As Halloween approaches, I’ve got a bit of a horror story to keep you up at night.
There’s an interesting quote that’s somewhat appropriate now. Well – song lyrics anyway. “Did you feel you were tricked / by the future you picked?” Which, I’m told, are part of a Peter Gabriel tune for a Pixar movie, but which I only came across when reading speculative fiction about quantum AI computers running 419 scams.
The thing about the future is that by the time it gets here, it’s already the present. Wait, I’m sounding like Criswell there… what I mean to say is that only a couple years ago, the big story in technology was how IT departments were becoming centralized due to advances in virtualization technology that cut down on hardware requirements and power consumption. Now the next level is cloud computing; an idea, fundamentally, that you can centralize data centers even further by centralizing them with the data centers for other companies via a third-party provider.
Taken to an extreme, it’s easy to think of a day when even these cloud computing centers become even further consolidated – perhaps one on each inhabited continent. “A world market for maybe five computers” indeed…
Except, it’s not quite that easy. The transition from in-house architecture to cloud computing resources is just about as difficult as the transition from real servers to consolidated virtual ones, and the big problem is ensuring network performance – that data gets where it needs to go quickly.
Much as the server consolidation/virtualization problem was helped with better virtualization technologies and advances in WAN optimization, the current rush in IT tool development is in the cloud computing area (not that we still don’t have a-ways to go with virtualization and consolidation). And some of these cloud-computing tools are starting to appear – for example, self-managing environments…
One of the newest approaches is the concept of the "dynamic infrastructure." Rather than a simple collection of humming boxes or cards designed to push data this way or that, the dynamic infrastructure brings together virtual networking, automation and resource management with tools like application management, security and policy management to create a self-managing environment that can react to changes in workloads and other needs with minimal human interference.
Lori MacVittie, technical marketing management for application services at F5 Networks is one of the prime movers of the concept, which she says will be the inevitable result of the transition to the cloud.
"When the entire data center is founded on a dynamic infrastructure, the infrastructure can react itself to changing network and application conditions and needs," she says. "When the entire ecosystem is sharing status and information about performance, every component can adjust itself dynamically to what’s needed now to improve performance or maintain availability. And it happens automatically, based on the specific needs of the business and IT."
Virtualization has underscored the need for performance management; back when everything was run on actual servers, you could almost always fix a problem by finding out where the bottleneck lied and increasing the amount of stuff. Not always, but almost always. But with virtualization, you’re essentially managing an interconnected ecosystem of stuff and… well, stuff that’s not stuff. “Unstuff,” to borrow a bit of NewSpeak.
And this management is so complex that it has increased the demand for network engineers, yes, but it’s also increased the demand for software to come along and replace the more tedious tasks of network engineers, automating the processes where possible.
But what if there is no upper limit? What if self-managed cloud computing software is exactly that – with computers calculating exactly what needs to be done to preserve performance and then automatically fix it?
And that network monitoring software…. WAS ME THE WHOLE TIME!!!!!
AAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!!
