As you know a couple of weeks ago I had the chance to participate in a #syschat via twitter and a webinar put on by SolarWinds and my good friend Kong Yang. The main topic was around Hybrid Cloud, Software Defined Data Center, Containers, and Converged Infrastructure. You can find some interesting predictions from Kong and SolarWinds HeadGeeks on these topics here. One of the questions I found interesting was “Are these architecture or marketecture?” One of my favorite quotes was from Christopher Kusek “The constructs being Architecture vs Marketecture really depends upon which vendor in in the room”.  Christopher added a 🙂 at the end of the tweet so I assume he was joking. However, I do feel that a lot of vendors start throwing around buzz words when talking about these technologies, but that shouldn’t stop customers from seeing the benefits, which simply put should be to make the jobs of the IT admin easier. However, in my opinion none of these technologies by themselves will solve all problems. One of the biggest questions is monitoring. There has been a search for the Holy Grail or as some call it “single pane of glass” for some time now.  This is easy if you have one vendor for all, but who really has that? To be able to quickly diagnose problems there needs to be a holistic view of the environment. I think we are getting closer as many vendors start developing APIs that expose hardware/software of the environment, but we still have a ways to go.

I think to fully embrace the switch to these new technologies IT teams need to converge into a jack of all trades type of teams. The time where you had siloes and there was one admin whose focus was deep in one technology will go away. The new IT admin will have to operate production workloads across a physical data center and in the cloud throughout the lifecycle covering everything from security to monitoring and configuration management.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the chat and if you have any predictions for the next year or two.