A cloudy perspective: My take on virtualization and what it means for IT pros
When was the last time you looked at the cloud? When people started using AWS, and later Azure, “cloud” was really just a marketing-friendly way of saying “outsourced hosting,” since it was used mainly to host virtual machines (VMs). Because users could do that in their own data center, it was just a normal outsourcing play. Sure, it made it easier to run VMs across the globe, with things like hosted-load balancing to connect it all together; but underneath, it was simply VMs. Even platform as a service offerings were, in many cases, just VMs where you didn’t get to see the VM. That was nice because the provider took care of the VM and its operating system for you — but it was still just VMs all the way down until you hit the turtles.
What you may not have noticed is that recently, this has all started to change. Services like Azure Functions and AWS Lambda are true “serverless” computing offerings. There are servers underneath everything, of course; you need a processor and memory to run code. But it’s all handled by the provider. The provider decides if it needs to spin up a new VM to run your code, or what OS it runs. It’s a much deeper level of abstraction. The idea is for developers to simply deploy code, and have that code run somewhere.
Now you might think that represents an existential threat to IT operations, because the cloud provider is taking over as the operator. Nobody needs youanymore. Well, not exactly.
The latest twist in cloud comes from Microsoft, and it’s a big one
You’ve heard of Azure Stack (and if you haven’t, Pluralsight has a great Big Picture course on it), which lets you run a little piece of Azure. Essentially, it is a private Azure region, inside your own data center. With this, Microsoft has changed cloud from being a location and into a model for datacenter management. With Azure Stack, you split the operations duties with Microsoft. While Microsoft does a lot the heavy lifting, you’re still needed for certain maintenance tasks and creating the offerings that your private Azure region will make available to developers and other consumers. All of the projects that couldn’t run in the cloud, for various reasons, now can run in the cloud. It is just the section of the cloud that’s under your control, or that’s hosted by a regional or specialized provider who can meet your specific requirements for security or privacy.
Looking at the cloud a year ago — and why you should be paying close attention
A year ago, the cloud looked completely different than it does now. This is why I keep saying, “ignore the cloud at your own peril.” It isn’t just outsourced VMs, even if that’s essentially where it started. It’s a fluid, dynamic thing. Like real puffs of vapor, it can sometimes be hard to grasp, and it defies attempts to be pinned down and defined. As a constantly evolving set of capabilities, you have to keep an eye on it. So you’ll know what it offers, how, and when — and if it might be the right tool for a particular job.
How these changes may affect IT
We live in interesting new times in IT. We aren’t just racking servers and setting permissions on print queues. It hasn’t been that for a long time now. It get more interesting every day, and the building blocks that connect to exactly what organizations need, represents a truer picture of why I got into IT in the first place.
I can’t wait to see what comes next — and I’m sure it’ll be here in a month or two.
