Cameron Haight

You sometimes hear the phrase “fighting the last war” to refer to the practice of using the tactics and strategies from the past to achieve present day (military) objectives.  Is it me, or do others see a similar story with regards to how the IT operations management industry is trying to address the complexities that SOA, virtualization and even the emerging cloud computing environment are now imposing upon us?  I’ve already blogged about the potential visualization impact, but what about other areas?  For example, CMDBs.  Will these be able to keep pace with not only the level of change, but also the increasing number of inter-dependencies (not only physical to physical, but virtual to physical and virtual to virtual)?  What if my service is composed of elements that are both on-premise and also in the “cloud?”  Forget for the moment about storing, normalizing and associating this information – will we even be able to discover these relationships to the level that may be necessary? Or how about process (or run book) automation tooling?  I saw an interesting demo at a recent conference where new servers were automatically provisioned within a cloud-style environment to meet a temporary demand need.  Very nice, but to me seems a bit simplistic.  I’m probably in the future going to want to check a few (maybe a lot) more things before doing this making the workflow increasingly complex.  Not just trying to pick on these two areas – there are others as well but CMDBs and RBA-style tools are attracting a lot of interest today within the traditional management environment.  ITIL-like processes I think also need to come under the microscope.  They seem in many ways too rigid, but we can’t not have some controls so how will this evolve?  And then there’s design – do we need to completely re-think how we architect our infrastructures?  Perhaps we need to look at again at ROC-based concepts or what I’ve sometimes seen referred to as “design for failure.”  It certainly could radically change the conventional wisdom about management … and hence management tools.   In 2009, I’ll be looking into the suitability of many of today’s traditional management products and processes as we move more closely into the clouds.