Welcome to Virtualization and Beyond
Cloud Killed the Virtualization Star
Written By Kevin M. Sparenberg, Product Manager, SolarWinds
I may be dating myself, but anyone else remember when MTV® played music videos? The first
one they ever played was The Buggle's "Video Killed the Radio Star." The synth-pop feel of the song seemed so out
of place with the words, which outlined the demise of the age of the radio
personality. Thinking back, this was the first time I can remember thinking
about one new technology completely supplanting another. The corollary to this concept
is that radio stars are now antiquated and unneeded.
Fast forward a few decades and I'm entrenched in IT. I'm
happily doing my job and I hear about a new technology: virtualization. At
first, I discounted it as a fad (as I'm sure many of us old-school
technologists did). Then it matured, stabilized, and gained a foothold.
One technology again supplanted another and virtualization
killed the physical server star. Did this really kill off physical servers
entirely? Of course not. No more so than video killed radio. It just added a
level of abstraction. Application owners no longer needed to worry about the
physical hardware, just the operating system and their applications. Two things
happened:
1.
Application owners had less to worry about
2.
A need for people with virtualization experience
developed
From that point on, every new person who entered IT
understood virtualization as a part of the IT stack. It was a technology that became accepted and direct
knowledge of physical servers was relegated to secondary or specialized
knowledge. Having knowledge about firmware and drivers was suddenly so "retro."
Virtualization matured and continued to flourish, and with
it, new vendors and capabilities entered the market, but dark clouds were on
the horizon. Or perhaps they weren't dark-just "clouds" on the horizon. As in private clouds, hybrid clouds, public
clouds, fill-in-the-blank clouds. The first vendor I remember really
pushing the cloud was Amazon®
with their Amazon Web ServicesTM (AWS®).
Thinking back, this seemed like history repeating itself.
After all, according to many, Amazon nearly destroyed all brick and mortar bookstores.
It looked like they were trying to do the same for on-premises virtualization.
After all, why worry about the hardware and storage yourself when you can pay
someone else to worry about it, right?
This seems reminiscent of the what happened with
virtualization. You didn't worry about the physical server anymore-it became
someone else's problem. You just cared about your virtual machine.
So, did cloud kill the virtualization star, which previously
killed the server star? Of course not. For the foreseeable future, cloud will
not supplant the virtualization specialist, no more so than virtualization
supplanted the server specialist. It's now just a different specialization
within the IT landscape.
What does this mean for us in IT? Most importantly, keep
abreast of emerging technologies. Look to where you can extend your knowledge
and become more valuable, but don't "forget" your roots.
You never know-one day you may be asked to update server
firmware.
##
Read more articles in the Virtualization and Beyond Series.
About the Author
With 20 years of IT
systems engineering and support experience across multiple environments, Kevin
M. Sparenberg currently serves as a product manager for the SolarWinds®
Orion® Platform Online Demo. In this role, he is responsible for defining compelling stories that
IT professionals face within the publicly accessible demos. He is a THWACK®
MVP and in 2017, was awarded the title of VMware® vExpert 2017.