Tech has always been a kind of swirling mix of trends (and hype), but any ecosystem necessarily supports symbiotic things best—positive feedback is after all “positive”. We may be seeing some signs of symbiosis in some of the trends in IT and networking, and so we may be poised for better-than-average rates of change in our industry.
What’s really happening underneath everything else in tech is an increased value placed on dynamism. Mobility has taken consumer communications and entertainment into our pockets, and what we can use at a whim promotes different usage patterns than that we used when we had time to sit at the computer. Companies are looking at productivity changes less by providing information (essentially hoping someone will do something with it) and more by promoting and supporting behaviors. Help a worker do a job better and they do a better job.
The cloud, fundamentally, is valuable mostly because it’s dynamic and not because it’s cheaper. Economies of scale, as I’ve noted, are fragile and easily lost as competition drives down margins and low-apple applications are converted. But dynamism is inherently useful, particularly because dynamism in demand is difficult to fulfill through static resource commitments. The cloud is the right vehicle to support the demand trend I opened with.
NFV (as carriers would see it) or “DevOps” as it might be called by enterprises, are a natural response to increased dynamism in both supply (resources) and demand (applications/components). If we’re into whim-satisfaction, we’re necessarily going to be seeing a lot of changes because whims are transient, dynamic, by nature. We have built IT on the premise that we could adapt work practices to fit automation models and now we’re doing the opposite, which means that we have to make IT more flexible. But what’s important about NFV is less the on-the-surface desire to substitute hosted stuff for appliances (that’s like saying the cloud is important because it’s hosted server consolidation) than the fact that when you formalize such a structuring of features you have to address how to deploy them and manage them profitably.
SDN, in my view, is really a tail of an NFV dog and not the other way around. If I have massive shifts in work created by dynamism, and if I expect my applications and services to be truly whim-satisfying enough to sustain user commitments to them, I have to be able to engineer performance to stay within acceptable limits. The basic mission of the network used to be connection but now it’s going to have to be delivery of experiences, which is a whole different thing because the experience has to be assembled from cooperative components sited in some logical place, then connected and streamed to the target consumer. The traditional approach of creating a network that can support open any-to-any is simply not economical because it demands everything be able to draw on unlimited capacity all the time simply because some of the time it will need a lot of it.
Right now, I think all of our giant revolutions are being hampered by “limitedism”, meaning the tendency to atomize something to make it easier to get your head (and wallet) around. The problem is that we’ve then killed that symbiosis, and created a situation where everything’s benefit case is weakened because it can’t be made with the cooperation of the other elements. We can’t have SDN without the cloud and NFV, can’t have NFV without dynamic applications and services, can’t have anything without that recognition that the user or consumer is the behavioral—and ultimately financial—driver of the whole picture.
Taken in this light, Apple’s recent shift toward home and health ecosystems may be a more interesting gamble than it might appear on the surface. It’s facile to say that Apple is just digging itself deeper into consumer electronics, becoming more a gadget company. Such a move would be an enormous risk because these deeper elements of consumer technology are just that—deeper. You know what your phone looks like and so does everyone else, so it’s subject to “coolness”. How many times have you thought “Gee, that motion sensor is really cool?” Apple can’t possibly be so stupid as to think it can brand a sensor, so it has to be thinking about branding the experience as a whole. It might be moving into dynamic cloud not through a service but from the experience side.
Amazon’s move with a vCloud connector may be something similar. If you want to sell cloud services you need to exploit dynamism if you’re in for the long pull. Applications need to be dynamic to use dynamic resources, so if Amazon can create more dynamic applications by creating containers that let them be moved around (OASIS has a similar goal with its CAMP model). But migrating stuff isn’t the same as making it dynamic, so Amazon will have to do more to encourage cloud-centric, dynamism-supporting, development models.
Every ecosystem has a foundation, and IMHO the foundation of the dynamic tech ecosystem of the future is the effective use and management of virtualization. Virtualization is the combination of functional abstraction and resource-independent instantiation. What’s important about tools for NFV or SDN or DevOps, what’s critical in application development today, is the migration of everything toward a virtual-driven model. That’s the high-level issue that every one of our trends has to be grounded in, or they’ll lose that critical symbiosis. That’s why I keep harping on the need to visualize management and orchestration (or “MANO” in the NFV ISG terms) as being more than OpenStack or service chaining. We can’t shrink our critical revolutionary foundation unless we’re ready to shrink our revolutions.