New Problems, New Job, and a New Look

I still consider myself a rookie in this field even though I started my "official" career in the Network/IT space 5 years ago. Why is that? Is part of the reason because of the rapid push that applications are demanding from the infrastructure? For example if we want XYZ app to be ready for testing today and production in a week how would you be able to stand that up manually? You can't, it really could take weeks to be ready for just testing and that doesn't fly anymore.

So what we doing to speed things up? We're focusing less on the common office apps like email, Instant Messaging, in house file servers and moving all of this to the cloud and paying for it like a utility bill. We are adding layers of abstraction on manual tasks and calling it automation. Openstack, Docker and SDN all have a common theme, abstract the complexity into a one-two-click solution. It sounds great on paper but what happens when it fails? You now have just increased the complexity of the solution that was suppose to help/hide the complexity in the first place.

Things get worse if nobody really knows what this does, how does it work, and how can I fix it? Couple of months ago Google had an issue with its compute engine instances where it lost external connectivity because of automated systems removed all BGP external IP blocks, this was due to software bug. More information. Networks are becoming more complex, and the need to have things spin up and down are now very important to an organization but there needs to be balance between how many layers of abstraction you have and just overall of functionally it.

I don't have a problem with automation and the abstracting of layers, I think its a great idea because it this helps us become efficient, competitive and overall it does work, honestly we don't really have a choice in the end because the industry is moving into that direction anyway. We have to be aware of how many abstraction layers there are between the bare metal equipment and you, We can't have Inception automation...but I still consider my self a rookie, I haven't been is this industry for that long so maybe I'm missing something.

I have been little quiet this summer, I have had some changes with my career and so far so good. I hope this information above is helpful. Let me know what you think, also enjoy the new look of the website. I seem to change this website layout around every couple of years. Enjoy the rest of the summer! :) Ryan