Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2017. Read them in this 9th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by Steve Francis, Founder and Chief Product Officer at LogicMonitor
The Year Enterprises Start Investing in their IT Staff
Enterprise transformation
will continue apace in 2017, and for good reasons. Businesses need to update
existing systems to take advantage of the agility that modern architectures
enable - not for the sake of technology itself, but to better align people,
process, and technology with business strategy. Agile methodologies allow this
transformation to occur much faster than traditional software development and
architecture lifecycles, as they enable rapid releases, learning, and
iteration. Adoption of public or private cloud technology can greatly
accelerate transformation efforts, as it allows on-demand scaling, programmatic
control and deployment of infrastructure, automation of deployments using
blue/green paradigms, and rapid provisioning of QA and Dev environments when
needed.
So why is cloud adoption,
while robust, still in pilot or trial stages for so many enterprises?
While there's no shortage
of cloud resources available (AWS, Softlayer, Azure,
etc.), there is a lack
of staff experienced with cloud technology. The set of
Developers and Operations people that are experienced both with cloud services
and with building/running critical applications is fairly small. Existing
applications that assume high levels of reliability and consistent performance
often need significant architectural changes to run in a cloud, which is done
by separating processes into scalable units, connected by queuing systems. But
failure to use experienced architects can lead to troublesome failure modes if,
for example, latency to the queuing system increases and all threads retrieving
queue items are stuck waiting.
Another key reason for
hesitancy about headfirst cloud adoption is cost.
Yes, running in a public
cloud provides all sorts of agility advantages, and cost savings for short
lived or dynamic workloads. Other cost savings like not having to deal with ISP
contracts, power provisioning, and network equipment service contracts, add up
as well. But there are going to be a lot of workloads that are stable and
ongoing (or increasing) workloads. Those workloads - especially if they require
a lot of memory or performant disks - will be much cheaper to run in an
enterprise's existing datacenter. And no CIO wants to get his budget caught in cloud
jail.
So what to do?
Enterprises need to invest
in their staff so they gain expertise in cloud deployments. This will enable
them to benefit from the agility of the cloud, and give them expertise in
assessing when applications, that may have been through a few iterations in the
cloud, should be brought back to the datacenter.
One way to free up staff so
that they can gain these experiences is to focus on automating processes as
much as possible. Push adoption of orchestration tools; replace checklist
processes with build automation; embrace SaaS tools that free up datacenter
resources (and more importantly eliminate server and application maintenance
and backup); adopt an automated IT
monitoring tool that provides insight into both cloud
and on-premise deployments. The effort will help in increasing IT agility
directly and the increased efficiency will allow more learning of cloud
technologies.
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About the Author
Steve is the Founder and
Chief Product Officer at LogicMonitor,
where he is responsible for leading the company's product vision of simplifying
IT management for modern enterprises. Since its founding, LogicMonitor has
become one of the strongest growing IT software companies in the world, with
nearly 200 employees and 1,200 customers. Prior to founding LogicMonitor, Steve
was responsible for the datacenter operations of a diverse group of
organizations including National Geographic, the University of California,
Citrix Online, and Valueclick.
