Data Center: Where comes from? Where are going ?
I remember glorious times, in the year 1998. Where I and some colleagues set up a Sun Microsystems(Sparc) server to serve as a DNS using Debian. Everything was complicated and as new engineers did not give up knowing every piece of the server, how they worked, it was practically the era of caves in terms of data centers.
Today we have a many of new concepts, technologies and an increasingly faster. Where those who do not move quickly towards the new one may not need to move anymore. I look at the services architecture that we have today when reviewing the videos of the last Google Next 2017 and I realize this incredible image:
Who dares erase the servers? How are we going to live in a world where we do not have shell access to be able to type:
$ who am mi
firemanxbr ttys000 Jun 6 00:03
Simple my fellows, the speed of innovation is taking us to a new place called Serverless. What the hell is this?
Well, we came back a bit to notice some changes if you didn’t work in a data center like me in the last 20 years.
Before we had serial access to console(bios) of servers. Yes! this feature already existed one day and was a much desired feature, because it avoided that you had to raise the ass of the chair to go to the server for connect a keyboard and a monitor.
How did they develop this amazing resource?
Easy, no one else wanted to pay for incredible system administrators to walk through huge data centers with keyboards and monitors in a grocery cart. I confess that I do not miss these activities :)
The new time started, servers with iDrac (Dell) or iLo (HP) cards, then come Virtualization, Containers and now we see the Serverless.
If we stop to analyze will realize that from the beginning to the container world we are living around a point: Operating Systems with the packages, the Linux distributions flavors, System V, Systemd, etc…
To have a virtual machine what the first step? Which operating system will use? Talking about the big container revolution, we keep trying to reduce the operating system and saying: Now we just think about which image we’re going to use? For those who do not know image is an operating system too.
For the first time we are talking about making this feature obsolete one day and even someone as old as I can think of it as a good idea. Oh really? Yes! Who ever turned a night for a “kernel panic” Who never had problems with packages? Who has never had problems with wrong configurations?
Finally we can do what we sometimes try to escape: Improve our codes, whether you like it or not! Long life to Serverless! Since 2008 and counting…
