The Cloud - stop the nonsense, it's about a better paradigm

The number of vendors subtly bringing fundamental capabilities associated with the concept of cloud infrastructures into their day to day products is impressive. And maybe it is even more impressive that they are doing so while we (IT practitioners at large) are immersed in busy chatter about what the cloud is, problems with clouds, and for that matter completely unable to lock in a consistent set of terminology. Heck, when it comes to terminology, we can't even consistently decide whether the cloud is a place or a thing.  Hmm... I'm pretty sure most of us jumped beyond that obstacle in kindergarten or so, but I think an outsider couldn't tell it from the way we use cloud.

But when it comes to what vendors are actually delivering around the concepts of cloud, we should all be paying attention, because it is going to change how we're doing business.  And it is my belief that the cloud nature of these innovations are largely going unnoticed.  If you haven't looked around recently, while actively thinking about what your computing needs of tomorrow will be, I can promise it is worthwhile to keep an eye on paradigm shifting technologies.

As one example, I had a routine conversation with a vendor this morning (Reflex Systems) that made me pause and consider just how much the virtual infrastructure has shifted our expectations and capabilities around management.  When the virtual infrastructure is used the right way, it can effectively be turned into a tool for an agentless management solution that can even take on the best of what agents used to be able to do.  This has huge potential, because in my opinion we've never made agent approaches work well on top of the traditional infrastructure (I'm always willing to listen to a new end user story, but so far I haven't found anybody using agents that totally takes the cake on best practices).  With the visibility the virtual infrastructure provides, the right vendor can dig deep, gain some real insight, and deliver some totally cool management and/or automation that could only barely be delivered by agents of the past.  More importantly, you can have multiple tools using the virtual infrastructure this way, without the multiplication of components that agents required.  I think of the virtual infrastructure as the agentless agent, or even a leveraged agentless agent, because you can leverage it across multiple tools to construct your own custom management infrastructure, without a multiplication in virtual guest or host complexity.

Word to the wise - when it comes to management and automation tools, the way I think about this space right now is that things fall into two buckets.  I'll keep the names to myself, because that's too much to bring into this discussion, but the buckets look like this:  1) You have top down guys that started out wanting to do some stuff with the virtual infrastructure, and are trying to peer down into it to find the data they need.  2) You have the guys that for some reason or another started peering at the real deep stuff first, and now the virtual infrastructure has come along and they've realized that they already have the data they need, and in turn can do some really cool management stuff.  I'm finding that the guys in bucket #2 are rapidly marking their territory as the leading innovators today, but time will tell who finally takes the cake.  Put your vendors to the test around the capabilities you need today and tomorrow, and how they dig deep enough into your infrastructure to deliver, while preserving the flexibility and ease of management you expect.

Email me if you want opinions on who is who - jeff @ tanejagroup dot com.

While this paints a partial picture of what cloud is - a more adaptive, more flexible infrastructure - there is more coming in part two of this post.