Category Archives: Microservices

OK- Stay with me on this. I’m drawing parallels again.  🙂

Like many from my generation, my initial exposure to classical music and opera was derived from Bugs Bunny on Saturday mornings (culturally deprived, I know). One of the cartoons I remember well was with Bugs trying to get even with the heavy-set opera singer who disrupts Bugs’ banjo playing. In order to exact his revenge, Bugs infiltrates the opera singer’s concert by impersonating the famous long-hared (hared…get it?) conductor, Leopold Stokowski. He proceeds to force the tenor to hit octaves that structurally compromise the amphitheater and as it crumbles leaves him bruised and battered. Bugs is as always, victorious.

In examining Bugs’ strategy (let’s assume he actually had one), Bugs took over operations of the orchestra’s musical program to achieve his goal of getting the tenor “in-line” so to speak. As I prepare to head down to the OpenStack Conference in Austin, TX next week, I’m seeing similar patterns develop in the cloud and data center infrastructure space which are very “Bugs/Leopold-like”. With organizations deciding on how to consolidate data centers, containerize apps and move to the cloud, vendors and open source technologies offer value, however true operational, infrastructure and platform independence are not what they appear to be. For example, once you move your apps off the data center to AWS or VMware and then later determine you are paying too much or the workload is no longer is appropriate for the infrastructure, good luck replicating the configuration work done on CloudFormation on another cloud or back in the data center. Same rationale is applicable to other technologies such as converged infrastructure and proprietary private cloud platforms. As the customer, to achieve scale and remove operational pain you must fall in line. That in itself is a big commitment to make in a still-evolving and maturing technology industry and a dynamic business climate.

On an unrelated topic, I was saddened to learn of the passing of Prince this past week. While not a die-hard fan, I liked his music. He was a great composer of songs and had a style all to his own. Beyond his music and sheer talent, I admired his business beliefs and deep desire to maintain creative ownership and control of his music and his brand.

Despite his fortune and fame, there was a period in the middle of Prince’s career in which he felt creatively and financially locked-in by the big record companies. Once Prince (and the unpronounceable symbol) broke away from Warner Music, he was able to produce music under his own label. This action enabled him to create music without a major record label dictating when he needed to produce a new album and what it needed to sound like. In addition, he was now able to market his new recordings to the distribution platform that supported his artistic and financial goals. While still having ties to Warner Music, he was no longer bound by their business practices. Along with starting his own music subscription service, Prince cut deals with Arista, Columbia, iTunes and Sony. Prince’s music production had operational portability, business agility and choice (seven Grammy awards and 100 million record sales also help create that kind of leverage.).

While open APIs and containers offer some portability, at RackN we believe they do not offer a completely free market experience to the cloud and infrastructure consumer. If the business decides it is paying too much for AWS, it should not allow for the operational underlay and configuration complexity to lock them to the infrastructure provider. They should be able to transfer their business to Google, Azure, Rackspace or Dreamhost with ease. We believe technologies that create portable, composable operational workflows drive true infrastructure and platform independence and as a benefit, reduces business risk. Choosing a platform and being forced to use it are two very different things.

In conclusion, when considering moving workloads to the cloud, converged infrastructure platforms or using DevOps automation tools, consider how you can achieve programmable operational portability and agility. Think about how you can best absorb new technologies without causing operational disruption in your infrastructure. Furthermore, ensure you can accomplish this in a repeatable, automated fashion. Analyze how you can abstract away complex configurations for security, networking and container orchestration technologies and make them adaptable from one infrastructure platform to another. Attempt to eliminate configuration versioning as much as possible and make upgrades simplistic and automated so your DevOps staff does not have to be experts (they are stressed out enough.).

If you are attending the OpenStack Conference this week, look me up. While I am far from a music expert, i’ll be happy to share with you my insights on how to spot a technology vendor that likes to play a purple guitar as opposed to one that eats carrots and plays the banjo.

-Dan Choquette: Co-Founder, RackN