Within the typical enterprise datacenter, developers have long been one of the drivers for the ongoing and painful “silo-ization” of enterprise applications. New applications enter the datacenter and custom infrastructure is provided per ‘requirements’ from the application developer. This has been a pattern for 25 years which is now drastically shifting. Now, the application developer has the choice: fit the infrastructure to the app or fit the app to the infrastructure (aka ‘cloud-readiness’).
Put another way: push the risk to the centralized IT department and manage them indirectly with ‘requirements’ or accept the risk onto the application and manage it’s infrastructure directly and programmatically.
All application developers want to be in control of their apps and their destiny. Combine this with the structural problems inherent in most centralized IT departments fulfillment and delivery capabilities and the choice seems clear: get it done now, for cheap, under my own control or push the risks out to a group I don’t control or manage with unknown delivery dates and costs.
Developers, in droves, from all kinds of businesses, have voted with their pocket books and Amazon EC2 is a runaway train because of it.
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Here’s another part of the secret: automating homogeneous systems is 10x easier than automating heterogeneous systems. You can’t just add magical automation sauce to an existing enterprise datacenter and *poof* a cloud appears.
Amazon’s simplification of their infrastructure, and hence reduction of choice for customers, has resulted in an ability to deliver automation that works.
The secret *is* simplicity, not complexity.
The new pattern *is* a homogeneous, standardized and tightly integrated infrastructure environment.
AWS success is *because* they ignored the prevailing pattern in enterprise datacenters.
” What is Amazon’s Secret for Success and Why is EC2 a Runaway Train? | Cloudscaling (via irq)
