Architecture Matters - JasonC at Sun: Architecture Matters - A View from the Field

So it's been awhile -- I hope everyone has had a restful holiday season and your all ready to get back into the thick of things. :) By now you've seen our announcement on the Q-Layer acquisition. Great news, and it validates and hopefully accelerates some of the work we are doing on the OpenDI side -- now hosted at http://opendi.kenai.com.

I've been doing some thinking lately on the enterprise, private cloud space. I believe there is some level of tension between the cloud as it exists today and how enterprise IT exists and operates. I think this is a good think -- perhaps it helps to move along the utility computing models (non-project based silos, etc) that we've tried to recommend in the past. But I do see a serious change in the developer use case and how it plays out with an IT shop.

In the diagram, there's two processes illustrated. The top, the developer as a freely able person to pick and choose his deployment technologies and design/technical decisions, and the second -- a more constrained enterprise view that helps illustrate my point.

IT shops need, want some level of control -- they have to -- they are often the folks that are goaled, fired, replaced, based on their ability to meet SLOs (servlce level objectives.) The cloud needs to take this into account and eventually help guide the developer towards the path of.... 1) getting their apps deployed 2) monitored, instrumented 3) scaled appropriately, etc 4) and managed

There's a handoff point here that's important. The role of the "operator" in a large existing shop is going to change slowly. The cloud needs to provide the views and the tools into this to ensure the business operates at the level they expect. How do we do this?

Take a look at the whitepaper at OpenDI for some more thoughts on the "model" driven approach.