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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.
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.
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!
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.
...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.
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.
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.
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.