Openstack or Cloudstack? Which product will it be. Or will it be an evolution of the infra deployment software we have written ourselves? Three weeks ago we started a PoC. The goal is simple:”Push button deploy of infra with the basic subset of ops functionality”.
Getting a system live is not a difficult task. Most people tell me that it is, but it isnt always the case. We should not forget the difference between a shitload of work and a very complex task. Unraveling, reverse engineer 16 years of legacy without the people that created the spagetti. That is the complex and difficult part. Running systems that differ like day and night, that is the complex stuff. Building the underlaying infra is not difficult. It is complex. But it is applying the same concepts, the same standards over and over. That should be automated.
So what is it that we really want to achieve? We want a system (PaaS if you like or IaaS maybe) that can build our initial design for a customer with a push on the button. We design a L3 / L7 architecture. We know how we feel and think about security. We are aware of flexibility requirements (private mission critical cloud, SBP Fog (Shared internal cloud) and the public Cloud (ec2 e.g.)).
The infrastructure is not as it was ten years ago. The infrastructure is becoming a commodity. We have the smartes people within Schuberg Philis and the deserve to work on the most complex puzzles. Not on jumpstarting just another machine. Not on installing a log server for the 5th time in a year. Do not get me wrong. They need to understand how these systems work, but they should spent their time on where we can make the difference as a company. And that time is with the customer and with the software partners.
Interesting times are about to happen. I’ll keep you posted once in a while.
