dev2ops

Nick Carr’s “The Big Switch” – Review of Part 1

Damon Edwards / January 17th, 2008

I just finished reading Part 1 of Nick Carr’s new book, The Big Switch. Let me just say that I’m both excited and disappointed thus far.

First, the excited part…
In my opinion, Nick Carr is a great writer. His way of explaining the future by retelling the past from an enlightened point of view reminds me a lot of George Gilder’s seminal Telecosm essays. Both make for a fascinating read. Part 1 is really a retelling of how electrical power generation went from being a custom piece of local infrastructure to a commodity delivered almost exclusively through a variable-rate utility grid. Through some very accessible storytelling, Nick makes an obvious case for how the same economic factors that drove “the big switch” for the electrical power industry are about to hit the IT industry. If you know someone who can’t clearly see the SaaS/cloud/outsourcing writing on the wall… give them this book. The economic argument is highly compelling.

Now for the disappointed part…
The vast majority of this first part is about the electrical power industry. While it makes for a compelling argument for a certain economic model, it doesn’t really say what the impact is going to be or what the response should be other than the fact that 1. most hardware vendors and on premises software vendors are toast 2. everyone better quickly figure out how to plug into the new grid. I thought that Part 2 was going to cover this… but nope. I skimmed through Part 2 and it looks like it is all about what the impact of the new grid will be on our personal lives, government, etc. It feels like I’m watching a compelling PBS miniseries and I missed an episode. Perhaps this book should have been called “Warning: a big switch is coming”.

The other disappointing part is how he glosses over over the fact that while computer cycles are a commodity, computing services are not. Electricity is electricity but not all computing needs are the same. You can’t just pick AC or DC and a voltage and tell everyone to fall in line. Nick jumps a little too easily between things like Google Search, Amazon Web Services, and Salesforce.com. Those are all very different things and, aside from the need for power, computing cycles, and bandwidth, they all have very different technical requirements. While power, computing cycles, and bandwidth are commodities that can be grid delivered just like electricity, the various levels of computing services that can be delivered on top of them are not. As I’ve said before, manufacturing is a much better model to study for how those services are going to play out.

But all in all, this has been a fun read thus far. For the uninitiated masses who don’t really know what we do in the IT trenches all day long, this book should be a startling wake up call for how fast the world is going to change.

I’m fired up to read Part 2 as soon as I get a chance. I’ll be sure to post my $0.02 when I’m done.

BarCampESM… the start of something interesting?

Damon Edwards / January 16th, 2008

A couple of us from ControlTier are headed to Austin for BarCampESM. It promises to be an interesting gathering of scrappy open source and big closed source (“but oh we so badly want to be viewed as ‘open'”) vendors all focused on the systems management space. The idea from this gathering came from the Open Management Consortium and is being organized by folks from BMC, Zenoss, and Zabovo (including the tasty sounding free food). This is the first BarCamp of this type so where this all leads is anyone’s guess.

For those unfamiliar with the BarCamp concept, it can best be described as a self-forming “unconference”. The idea is to encourage as much brainstorming and networking as possible. While sessions are proposed on a wiki ahead of time, much of the actual structure forms at the start of the conference and while it progresses. Oh and they are free and open to all.

A fun side observation:
Check out the these videos of past general technology BarCamps in San Francisco and Austin. I guess stereotypes about cities exist for a reason!

New IT Management / ESM podcast is worth a listen

Damon Edwards / January 14th, 2008

I just listened to Remonk’s latest podcast, “IT Management”:
http://www.redmonk.com/cote/2008/01/11/it-management-podcast-001-barcampesm-monitoring-the-cloud-2008-predictions-and-more/

The hosts are Redmonk’s Michael Cote and independent consultant John Willis.

This podcast shows real potential. Hopefully they’ll feature other voices on the show as it progresses and avoid the all too common trap of just rehashing big vendor press releases (especially given John’s deep immersion in the Tivoli universe). If they deliver on the promise of doing real analysis on the day-to-day reality of the IT Management / Enterprise Systems Management world… this is going to be a great addition to all of our ipods.

The “what is and isn’t SaaS” debate comes up again

Damon Edwards / January 14th, 2008

This question seems to pop back up every couple of months:

Does a SaaS relationship have to be between two different companies or can it be between internal IT and business users within the same company?

Now it’s Todd Biske and Joe McKendirck re-igniting the debate.

My view hasn’t changed much since the last time this went around. Saas formalizes and standardizes what business and IT leaders have been discussing for years. The business agrees to specific business requirements and to a minimum platform (in most cases, a standard browser). IT (or external provider) agrees to meet those requirements with a minimum SLA. How the bill is paid or what corporate entity owns the datacenter are secondary logistical concerns and not central to grasping the importance of what the SaaS model brings to the enterprise.

Nick Carr’s “The Big Switch”… the big dream?

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Damon Edwards / January 10th, 2008

Vinnie, The Deal Architect, has an interesting early review of The Big Switch the latest book from of Nick “IT Doesn’t Matter” Carr. The book sounds like an interesting read and I just ordered a copy from Amazon.

Vinnie has a great take on how the reality of utility computing just doesn’t match up with the dream the pundits are selling.

My comment on his blog sums up my $0.02 on the matter:

But I would add to your analysis that the root problem isn’t scale. The problem is that the business visions have jumped light years ahead of their internal capability to “deliver”. Simply put, the technical tooling and technical processes are woefully inadequate. Poke around in how the large outsourcers, managed services providers, or even large e-commerce and SaaS providers manage their infrastructure and applications and I think you’ll be shocked at how manual and ad-hoc things really are.

A good metaphor to use is manufacturing. The business minds behind the utility computing push are talking about things that are the equivalent to “mass customization” and “just in time delivery” while the technology and process model available to deliver those dreams is little more than the master craftsman and apprentice model of the pre-Ford Motors days (or maybe an early Ford assembly line, to be fair).

There are some interesting things under the radar in the open source community like ControlTier (plug) and Puppet, but the general interest in the problem space seems to be limited to the relatively limited pool of engineers who have tried to scale significant operations and know that a better way is out there. Unfortunately most of the technical fanfare in this area seems to be focused around “sexier” things like faster grid fabrics and hardware vendor wars. In general, automating and optimizing technical operations is a neglected field.

And for the time being, forget about help from the big 4 systems management vendors. Their state of the art is not much more than 15 year old Desktop/LAN management technology wrapped with a new marketing veneer.

So this is a problem that isn’t going away soon and is a real impediment to all who don’t have high profit margins or large pools of cheap labor to throw at the problem.

Teaming with the Open Management Consortium on a Software Operations Design Pattern Repository

Damon Edwards / January 3rd, 2008

After Alex’s post yesterday on the need for design patterns, he contacted the Open Management Consortium (OMC) about setting up Design Pattern Repository specifically for those who are creating Operations solutions.

Whurley (fearless leader of the OMC) liked the idea:

“Well, as you all know this is exactly how we want the OMC to operate; community lead. So we have created a new workspace under the “Open Standards” section of the website called “OMC Design Patterns”. Thanks to ahonor for the idea and for volunteering to kick things off and help manage the workspace. You can link directly to the workspace (from your blog or other sites) using the following URL:

http://beta.openmanagement.org/community/open_standards/omc_design_patterns

It will be very interesting to see how much adoption this idea picks up. I for one will be participating heavily in the workspace as ahonor has a great idea/perspective that I hope others join in support of.”

Be sure to subscribe to that section of the OMC site and join in the discussion.