Reader response to the last Real User Monitoring blog, “Letting go …“, surprised me: it generated more interest, and more praise, than I expected. I was pleased, of course, that it seemed to meet a need.
There’s a complement to “letting go”, of course. We have to know where to focus next. A couple of recent articles suggest specific directions for a devop turning to the future.
Make the Cloud your servant
First, a Gartner study highlights the growing importance of IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service). While “traditional data center outsourcing decreased by 1% …” over the last year, IT (information technology department) spending on cloud services went from $3.4 billion to $5 billion in the same time.
The Gartner estimates are no surprise. Just before he arrived last week as new CIO (chief information officer) for HP, Ramon Baez gave an interview filled with anticipations of the jobs of the future: “Our people are becoming information architects or they’re becoming integrators of SaaS. … Integrating with our SaaS providers is a significant skill.”
Mobile connection
Baez also added that “With mobility, we will focus less on the big, large application systems and more on the micro apps and how you add value with those.” This comment intrigues me, because it’s not how I think of mobility. Certainly it’s important to recognize that the mobile client end-point is “miniaturized”, in my language; that might still leave quite a “big, large application system” on the server and middleware sides to support the mobile handsets. For me, mobility heightens the emphasis on responsiveness, and there
fore everything to do with APM (application performance monitoring), as this series often discusses.
Mobile use typically has a single purpose at a time, and demands quick turn-around; that’s a different usage pattern than the desktop. From all I know, the requirement for application nimbleness and ease of use will shape the careers of the future far more than just a trend to the “micro”. It’s a good time to know how to measure the applications and services we deliver. That’s also one of the reasons that EUE (end-user experience) is receiving a growing share of the attention that used to lump under APM. We’ll look more at EUE over the coming months.
Baez brought up integration with the cloud as key. APM is fundamental in integration, for reliance on IaaS shifts performance characteristics.
A different, if related, way to think about the careers of the future is that they’ll emphasize teamwork. Instead of being cowboys who do whole systems by ourselves, the premium will go to those who figure out collaboration. We need to learn enough to integrate technical pieces and human expertise wisely.
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