Check out that title. Pretty awesome way to sound smart, right? Well this blog post is another one of my long winded ones and concerns my recent 6 week side-project. So a little warning in advance: This is a long read and a minder-bender in spots. Have a hot or cool drink and some time before you start. I think you will enjoy the ending.
The Idea
I am a firm believer that virtualization and cloud computing are creating new paradigms to approach innovation, operation, and execution within information technology. I find myself inspired by ideas and concepts that would be impossible before the advent of virtualization as a common approach to logical abstraction of x86 compute, storage, and networking. In my feeble mind, I see endless possibilities not only in automation. I also see possibilities in creating intelligent systems; able to respond in way much more organic that we may have thought possible.
It is from this belief that this new idea came to me. The lifecycle of applications and infrastructure has been both very a manual and managed process. Creation, changes, and death (decommissioning) are all things that can be automated; but require prerequisite knowledge to orchestrate correctly. You would specifically know the quantity, scope, and configuration of physical or virtual servers prior to building for an application. Likewise, configured settings and metadata for the application would have been tested and discovered through intense integration and regression cycles by development/quality teams beforehand. All of this would be wrapped around processes and models (ITIL, COBIT) with the goal of ensuring control and accountability.
And I am not proposing that the model above is inherently wrong. Rather, I just think that it may be possible we are missing opportunities for the infrastructure to work for us.
