Workloads Don’t Care
Don’t worry, I don’t want to open a new chapter in the “chicken or the egg” causality dilemma. But when I stumbled upon an argument by Bernard Golden – the author of the famous book: Virtualization for Dummies – I was briefly reminded of a dead-end street called “Business/IT alignment” we walked down some months ago.
Forget the wall separating IT and business. There is no such thing. It’s not true anymore that business pre-exists and IT is just a representation of what is happening on the business side. Therefore any “paving the cow paths” approach of computing will be a long shot, as Golden emphasizes in his brilliant article:
“In the past, IT was used to automate repeatable business processes — taking something that already exists and computerizing it. The archetype for this kind of transformation is ERP — the automation of ordering, billing, and inventory tracking. That “paving the cow paths” approach to computing is changing. Today, businesses are delivering new services infused and made possible by IT — in other words, creating new offerings that could not exist without IT capabilities.”
What Golden describes here is the end of the reaction model of IT as we know it – that someone acts and IT reacts. It’s not a pulling approach anymore it’s a pushing approach – where location-sensitive devices and mashed-up applications interact with each other as part of data driven processes.
Dynamization changes not only the application architecture, but also the requirements service-aware automation technologies must meet. In these highly variable environments applications will – according to Golden – need to “dynamically scale” “to gracefully and dynamically add new data streams as inputs” and “to rapidly shift context and data sets.”
Does this new variability sound familiar to you? Workloads need to be distributed dynamically and out of the process because events are the heartbeats of modern applications. That’s why workloads neither adhere to system borders nor to business hours. They just don’t care.
Wolfgang Tonninger
Not a UC4 employee, but an external source and UC4 companion. Wolfgang Tonninger is responsible for irritation and inspiration in this blog, and secretly the blog engine. He has been working in content creation and development for 20 years, as well as writing about intelligent use of IT solutions. He thinks too much about cultural aspects of technology - sometimes offline without bad conscience.
Not a UC4 employee, but an external source and UC4 companion. Wolfgang Tonninger is responsible for irritation and inspiration in this blog, and secretly the blog engine. He has been working in content creation and development for 20 years, as well as writing about intelligent use of IT solutions. He thinks too much about cultural aspects of technology - sometimes offline without bad conscience. ...less info
