CloudExpo London 2014

I went to CloudExpo Europe at ExCel in London yesterday. I only had a few hours due to needing to attend a meeting in the afternoon. I managed to traverse the floor a couple of times, pick up a load of handouts, and attend a few keynotes.

One theme that was very apparent in the infrastructure space is the ongoing disintegration of hardware and OS; by this I mean the un-bundling of a single vendor owning both: Sun/SunOS, Cisco/IOS etc. We've seen this with servers: Linux and commodity x86 servers, and we're now seeing this with both storage and networking. Take a look at Cumulus Networks as an example; if I were Cisco I would be very scared, particularly as Dell are now at the table in deals they historically haven't been.

What struck me is that we now have the potential install software like Puppet and Chef on every piece of infrastructure in the data center, and orchestrate the complete environment from one platform, and then seamlessly integrate this into the Application Life-cycle Management process. I heard a great term the other day on a DevOps Cafe podcast - "DevOpsability". I like that ;-) We're getting to a point that we can easily automate the day-to-day management and provisioning of our infrastructure - it is DevOpsable!

Interesting times ahead...

Why I don't care about server vendors any more

I come from a background of UNIX; from SunOS, Irix, Solaris, Linux and MacOS. And yes, MacOS is a UNIX for those that have never opened a terminal... Shame on you;-). Actually well done Steve, you took NextStep and brought it to the masses. Kudos.

My old favourite UNIX workstation

I used to love my hardware, particularly the purple Sun Sparc boxes, and the more colourful SGI indigo ones - loved those Indys BTW. But these days I'm not so bothered; even my much loved Macintosh doesn't really do anything for me, though part of that is probably down to me no longer rooting for an underdog: I love supporting the little guy, and love even more an obscure brand. Apple is just too big for me now, but I wish them well.

So why is this? Well the hardware is so commoditised these days that the intelligence is all in the software wrapped around it; it's this that gets me excited: auto provisioning for integration testing, nice! Burst capacity into the Cloud, smart! Deploying an app onto any portable device, wicked! This is the stuff we, as a business enablers, should be focused on. Not the colour and brand of the physical tin it all runs on.

I had an interesting dialogue with a colleague the other day about the pros of a multi vendor x86 strategy: leverage etc, but I still see the silos run deep, and the badge allegiance high. White label the lot, drive down the price, and focus on managing the service back to the business. This is where the role of the architect comes in to sell the vision and get stakeholder buy in.

It's all about business differentiation. Our focus should be on the areas within IT that can give our business partners an edge; managing commodity hardware platforms just don't provide that.

Don't mention the "C" word!

I have recently been involved with an organisation that can't say the "C" word: "Cloud". There I said it. Now, that wasn't so bad was it?

So what's the problem? I'll tell you what: organisations, particularly large ones, still don't know what the Cloud means to them... So rather than say it, they skirt around it: "Elastic Infrastructure", "On-demand Provisioning", "Capacity driven", and so on. All the while this further confuses the client as to what Cloud is, and what the organisation's strategy is to move towards all that Cloud goodness, whatever that may be. It's a funny old situation, and I'm wondering if it's unique. Are we all still struggling to define the Cloud? Should we just accept it for what it is, which is whatever you want it to be?

So what is it to me? In a word: differentiation, and in two: business differentiation. So what do I mean by this? In a nutshell it's about creating business opportunity by freeing up resources, and empowering those resources to be innovative. Innovation comes when you have a culture that enables people to not only fail fast, but to learn fast. This learning drives the innovation. Cloud technology allows us to do this in a cost effective, and timely manner. Its really that simple.

Stop worrying about saying the "C" word; just work or what your business goals and challenges are, and then see how Cloud can help you realise them.

Visualisation - a British spelling

An old colleague of mine has a great blog on BI (Business Intelligence) and it's application through a tool called Tableau. It was from reading Paul's blog that made me think I should start outputting some of my architecture ramblings; the ones I don't have the chance to during the working day, or the ones nobody wants to listen to;-)

In my head I see the visualisation piece as being the icing on the top of the cake: there is a whole data architecture that needs to underpin this, within the IT environment it is part of the ITOA movement I mentioned in a previous post.

That being said, Tableau is both a very powerful tool, and more importantly a very easy tool to get up and running to gain some valuable business insights.  Empowering a user base is one thing I look for in a platform, since it avoids service bottlenecks: i.e. a team of staff managing requests. Power to the people is what I say!

Anyhoo, recommend checking Paul's blog out for all your Tableau visualisation needs.

Going the ExtraHop

ITOA (IT Operations Analytics) is going mainstream big style in 2014. This is an area I am particularly interested in from an instrumentation, aggregation, analytics and visualisation perspective. This is an area IT folks can really add some business differentiation, but there are a number of hurdles to overcome: breaking down the silos, the usual road to DevOps enlightenment.

I had an interesting update from ExtraHop today. They have slick on-the-wire instrumentation product that does packet header analysis and correlation in real-time. They're also able to offload to Splunk to take advantage of Splunk's indexing capabilities; one nice result of this means you can use less Splunk license given you're targeting the data that's indexed using triggers (don't tell Splunk's sales people;-).

Hello world

This is the start of a little blog for me to use as an outlet for all things technology and architecture. Why undercover? Well I'm more a behind the scenes kinda guy - I like success through others. In hoping that though this blog I can sync up with other like minded technology architects working in the field.