- Today date gets interesting meaning from computer science perspective: 31OCT == 25DEC. Will IT Santa come in the town?
- InformationWeek article points out on very interesting twist in the IT infrastructure of enterprise world. SaaS based applications become significant force to change traditional position of “kingdom” of enterprise IT department. As our product is available only via SaaS model we’ve got similar experience as described. But winning position against client’s in-house IT department is not easy one. To convince clients adopt sophisticated SaaS application you need to go extra mile or two to help them integrate offered solution with their internal processes and infrastructure. And you can be sure their IT will fight hard against “foreign intruders”. Definitely interesting time for IT and business sector is coming.
- There are many ways how to develop distributed system and more importantly how to manage it. Applications complexity will continue to grow while app management becomes more and more overtaken by business staff rather than IT specialists. IT department or service provider will “just” ensure that application will perform optimally on given set of HW and within expected reliability/latency. This is clearly shown by trend of enterprises to adopt SaaS applications (see previous point). Application management functionality will therefore need to offer simple to use and “all-in-one-place” presentation/access. Additionally would system need to ensure configuration consistency and eliminate all miss configurations which might lead to system malfunctioning. I don’t see any other way to solve that than make management centralized – at least from user’s point of view (no matter if “user” means here business staff or IT specialist). I have made some comments on this theme related to original Harry Piersons article. Harry Pierson replied with position that centralized management “doesn’t make it feasible at any significant scale”. Unfortunately my experience with it is contrary to his statement. Moreover I have “living” example within our application. It would be therefore beneficial if Harry can dedicate some time and clarify what management model he has in mind and what constrains he assumes. And what about clarification what scale is significant enough to prove something is working (if one application instance is spread over 50-100 boxes and two/more geo locations is large/significant enough)? Arguments which Harry places against centralized management seems to me are at very best quite weak at least for “average” SOA based application.
-Libor
Wednesday, October 31, 2007 at 17:28 |
I didn’t mean the scale of a single system. For a single system, geoscaled and spread across 100’s of boxes, you’d still want a single mechnaism to manage it.
I mean the scale in terms of the numbers of systems inside a typical large enterprise. @MSIT we have scores of different management systems, the number of different management interfaces is at least in the hundreds, maybe thousands.
Getting those thousands of systems to “adopt [the] same common management interface” is impractical. And you can’t centrally manage all the systems in your enterprise if you don’t have them on a common management interface.
Thursday, November 1, 2007 at 14:52 |
Now I see your point much more clearly and do understand your objections.
From this point of view, where you need to handle hundreds or even thousands different distributed systems where each might need its own “specific” management treatments, is implementing one “common” management interface daunting task indeed.
When someone speaks about ESB as solution to it you can just “laugh” but I guess probably not many companies (Fortune 500 possibly???) are at the same problem domain as you have to address. And for them proposed way might work maybe (i.e. it certainly works for us
). Anyway this is very interesting view from “opposite” side of “border”.
Thanks for comment and clarification!