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...

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;-).