In the cloud computing world, developers and managers cannot ignore each other

Last week, David Linthicum of the Info World website published an article on the importance of it fundamentals, emphasizing that it can help you better in the area of cloud computing. In this article, linthicum that if you don't have a good understanding of the traditional enterprise IT environment, don't expect much success from cloud computing.

In this article, I want to further expand his view, and as server virtualization flourishes, I see a broader trend. Once upon a time, when a server administrator builds a new system, he needs to have considerable application knowledge if he wants to control the operation of the system. And if an administrator makes a mistake, he may need to rebuild the system, or, worse, seek funds to buy additional hardware.

Today, however, almost any workload can be supported by easily deploying and modifying virtual machines. The need for hardware and related data center infrastructure configuration is no longer so strong, after all, it can be easily changed. Data center administrators seem to have fewer and less knowledge about the applications they run.

From their point of view, these applications are just a data storage cluster running virtual machines. Do they really need to know how these apps work? Shouldn't this be the promise of cloud computing? Whether we're building a public cloud or a private cloud, the infrastructure should replace the administrators to observe all the complexities of the business and allow fewer infrastructure-oriented applications to choose private cloud services. My point is that the infrastructure of consumption, whether public or private, should be simple, fast, and easy to operate.

The problem is that data centers actually still need someone to make up for the gap between infrastructure and applications. There is still a good understanding of how the infrastructure and applications work so that the infrastructure can be configured to meet the needs of the application in real-world work. In many cases, communication and communication between the infrastructure and application managers is missing, either in a traditional IT infrastructure environment or in a cloud based environment.

Prospect Cloud Separation

To further analyze the problem, let me give a simple example. Imagine a business that is considering deploying a highly customizable mission-critical application in the enterprise's new private cloud infrastructure.

The enterprise's problem is forward-looking, so they have deployed a cloud management system to manage their private cloud. What all application developers need to do is develop toward a web-based portal that is being asked to take a series of virtual machines. After a few minutes, the virtual machines are configured to work with these developers. Just a few days later, the installation and integration of the application began.

Throughout the process, developers do not need to know about how the network or storage is configured. They just need to select some items from the menu and fill in the basic information they need for RAM and disk size. Similarly, infrastructure administrators do not need to know how the application works, how they are installed, or even what they do when they run the cloud infrastructure. Instead, they only need to focus on ensuring that the infrastructure is kept running safely.

The potential problem is to ignore each other

First of all, everyone's skills are at their best, and no one is forcing them to do the work they are not good at, which sounds perfect. However, this could potentially be a big problem.

For example, what does a developer know about a backup that the infrastructure administrator has configured? Although the virtual machine infrastructure backup is really easy. Protecting a database Based enterprise application requires more than just ensuring that backups are performed at least once every 24 hours. The consistency process for several data may need to run before a backup or simply backup at a specific time of day. Ensuring that backup work is also important for restored virtual machines. This also means ensuring that the data for the application is consistent.

Similarly, how are cloud infrastructures protected in different city sites? Given that infrastructure administrators do not need to know about any application to ensure that the appropriate SAN volumes are replicated, network traffic can be imported to some sites to cause a failure. However, if the application brings in data that is newer or older than the traditional system interface data, does the relevant ordered data become inconsistent, do they know? Does the application administrator know to tell the infrastructure administrator?

This example involves a private cloud that is operated by an enterprise's internal IT department, but it is also a problem (perhaps even worse) when it comes to public cloud infrastructure. Ignoring the backup and replication configuration, the application's administrators now find themselves responsible for ensuring that these programs run in the configuration, whether they know it or not. After all, only a handful of cloud service providers will serve you with such a detailed question. Why not? Because they don't know what your application needs, and they don't needlessly focus on problems that may consume more resources, such as failover or backup, that only makes their services more expensive.

I don't think infrastructure and cloud administrators know a bit about how their infrastructure supports applications. They may not need to know how the new supplemental program is programmed, but they should at least have a general idea of how these supplemental programs are used, how the data is transmitted, and that they should be sensitive to the various ways of restoring and reproducing. Similarly, administrators who are responsible for applications need to know more about the capabilities of their infrastructure to run.

Ultimately, your organization needs IT professionals who are generally familiar with infrastructure, whether public, private, or traditional it, as well as the applications they run. Of course, their depth and professionalism can be rooted in one or more areas, but complete ignorance of the overall broader picture is at least dangerous.