IT Management 2.0: New Answers to New Questions
Today, most IT leaders have a relatively clear idea about what they must grow up to become—highly responsive, agile and lean service providers. Of course, they’ve known this for some time—only now, the transformation seems more imminent than ever.
It’s the combination of necessity and invention that has made this so: necessity, in the form of changing economics and market realities, and invention, in the form of new tools.
For most, the necessity part is clear as day—painfully so. But the tools? The tools remain cloudy—in many cases, literally.
In part, we have ourselves to blame for this rampant “cloud washing” that has swept across the vendor landscape over the last year or two. (Although, I’m quite proud of rPath’s discipline on this front. Certainly, cloud is an amplifier to our value, but we’ve consciously avoided being labeled “a cloud company” in the service of clarity and focus.)
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Shared Content is the Glue that Binds Dev and Ops
Kris Buytaert, one of the voices behind the DevOps movement, wrote an interesting and timely post that suggests the fragmentation of operational roles puts pressure on the release process—and the dev/ops relationship in general. His point? Most IT organizations are made up of specialists responsible for specific layers of the stack—for example, OS, middleware, application—or specific crosscutting disciplines—for example, security, network, storage. The lack of coordination between these groups creates delay, cost and risk in the release process.
From our perspective, we see the definitive software library as the glue that binds these fragmented groups. Rather than building a system in isolation, everyone contributes to a unified and version-controlled repository. Each party draws from the correct set of bits and clearly documents dependencies, policies, configurations and metadata as the system moves through development, testing and into production. In a recent post, I compared this dynamic to the principles of knowledge management, where shared, authoritative content becomes the basis for effective collaboration between fragment and interdependent teams.
Our view? Shared content is the glue that binds dev and ops.
eWeek Feature on Intelligent System Automation
Last week, I wrote about the three factors converging to make DevOps one of the key movements of the day. Specifically: Lean mandates, the need for speed, and the tidal wave of system scale.
These same factors are the reason that new, more reliable approaches to system automation are under close examination by IT today.
To better understand what intelligent system automation is all about, see the slide show eWeek published on the topic. It’s a quick, bite-sized survey of what makes this new model-driven approach to automation different–and better–than script-based approaches of yore.
DevOps: Why now?
There’s tremendous passion surrounding this burgeoning DevOps movement, which aspires to address the longstanding bottleneck between development and operations. It’s no surprise, because the cause is worthwhile: this bottleneck is the primary barrier to agility, responsiveness and delivering business value.
But more than a few have raised the question: How in the world is this new? It’s a fair question; dev and ops have long been divided by conflicting cultures, goals, processes and tools. And the motivation to bridge this gap is far from new.
What is new is an organized movement to shine a light on the problem space and emerging solution patterns. A community is finally organizing around the issue.
But why now? Because the time is right—for several reasons:
Lean mandates—last year’s crushing recession forced us to do more with less. Automation became the necessary alternative to headcount. It also made us smarter and more efficient at scaling without adding people. This is one of the reasons that economists are predicting a “jobless recovery” in 2010. Automation remains necessary and very much in vogue.
The need for speed—IT as competitive advantage is nothing new, but many companies are realizing that the velocity created by Agile hits a brick wall when it comes time to deploy an application—which is when business value is realized. That’s why agility needs to be extended into the operational context. At the same time, emerging self-service and elastic computing initiatives dictate the need for zero-latency provisioning—automated, policy-driven and conflict-free.
Crushing scale—IT is staring down a tidal wave of scale as systems transition from physical to virtual to cloud. What they’re realizing is that these new architectures are a cap ex boon and an op ex bust—every dime of ROI realized could be washed out by attendant growth in op ex costs as the management burden is shifted to these new architectures, which promise compounding growth in system volume.
And each of these pressures converges on the gap between dev and ops.
So, is the pain new? No, but it’s more acute than ever and it’s only getting worse.
That’s why the time is right for DevOps.
Integrating rPath with Puppet, Cfengine, and Chef
Here at rPath we just announced integration support for Puppet, Cfengine, and Chef, and wrote a new white paper on the subject. We also released new detail about our configuration roadmap (about which I will have lots more to say in the near future).
But for now let’s talk about Puppet integration. Read more
Cloud Confusion: Where to Run That App?
Bill Claybrook wrote an interesting feature in Computerworld on the perplexing dilemma facing IT organizations today: Where should I run my application? Faced with a growing universe of choices—physical, virtual, public cloud, private cloud—you can appreciate the challenge.
Making matters worse is the risk of lock in.
Our view? You don’t have to decide!
rPath treats system image formats as a “late binding” decision. By managing a complete system manifest from which you can automatically generate any arbitrary image type, rPath liberates IT organizations from the burden of deciding a priori. If you manage system manifests and treat images as ephemeral artifacts, deciding where to run an application and moving between environments is a piece of cake.
This model also has implications for the cloud of the future: Workloads can automatically move between cloud environments based on dynamic optimizations for price, performance or policy. Choice of a cloud target becomes a reverse auction or a policy-driven decision.
But that’s not possible unless systems are freed to run anywhere.
So, go ahead—sit on the fence and decide not to decide!
Shades of IT Management 2.0?
I’ve frequently railed against the outmoded view of IT management solutions, perpetuated by prevailing taxonomies and category definitions that are biased toward incumbent, legacy-focused vendors. Emerging vendors (like rPath and others), which are more in step with next-generation architectures and approaches, are all lumped into a nebulous bucket related to virtualization or cloud or some such thing.
So, it was with great satisfaction that I witnessed several events unfold this week.
It begins with a report published by JP Garbani and Thomas Mendel at Forrester Research which bids farewell to last-generation IT management definitions and promises a new taxonomy in better alignment with where architectures are headed (elastic, virtualized, application-centric) and business requirements are taking us (zero-latency, lean, massively leveraged human capital).
(The parenthetical notations are mine, not Forrester’s. Next week, I’ll share my specific views on the characteristics of IT Management 2.0–both commentary on Forrester’s emerging definitions and color on other points of view.)
This was followed by the announcement that CA will acquire 3Tera, an early innovator in elastic infrastructure (with a very slick user experience for visual server orchestration). And, finally, word that VMware will acquire EMC Ionix products including FastScale and ConfigureSoft to bolster its own efforts to dominate the IT management tool chain.
This is all good news for next-generation management vendors like rPath and others who will benefit from an increasingly clear market context.
It seems that shades of IT Management 2.0 are emerging.
DevOps: A Movement Emerges
Why do entrepreneurs do what they do?
Certainly many reasons, but I think one in particular stands apart: The belief that a problem is worth solving. In my experience, this is the essential motivation and the source of the passion, commitment and sacrifice that makes us half-crazed at times.
But how do you really know a problem is worth solving?
You know when the market begins telling your story—an unaided and authentic discovery of your problem space—and the pattern repeats until it’s a bona fide movement.
rPath has been the fortunate beneficiary of several movements: the rise of virtual appliances; the emergence of virtualization and cloud computing—and the attendant need for automation to deal with scale; and the changing nature of IT budgets and the need for automation in order to scale and “do more with less.”
Cap Ex Boon, Op Ex Bust? Virt and Cloud Drive Need for Automation
NetworkWorld’s Denise Dubie wrote an interesting article about this week’s IT management technology acquisitions by IBM and Dell. Dubie points out that IT management technologies offer intriguing capabilities to big tech vendors looking “to further expand their products into the management realm.” Dubie also notes that “the drive to acquire management capabilities is a byproduct of trends such as virtualization and cloud computing.”
It seems that virtualization and cloud may be a cap ex boon and an op ex bust.
As I said in my post yesterday, IT needs to get out of the infrastructure business. Today’s IT leaders are looking for ways to accelerate IT and deal with compounding system scale without adding cost or resources, and that’s where rPath comes in. rPath provides a next-generation system automation solution for provisioning and maintaining systems across physical, virtual or cloud environments. Massive scale at little or no marginal cost.
Toward an Application-Centric Data Center
Talk to any enterprise CIO today, and you’re likely to find an executive on a mission—a mission with a clear mandate to get IT out of the infrastructure business.
They’ll tell you that IT has been mucking around in the weeds for far too long.
They’ll tell you that time and budget are wasted managing software and physical infrastructure many layers beneath what business lines really care about.
They’ll tell you that infrastructure has no impact on business value—that it’s a costly distraction to what really matters: Applications and business services.
