Myth, Lore and Religion in the Brave New Cloud
There is a certain myth when it comes to how we think of the way we define, build and manage new stack infrastructures. Too often, the conversation sinks into discussions that are too broad for any meaningful understanding. But when we start talking about mythology and its context to the data center, then we can really start exploring our roles and how we relate to the new stacks people are developing. What is the myth that keeps people from advancing the infrastructure they have developed?
It’s this discussion about mythology that surfaced in my conversation yesterday at the Open Data Center Alliance Forecast 2014 in San Francisco with Corey Voo, Infrastructure CTO, UBS; Chris Swan, CTO at CohesiveFT and Jonathan King, Vice President, Cloud Strategy and Business Development at CenturyLink Technology Solutions.
#15: Myth, Lore and Religion in the Brave New Cloud
Show Notes
- There is next generation e efforts among members of the ODCA. Docker and other next generation technologies are getting adopted but the focus is more on volume based adoption.
- People are using the cloud for the first time. It is almost scary that senior people are not touching what it is like to use cloud services.
- The culture of the IT group is defined by “the way we things are done around here.” There is still a great deal of inertia. Banks, typically, are half business, half infrastructure. It would be disruptive if there was a much thinner slice of infrastructure. But that won’t happen.
- Legacy: What is its role? There is a lot of conversation about migration. To be honest, there is not much of that anymore. People are now building in the cloud and connecting to back to IT.
- There really is no real open cloud. The providers are similar to the carriers.
- It’s odd to see this continued effort not to drive an open source approach.
- In terms of policy, semantic environments are getting more notice.
- As Adrian Cockcroft says, organizations are made out of their scar tissue.
- Trust the robot, get beyond the fear of potential problems that might arise with new automation capabilities.
- Too often it’s the lore, not the law that rules the day.
- What is the mythology of the developer? The developer is the new kingmaker, as Red Hat likes to say.
- Docker Hub exemplifies a new way of development that is more about assembling pieces than building from scratch.
- There is this myth that every problem is unique and new. Containerization? It has been around since Solaris but Docker has solved the build, ship, deploy issue.
- What is the mythology of legacy technology? In IT there have been these priests that have emerged. It’s more about serving a religion than solving a problem.
- What is the impact of language on the enterprise?
- Language in tech is sometimes reminiscent of Orwell and the concept of newspeak. It’s the buzz words that control the language and by default the conversation.
- Usage models are really important and are becoming a real way to better understand across different c constituencies in the cloud ecosystem.
Intel is a sponsor of The New Stack.
