Hello everyone!
Sorry for the long absence – I’ve been busy with my new gig at Nokia. After decades of designing products I decided to cross to the ‘dark side’ and get closer to Operations. It’s something that I meant to do for a long time and I’ve been holding out for the right opportunity. Finally that opportunity came along! I’m now part of the CCOD Data Center Infrastructure Architecture team, responsible for server designs for various High Performance, Cloud and Big Data solutions.
I’ve learned a lot in these recent months. IT Operations is a lot different from your typical product design. Things tend to move at much faster pace. Business sense is just as important as making sound technical decisions. Leadership, teamwork and organization alignment all play key roles in operational efficiency and maturity.
I’ve also learned about the challenges of designing and operating a Services Provider infrastructure, especially across multiple data centers and geo-regions. One example is the extremely large variety of tools and technologies that the IT Operations folks need to master. While competition is good, it also tends to create point solutions of limited utility, eventually leading to vendor lock-in situations. Why all these vendors cannot agree on a fairly light set of standards and interface? Why all these suppliers cannot pack more of their differentiating features beneath some open standards? It will certainly make it easier for the end-user to adopt the best-of-breed technology which eventually will turn into higher volumes of sales for the vendors.
In the upcoming months I’ll start a technical series describing these challenges and few of the solutions that had been evaluated. Topics will include standardization, automation, virtualization, Infrastructure-as-Code, etc. Stay tuned for updates!
Until then have a great day and thanks for your time!