Elder Mail

I recall using email for the first time when I joined Hewlett-Packard as a new engineer. I liked the ability to share designs, bugs and information with my fellow engineers. From that day forward, I had to find ways of organizing, deleting, and archiving my email. When AOL burst on to the scene with their dial-up accounts and email service, I helped my parents understand email and how it could increase communications with their children. Needless to say, it took them a long time to get into the email craze. A few years later, with my email filling up with 'if you care, you will forward this message to 10 friends and family members', I wondered why I ever helped them. I spent more time managing email. When Spam arose, I spent even more time managing email. Sometimes, I was thankful when I had to do a fresh system reinstall. Since I never backed-up my email, I started with a new, clean mailbox at the cost of losing information.

I tried Gmail Beta as soon as I could get a friend to invite me into the trial. Google changed email by introducing conversations and an ever-increasing storage limit (now at 7.4 Gigabytes). Just as in having a conversation with a friend, you don't delete a conversation from your memory or Gmail. They used Spam filters to keep junk out of my Gmail. I spent less time managing Gmail. Nothing seems to stop my parents from forwarding the 'if you care' messages. I don't care since I don't worry about storage space. So far, I have not lost a single conversation due to a system crash. I use the 'search' feature to provide 'on-demand' organization for the conversations.

Recently, I have been using Twitter, blogspot, facebook, and other social networking services. These Cloud software services have millions of users and tons of storage. Just like Gmail, they are about hosting discussions. The discussions are an ongoing stream. They don't get organized, filed, or filtered. We choose who sees and receives our discussions. Nothing gets deleted. I don't have to organize the streams of discussions. Searching is done by who we connect to and what they publish.

I had an epiphany during a face-to-face (hard to believe isn't it) discussion with a friend who had brought her teenaged daughter into work. Her teenaged daughter is a 'power' facebook user. Her daughter sat down at her desk, looked at her email screen with a bunch of file folders to the left, and asked about those. My friend explained that she had to file her email messages into folders because she wanted to keep them organized so she could find a message when needed, and her company wanted to keep the email server space available. Her daughter looked up, scrunched her face and whined, 'that's sounds too hard'. Email has become 'elder' mail. The notions of discussions, publish once, store forever, search everything, and social organization are driving us to a completely different way of communicating.

Maybe the 'if you care' emails will be replaced by the 'if you care, you'll subscribe to my Twitter feed' requests.

Commoditization of IT Operations

My response to 'What will be commoditized by the Cloud?' made during Cloud Camp Boston was "The commoditization we're going to see in the cloud is operations". These new entrants to Cloud Computing seemed to imply that storage, networks and computers were already commodities and unless something else was being commoditized, Cloud Computing would not create sufficient value to succeed. There are other benefits to Cloud Computing, but let's stay on the IT operations aspect for now.

I'm not ready to go as far as Nichols Carr has gone in declaring IT Doesn't Matter nor what's been attributed to Thomas Siebel. Current IT practices emerged in response to the application creation/selection process. The application creation/selection process determines what IT operations must deploy in data centers to support the business. As an over-simplistic example, a company determines that they need a new CRM application. They evaluate CRM applications that were written and tested months or years earlier by an ISV for the market-at-large. The application specifies the supported hardware platform(s), software stack(s), patch level(s), network configuration(s), data access methodology(ies) and monitoring/management interface(s). Once the specific CRM application is selected and purchased, IT operations has to develop a runbook specific to the application for deployment in a specific data center(s). The various IT operations departments work together to fit the application's requirements into their existing infrastructure, and procure new, unique, or additional components, or 'one-offs'. They have to side-step other applications' conflicting requirements and 'one-offs' to complete the deployment. IT operations' job complexity has to be staggering as they deal with hundreds or thousands of deployed applications. Maybe that's why IT operations like to leave a newly deployed application untouched for months or years while they tend to the other applications.

Essential characteristics for Cloud Computing include: on-demand self-service, ubiquitous network access, location independent resource pooling, rapid elasticity, and measured service. Cloud Computing will provide these essential characteristics affordably through virtualization, automation, programmatic control and standards[1]. Applications and automated runbooks will be developed specifically for the Cloud. Programming will automate the manual work done on infrastructure (network, storage, data base, and system) and application configuration, management, monitoring, and maintenance. The automation will drive the cost of operations lower. The virtualization, automation, programmatic control and standards will commoditize IT operations. Evidence of this progress are appearing now as virtualization companies and cloud suppliers automate the allocation, configuration, monitoring, and management of infrastructure and applications.

IT operations will take back control from the applications to deliver better efficiency and lower cost through using public and private Clouds. The pressure to increase IT operations' efficiency and lower costs will be great enough that applications be re-written and automated runbooks will be developed. The historic pressure of creating 'one-offs' in IT operations for unique application requirements will fade. How many 'one-off' requests do you think Amazon has gotten since they started up AWS? I'd bet a lot. How many 'one-off' requests have Amazon implemented? I'd bet none. AWS cannot afford to make custom changes for any application. The same is likely for Google AppEngine, and Microsoft Azure. In the future, it may even be likely for IT operations.

What should we call this new world of commoditization of IT operations? What about OPS 2.0? OPS 2.0 fits along side Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, and Everything 2.0, doesn't it?

[1] No standards exist and are likely years away. The industry will likely generate many competing ways of doing Cloud Computing before an a priori or de facto standard comes about. Industry-wide efficiency and cost savings won't be possible until then.