Slashdot Mirror
The Quiet Before the Next IT Revolution
snydeq writes: Now that the technologies behind our servers and networks have stabilized, IT can look forward to a different kind of constant change, writes Paul Venezia. "In IT, we are actually seeing a bit of stasis. I don't mean that the IT world isn't moving at the speed of light — it is — but the technologies we use in our corporate data centers have progressed to the point where we can leave them be for the foreseeable future without worry that they will cause blocking problems in other areas of the infrastructure. What all this means for IT is not that we can finally sit back and take a break after decades of turbulence, but that we can now focus less on the foundational elements of IT and more on the refinements. ... In essence, we have finally built the transcontinental railroad, and now we can use it to completely transform our Wild West."
Horsehit, your company ran out of money to buy more tech. That's called 'stasis'.
The article is a rather simplistic hardware-centric viewpoint. It doesn't even begin to touch on the areas where IT has always struggled: design, coding, debugging, and deployment. Instead it completely ignores the issue of software development, and instead bleats about how we can "roll back" servers with the click of a button in a virtual environment.
Which, of course, conveniently ignores the fact that someone has to write the code that runs in those virtual servers, debug it, test it, integrate it, package it, and ship it. Should it be an upgrade to an existing service/server, add in the overhead of designing, coding, and testing the database migration scripts for it, and coordinating the deployments of application virtual servers with the database servers.
Are things easier than they used to be? Perhaps for they basic system administration tasks.
But those have never been where the bulk of time and budget go.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
So say we all!
We have built the darknets and their hidden services. We have the cryptocurrencies and the second/third generation ones are scaling much better than bitcoin. Maybe we can settle into the modern world a bit and fix some of the totally broken/stupid shit now? Credit cards, server side password auth (At least use SRP if you still want passwords), dozens (or more) certificate authorities fully trusted (if you thought a single point of failure was bad, how about a hundred points of failure?), email, IPv4, using third parties to host unencrypted private group communication (facebook and others) etc.
There is so much stuff that is clearly shitty from a security/privacy perspective, and not very hard to fix. Maybe we will have time to fix some of this now?
I assume you are talking about the hardware... because once you have a "private cloud", the next step is moving away from setting up servers and configuring the applications manually, and getting into full on DevOps style dynamically scaling virtual workloads, that are completely (VM and their applications, the network configuration including "micro networks" and firewall rules) stood up and torn down dynamically according to the demands of the customers accessing the systems.. those same workloads can move anywhere from your own infrastructure to leased private infrastructure to public infrastructure without any input from you... of course, none of this is new... but it's certainly a paradigm shift in the way we manage and view our infrastructure... hardly something static or settled. Really this is a fast moving area that is hard to keep up with.
As soon as we have 8k video commonly available, which could be as soon as 2020, if Japan gets to host the Olympic Games, we will run out of storage, out of bandwidth, and there is not even a standard for an optical disc that can hold the data, at the moment. So our period of rest will not be too long.
BS has arrived to slashdot.
They could be if you did not know what you were doing. Like I suspect the author of TFA did not know.
From TFA:
If he's talking about a production system then he's an idiot.
If he's talking about a test system then what does it matter? The time spent running the tests was a lot longer than the time spent restoring a system if any of those tests failed.
And finally:
WTF is 10Base-2 doing there? I haven't seen that since the mid-90's. Meanwhile, every PC that I've seen in the last 10 years has had built-in gigabit Ethernet.
If he wants to talk about hardware then he needs to talk about thing like Cisco Nexus. And even that is not "new".
And, as you pointed out, the PROGRAMMING aspects always lag way behind the physical aspects. And writing good code is as difficult today as it has ever been.
In the recent decades we've been eyewitnesses to the revolutionary breakthroughs in such fields as energy, transportation, healthcare, and space industry, to name a few. The technologies emerged are nowadays pretty much ubiquitous and impossible to go without in day to day life. Yet the hardware IT industry is stuck with Moore's law and silicon, and there's even an embarrassing retreat to functional programming in the software branch.
Because his head is in the sand! DEEP!
Now standardize all your password requirements to a strength-based system without arbitrary restrictions or requirements, and standardize your forms' metadata so that they can be auto-completed or intelligently-suggested based on information entered previously on a different website. Trust me, this sort of refinement will be greatly appreciated.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
I don't subscribe to this rose-tinted point of view, especially if you look at all this beautiful tech from the security standpoint.
Most of the tech we deal with today was originally designed without security concerns. In most cases, security is an afterthought.
So much for sitting back and taking a break.
13-4=54/6
>Now that the technologies behind our servers and networks have stabilized,
Talk for yourself. I know since kinder garden that the bugs of today are the work of tomorrow !
Moore's law has run out of steam. Yay!
thegodmovie.com - watch it
No, you IT people are no longer the great revolutionists - your time is gone. You are now just plumbers, who need to fix the infrastructure when it are broken. Other than that, we don't want to hear from you, and we certainly don't want your veto on our business decisions - that is why a lot of us business people use the cloud, because the cloud doesn't say "can't work, takes X months, and I need X M$ to set it up", but is running tomorrow out of operational budget.
Another submission to a superficial article from syndeq to drum up traffic for Info World.
...right before the next, undreamed-of computing revolution knocks everyone on their ass.
...like a dinosaur in the last days before the meteor. The future is over there in the Makerspaces, where 3D printing, embedded stuff, robotics, CNC machines, homebrew PCBs at dirt-cheap prices are happening. It's all growing like weeds, crosses the boundaries between all disciplines includg art, and is an essential precursor to the next Industrial Revolution, in which you and your giant installations will be completely bypassed.
You, sir, are a buggy-whip manufacturer (as well as a dinosaur).
"Cock Up Your Beaver" does not mean what you think. This sig is intended to clog filters and annoy do-gooders
What the -- ?? "the technologies behind our servers and networks have stabilized" -- when did this happen? I'm not a datacenter person, but isn't the world filled with competing cloud providers with different APIs, and things like OpenStack? Did all this stuff settle down while I wasn't paying attention?
I think would be a better way of looking at what this article is on about.
Back in the late 80's early 90's when I graduated and started my career in the Networking Industry the OSI 7 layer model (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model) was often referred to. You don't hear it mentioned much these days.
If you applied IT history and economics to it you'll find that each of those layers saw a period of fantastic growth & innovation (a few short years) before becoming IT commodities and having little value left to reap but at the same time becoming stable and allowing growth & innovation in the next layer above.
Cisco, the once darling of Wall Street, benefited from the growth & innovation in layers 3 to 5.
All 7 layers are now stable and "complete", there's no growth value left in them, Cisco as the example struggles when it once printed money.
I'd like to see someone attempt to define layers 8 ->12 with an attempt at extrapolating into the future with layers 13 and above.
On a related topic I've been reading a lot of articles around the hardships of making money as an independent App developer.
It occurs to me, taking this layered view of the economies of IT, that perhaps software itself has seen it's best days behind it.
That in fact to find value as a lone developer, or even as a company, software is just a commodity now which should be free with the money coming from the services you sell on top of, or a few layers above.
How long until machines program themselves after a short interview with their human "client" as to their requirements (layer 13)?
Now that the technologies behind our servers and networks have stabilized, IT can look forward to a different kind of constant change, writes Paul Venezia.
I don't think Paul Venezia works in IT.
As a senior engineer, im glad to get some downtime before the "next revolution." I certainly havent had to patch any hacks or bugs related to our transcontinental wonkavator. this week ive done nothing but drink pina coladas and enjoy a long vacation instead of worry about vendor lock-in and incompatibility, which as we all know was solved during the IT Revolution(c). thanks to the IT revolution (and especially the cloud) ive had plenty of time to spend with friends playing my favourite games, which in no way were encumbered by a lack of reliable infrastructure to play them on (thanks again IT Revolution!) Technologies used in the corporate data center like DRAC and EFI PXE have worked so well that i dont even have to worry about security vulnerabilities or bugs. gone are the days when disk and ram shortages were commonplace, as are the days when disks were specifically coded to certain vendors and controllers.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Translation: Bandwidth and ubiquitous connectivity, along with a generation trained to have no privacy are in place. Let the police state begin.
If you think things like rural electrification are about helping people, you have your head in the sand.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
'Our vendors' "virtual appliances" are horrible to update and are rife with security problems, we need them to give us an application and we'lll manage the OS so we can update the libraries'
So, IT can commit genocide? Awesome.
I think that was the point of OP... that kind of "big thing in IT" hasn't happened since... well... mid-'90s when internet went everyone and their pet went onto the Internet. And pure technology hasn't had a HUGE leap in a generation (perhaps "everyone getting a video card" was a big one... but I doubt it).
And you know what, even *then* there were more personal websites and development than there's today. How many people do you know who setup their own website these days? Back then, it was just about every techy... now it's... facebook profiles...some progress!
At the risk of pissing off some folks, I must say I've worked in IT since before it was called IT, and I can honestly say no revolutions will come from that area. After all, IT isn't known for it's innovative and R&D atmosphere. IT is the result of cramming middle management, contractors, and novice-to-mediocre developers together in cubicles. Sure, it's a steady paying job, which is why most of us do it. The revolutionary stuff will continue to come from those who have the luxury of choosing not to be part of the corporate IT scene. It will then be discussed and consumed by "IT Professionals" around the country. The positive outcomes of such consumption will be published ad nauseam in various tech rags in such as way as to make the choice to implement a revolutionary idea the same as creating it.
I know such a rant makes me sound like some bitter developer who feels he didn't get enough credit for something he developed, but that's not really the case. I've just been in IT a long time. Why not call a fish a fish?
IT revolution is really just a general IT adoption of a (hopefully) revolutionary idea. But yeah, IT revolution is easier to say.
That is going to be the next big problem for IT. Especially with iPhones and Android phones on corporate networks.
Don't be too hard on the guy. Thisis why evolution invokes death. Just about the time you get it all figured out and decide it's not worth going in and punching your time clock, nature punches yours.
The on-going technology churn we've seen in the last decade is *not* a feature of a revolution in progress that may be coming to an end, it's a reflection of stagnation in technology, without the ideal data centre technology (at least in terms of software) having achieved any kind of dominance. There's been a endless parade of new web technologies, none of which is more than an ugly hack on HTML. Websites are better than they were in twenty years ago, but certainly not 20 years' worth of progress better.
Why stop at defining layers 8 through 12? We need at least 42 layers for a new OSI model to truly be complete.
It seems too many forget that all this virtualization still runs on physical servers. Those physical servers still need hardware upgrades, monitoring, and resource management (especially when one starts oversubscribing). I don't get why people keep thinking hardware went away. Instead of lots of 1U servers, now you have big iron running lots of virtual servers.
The concept is false. Things have changed in how they break and what we are concerned about on a daily basis. 10 years ago I didn't have compromised accounts to worry about every day. But I did spend more time dealing with hard drive failure and recovery. We are still busy with new problems and can't just walk off and let the systems handle it.
If you believe IT is like running your Android device, then yes, there is little to be done other than pick your apps and click away. If you have some security awareness you would know there is much going on to be concerned about. When the maker of a leading anti-virus product declares AV detection is dead, it is time to be proactive looking at the problem. Too many IT folk believe if there is malware it will announce itself. Good luck with that assumption.
No one argues for unregulated markets.
Reasonable regulation, built on experience, is all that people ask for and all that is needed.
Forcing companies to provide mortgages to people who are patently unqualified is an example of unreasonable regulations that resulted in untold devastation to the economy.
Now, the Feds are going around telling banks that these businesses are "bad" and that if they provide service to them, they'll be audited from top to bottom. It is a defacto suppression of Free Enterprise based on a political viewpoint.
And for those of you that would say this is a good thing, what would you say when at some point, abortion providers suddenly become "bad" businesses?
People like Waxman and others would love for us to have a Command Economy, if not literally, at least virtually. Since that is fundamentally immoral and 100% incompatible with our Constitution and the laws which flow from it, they are trying an end run around the issue with targeted regulations designed not to protect the consumers, but to encourage/discourage businesses to achieve the same results.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
troll