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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."
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.
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.
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.
Now - just because one company goes belly-up doesn't mean that another can't take over and be successful.
What you have is not by far a successful IT platform yet, you have the foundation. What is limiting is the ISPs and their customer agreements that effective limits the users to being consumers of bandwidth and services. When the ISPs realizes that their models with bandwidth throttling and agreements prohibiting customers to set up services at home slows down development of new companies and services then you will see new creations. Not everything will be successful, but enough will be to build the next big corporation.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
alternately, it will soon be time for the pendulum to swing back to "we've got to have everything in-house, these security breaches are killing us" and "dumb terminals and having everything in the 'cloud' is killing productivity when the cloud is down, we need real apps so users can work even when the cloud doesn't"
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
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
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
I envy your optimism and agree that ISPs are the problem, but I don't see how new companies and services will force change upon ISPs.
New ISPs? Not in the state-sanctioned monopolist USA.
Loss of customers? See above.
The ISP and backbone provider bridge trolls sleep soundly, knowing that no one has the money or statutory permission to build competing bridges.
Only the FCC and Congress could do that, and the oligarchs are quite happy with the current bridge trolls.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
That's only in the US. Here in the EU we solved that problem long ago, paving the way for the development of new companies and services. You will be left behind if you keep letting the market decide these things.
-- Cheers!
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.
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.
Yeah? But, but... All those EU countries and their policies are socialist. How could it be possible that socialist policies lead to anything that is better, faster, and more readily available? The free market ensures that where there's a demand, those things are always available to anyone who wants to buy them. Right. RIGHT?
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.
Or, in the future, you could just have apps that can run their parts either on the client side or on the server side depending on what's more advantageous in the given situation (based on network bandwidth, network latency, intra-app communication patterns, current server load, client CPU performance, client storage options etc.) That seems like the most flexible option I've ever heard of, and it subsumes having an offline mode. (Plan 9 already did something vaguely similar on the OS level.)
Ezekiel 23:20
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.
I know that was sarcasm, but for the sarcasm impaired (or the ignorant), I recommend reading Greenspan's testimony to a congressional oversight committee in 2008 where he was forced to admit that the objectivist-based idiocy about free markets and rationality always winning out that underpinned the Reagan Revolution and subsequent de-regulation and freeing of the "free market" does not work in the real world.
Amazing, to see someone who gazed admiringly on Ayn Rand as he sat at her feet forced to admit his entire philosophical base is a fallacy.
= = =
REP. HENRY WAXMAN: The question I have for you is, you had an ideology, you had a belief that free, competitive — and this is your statement — “I do have an ideology. My judgment is that free, competitive markets are by far the unrivaled way to organize economies. We’ve tried regulation. None meaningfully worked.” That was your quote.
You had the authority to prevent irresponsible lending practices that led to the subprime mortgage crisis. You were advised to do so by many others. And now our whole economy is paying its price.
Do you feel that your ideology pushed you to make decisions that you wish you had not made?
ALAN GREENSPAN: Well, remember that what an ideology is, is a conceptual framework with the way people deal with reality. Everyone has one. You have to — to exist, you need an ideology. The question is whether it is accurate or not.
And what I’m saying to you is, yes, I found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is, but I’ve been very distressed by that fact.
REP. HENRY WAXMAN: You found a flaw in the reality
ALAN GREENSPAN: Flaw in the model that I perceived is the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works, so to speak.
REP. HENRY WAXMAN: In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right, it was not working?
ALAN GREENSPAN: That is — precisely. No, that’s precisely the reason I was shocked, because I had been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.
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.
And if he had known his history he would have seen the stupidity of his ways. The history of financial crashes of the 1800's, before financial regulation was wide spread or even conceived of in some cases, is compelling. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_banking_crises
Real world data refutes the market deregulation.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
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.
If the "transcontinental railroad" is truly built, then the cloud won't be going down (for any significant amounts of time) in the future.
How often do you venture out onto the Eisenhower Interstate Highway system, stymied that you can't use it in the normal fashion (yes, rush hour in metro areas still needs work, mostly population control, I say, but...)?
If your "cloud is down" more than 5 minutes per day, or has a big (multi hour) outage more than once a year, then you have not yet arrived at modern (2014) IT nirvana.
WRONG. I was booking a trip to Flagstaff, AZ the other day via train and there were many track warnings of BASF doing track upgrades, resulting in passengers being taken off the 'network' entirely and shoved into buses.. Trains are NOWHERE near 5 sigma in any way. The Pacific Surfliner route has a 78% on time record....not great (amtrak publishes their reliability stats).
Good-bye
What the hell are people talking about quiet before the storm ?
What do you mean foundations have been laid ?
Bunch of BS. Large companies are starting over, without the legacy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
New things are always on the horizon
Centralize/Decentralize YAWN. I've seen 3 swings in 20 years of pro, myself.
---Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A START
Foundations - in the way that now there's optical fiber backbones all over the place, and there's a proof that it is feasible to offer internet services to most citizens.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
I guess it depends on the type of foundation you mean.
Things like fiber have been there for many, many, many years now. I hardly see it as anything new. Or anything part of this quiet, they talk about it.
There are some big changes coming in fiber optics though. Silicon photinics.
New things are always on the horizon
Fiber would be something new in my neighborhood.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
The railroad is built, and kicked butt over ox and wagon, and has been outmoded by car/truck (thus my example) and plane - and left to rot.
Yes, train service sucks - unless you are a hopper car full of ore and don't particularly have a schedule.