasks, networking, security and so on. To enable these as self-service function new layers that create a dynamic, autonomic, automatic and user-friendly experience will need to be created.
Portability: One of the barriers that still exist to cloud computing is the issue of vendor lock-in. There's a nice piece in the December 1 print edition of InformationWeek about Harrah's Entertainment (the big hotel and casino company) and their adoption of cloud computing, entitled "Real Money on the Cloud". Harrah's is an early adopter of Salesforce.com's Force.com platform-as-a-service. Here's a little excerpt:
"There's a learning curve and a bit of a lock-in," [Harrah's CIO Tim] Stanley said in a recent interview, because he doesn't see an easy way to port anything developed on Force.com to a non-Salesforce platform. So he's been careful where Harrah's uses Force.com. So far, the "merits are outpacing the detriments."
not everyone is willing to be an early adopter like Stanley and even he is extremely caution about the use of a highly proprietary platform. And to emphasize the lst sentence in the quote -- as Homer Simpson says to Bart when the boy says "this is the worst day of my life" -- "This is the worst day of your life SO FAR".
To enable portability, new standards will emerge in infrastructure (I mentioned Puppet above), and new abstraction layers that hide the specifics if various infrastructure implementations.
Speed and Cost Savings: Much of the drive towards cloud computing is based on time-to-market and costs-savings benefits. The competittion among cloud providers will, therefore, increasingly be on who provides a faster more efficient system. This will be another major driver for new forms of infrastrcture automation and improvements.
UPDATES:
