Monday, September 30, 2019

HPE strategist Mark Linesch on the surging role of containers in advancing the hybrid IT estate

https://www.hpe.com/us/en/resources/cloud/idc-hybrid-cloud.html?jumpid=em_qsmzuf7fx4

Openness, flexibility, and speed to distributed deployments have been top drivers of the steady growth of container-based solutions. Now, IT operators are looking to increase automation, built-in intelligence, and robust management as they seek container-enabled hybrid cloud and multicloud approaches for data and workloads.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Read a full transcript or download a copy.

This next edition of the BriefingsDirect Voice of the Innovator podcast series examines the rapidly evolving containers innovation landscape with Mark Linesch, Vice President of Technology Strategy in the CTO Office and Hewlett Packard Labs at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). The composability strategies interview is conducted by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.


Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: Let’s look at the state of the industry around containers. What are the top drivers for containers adoption now that the technology has matured?

Linesch: The history of computing, as far back as I can remember, has been about abstraction; abstraction of the infrastructure and then a separation of concern between the infrastructure and the applications.

Linesch
It used to be it was all bare metal, and then about a decade ago, we went on the journey to virtualization. And virtualization is great, it’s an abstraction that allows for certain amount of agility. But it’s fairly expensive because you are virtualizing the entire infrastructure, if you will, and dragging along a unique operating system (OS) each time you do that.

So the industry for the last few years has been saying, “Well, what’s next, what’s after virtualization?” And clearly things like containerization are starting to catch hold.

Why now? Well, because we are living in a hybrid cloud world, and we are moving pretty aggressively toward a more distributed edge-to-cloud world. We are going to be computing, analyzing, and driving intelligence in all of our edges -- and all of our clouds.

Things such as performance- and developer-aware capabilities, DevOps, the ability to run an application in a private cloud and then move it to a public cloud, and being able to drive applications to edge environments on a harsh factory floor -- these are all aspects of this new distributed computing environment that we are entering into. It’s a hybrid estate, if you will.

Containers have advantages for a lot of different constituents in this hybrid estate world. First and foremost are the developers. If you think about development and developers in general, they have moved from the older, monolithic and waterfall-oriented approaches to much more agile and continuous integration and continuous delivery models.

And containers give developers a predictable environment wherein they can couple not only the application but the application dependencies, the libraries, and all that they need to run an application throughout the DevOps lifecycle. That means from development through test, production, and delivery.

Containers carry and encapsulate all of the app’s requirements to develop, run, test, and scale. With bare metal or virtualization, as the app moved through the DevOps cycle, I had to worry about the OS dependencies and the type of platforms I was running that pipeline on.

Developers’ package deal 

A key thing for developers is they can package the application and all the dependencies together into a distinct manifest. It can be version-controlled and easily replicated. And so the developer can debug and diagnose across different environments and save an enormous amount of time. So developers are the first beneficiaries, if you will, of this maturing containerized environment.
How to Modernize Your IT
With Container Technology
But next are the IT operations folks because they now have a good separation of concern. They don’t have to worry about reconfiguring and patching all these kinds of things when they get a hand-off from developers into a production environment. That capability is fundamentally encapsulated for them, and so they have an easier time operating.

And increasingly in this more hybrid distributed edge-to-cloud world, I can run those containers virtually anywhere. I can run them at the edge, in a public cloud, in a private cloud, and I can move those applications quickly without all of these prior dependencies that virtualization or bare metal required. It contains an entire runtime environment and application, plus all the dependencies, all the libraries, and the like.

The third area that’s interesting for containers is around isolation. Containers virtualize the CPU, the memory, storage network resources – and they do that at the OS level. So they use resources much more efficiently for that reason.
Unlike virtualization, which includes your entire OS as well as the application, containers run on a single OS. Each container shares the OS kernel with other containers so it's lightweight, uses less resources, and spins up instantly.

Unlike virtualization, which includes your entire OS as well as the application, containers run on a single OS. Each container shares the OS kernel with other containers, so it’s lightweight, uses much fewer resources, and spins up almost instantly -- in seconds versus virtual machines (VMs) that spin up in minutes.

When you think about this fast-paced, DevOps world we live in -- this increasingly distributed hybrid estate from the many edges and many clouds we compute and analyze data in -- that’s why containers are showing quite a bit of popularity. It’s because of the business benefits, the technical benefits, the development benefits, and the operations benefits.

Gardner: It’s been fascinating for me to see the portability and fit-for-purpose containerization benefits, and being able to pass those along a DevOps continuum. But one of the things that we saw with virtualization was that too much of a good thing spun out of control. There was sprawl, lack of insight and management, and eventually waste.

How do we head that off with containers? How do containers become manageable across that entire hybrid estate?

Setting the standard 

Linesch: One way is standardizing the container formats, and that’s been coming along fairly nicely. There is an initiative called The Open Container Initiative, part of the Linux Foundation, that develops to the industry standard so that these containers, formats, and runtime software associated with them are standardized across the different platforms. That helps a lot.

Number two is using a standard deployment option. And the one that seems to be gripping the industry is Kubernetes. Kubernetes is an open source capability that provides mechanisms for deploying, maintaining, and scaling containerized applications. Now, the combination of the standard formats from a runtime perspective with the ability to manage that with capabilities like Mesosphere or Kubernetes has provided the tooling and the capabilities to move this forward.

Gardner: And the timing couldn’t be better, because as people are now focused on as-a-service for so much -- whether it’s an application, infrastructure, and increasingly, entire data centers -- we can focus on the business benefits and not the underlying technology. No one really cares whether it’s running in a virtualized environment, on bare metal, or in a container -- as long as you are getting the business benefits.

Linesch: You mentioned that nobody really cares what they are running on, and I would postulate that they shouldn’t care. In other words, developers should develop, operators should operate. The first business benefit is the enormous agility that developers get and that IT operators get in utilizing standard containerized environments.
How to Extend the Cloud Experience
Across Your Enterprise
Not only do they get an operations benefit, faster development, lower cost to operate, and those types of things, but they take less resources. So containers, because of their shared and abstracted environment, really take a lot fewer resources out of a server and storage complex, out of a cluster, so you can run your applications faster, with less resources, and at lower total cost.

This is very important when you think about IT composability in general because the combination of containerized environments with things like composable infrastructure provides the flexibility and agility to meet the needs of customers in a very time sensitive and very agile way.

Gardner: How are IT operators making a tag team of composability and containerization? Are they forming a whole greater than the sum of the parts? How do you see these two spurring innovation?

Linesch: I have managed some of our R and D centers. These are usually 50,000-square-foot data centers where all of our developers and hardware and software writers are off doing great work.

And we did some interesting things a few years ago. We were fully virtualized, a kind of private cloud environment, so we could deliver infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) resources to these developers. But as hybrid cloud hit and became more of a mature and known pattern, our developers were saying, “Look, I need to spin this stuff up more quickly. I need to be able to run through my development-test pipeline more effectively.”

https://www.hpe.com/us/en/resources/storage/containers-for-dummies.html

And containers-as-a-service was just a super hit for these guys. They are under pressure every day to develop, build, and run these applications with the right security, portability, performance, and stability. The containerized systems -- and being able to quickly spin up a container, to do work, package that all, and then move it through their pipelines -- became very, very important.

From an infrastructure operations perspective, it provides a perfect marriage between the developers and the operators. The operators can use composition and things like our HPE Synergy platform and our HPE OneView tooling to quickly build container image templates. These then allow those developers to populate that containers-as-a-service infrastructure with the work that they do -- and do that very quickly.

Gardner: Another hot topic these days is understanding how a continuum will evolve between the edge deployments and a core cloud, or hybrid cloud environment. How do containers help in that regard? How is there a core-to-cloud and/or core-to-cloud-to-edge benefit when containers are used?

Gaining an edge 

Linesch: I mentioned that we are moving to a much more distributed computing environment, where we are going to be injecting intelligence and processing through all of our places, people, and things. And so when you think about that type of an environment, you are saying, “Well, I’m going to develop an application. That application may require more microservices or more modular architecture. It may require that I have some machine learning (ML) or some deep learning analytics as part of that application. And it may then need to be provisioned to 40 -- or 400 -- different sites from a geographic perspective.”

When you think about edge-to-cloud, you might have a set of factories in different parts of the United States. For example, you may have 10 factories all seeking to develop inferencing and analyzed actions on some type of an industrial process. It might be video cameras attached to an assembly line looking for defects and ingesting data and analyzing that data right there, and then taking some type of a remediation action.
How to Optimize Your IT Operations
With Composable Infrastructure
And so as we think about this edge-to-cloud dance, one of the things that’s critical there is continuous integration and continuous delivery -- of being able to develop these applications and the artificial intelligence (AI) models associated with analyzing the data on an ongoing basis. The AI models, quite frankly, drift and they need to be updated periodically. And so continuous integration and continuous delivery types of methodologies are becoming very important.

Then, how do I package up all of those application bits, analytics bits, and ML bits? How do I provision that to those 10 factories? How do I do that in a very fast and fluid way?


That’s where containers really shine. They will give you bare-metal performance. They are packaged and portable – and that really lends itself to the fast-paced delivery and delivery cycles required for these kinds of intelligent edge and Internet of Things (IoT) operations.

Gardner: We have heard a lot about AIOps and injecting more intelligence into more aspects of IT infrastructure, particularly at the June HPE Discover conference. But we seem to be focusing on the gathering of the data and the analysis of the data, and not so much on the what do you do with that analysis – the execution based on the inferences.

It seems to me that containers provide a strong means when it comes to being able to exploit recommendations from an AI engine and then doing something -- whether to deploy, to migrate, to port.

Am I off on some rough tangent? Or is there something about containers -- and being able to deftly execute on what the intelligence provides -- that might also be of benefit?

Linesch: At the edge, you are talking about many applications where a large amount of data needs to be ingested. It needs to be analyzed, and then take a real-time action from a predictive maintenance, classification, or remediation perspective.
We are seeing the benefits of containers really shine in these more distributed edge-to-cloud environments. At the edge, many apps need a large amount of data ingested. The whole cycle time of ingesting data, analyzing it, and taking some action back is highly performant with containers.

And so containers spin up very quickly. They use very few resources. The whole cycle-time of ingesting data, analyzing that data through a container framework, taking some action back to the thing that you are analyzing is made a whole lot easier and a whole lot performant with less resources when you use containers.

Now, virtualization still has a very solid set of constituents, both at the hybrid cloud and at the intelligent edge. But we are seeing the benefits of containers really shine in these more distributed edge-to-cloud environments.

Gardner: Mark, we have chunked this out among the developer to operations and deployment, or DevOps implications. And we have talked about the edge and cloud.

But what about at the larger abstraction of impacting the IT organization? Is there a benefit for containerization where IT is resource-constrained when it comes to labor and skills? Is there a people, skills, and talent side of this that we haven’t yet tapped into?

Customer microservices support 

Linesch: There definitely is. One of the things that we do at HPE is try to help customers move into these new models like containers, DevOps, and continuous integration and delivery. We offer a set of services that help customers, whether they are medium-sized customers or large customers, to think differently about development of applications. As a result, they are able to become more agile and microservices-oriented.

Microservice-oriented development really lends itself to this idea of containers, and the ability of containers to interact with each other as a full-set application. What you see happening is that you have to have a reason not to use containers now.
How to Simplify and Automate
Across Your Datacenter
That’s pretty exciting, quite frankly. It gives us an opportunity to help customers to engage from an education perspective, and from a consulting, integration, and support perspective as they journey through microservices and how to re-architect their applications.

Our customers are moving to a more continuous integration-continuous development approach. And we can show them how to manage and operate these types of environments with high automation and low operational cost.

Gardner: A lot of the innovation we see along the lines of digital transformation at a business level requires taking services and microservices from different deployment models -- oftentimes multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, software-as-a-service (SaaS) services, on-premises, bare metal, databases, and so forth.

Are you seeing innovation percolating in that way? If you have any examples, I would love to hear them.

Linesch: I am seeing that. You see that every day when you look at the Internet. It’s a collaboration of different services based on APIs. You collect a set of services for a variety of different things from around these Internet endpoints, and that’s really as-a-service. That’s what it’s all about -- the ability to orchestrate all of your applications and collections of service endpoints.
https://www.hpe.com/us/en/resources/storage/containers-for-dummies.html
Furthermore, beyond containers, there are new as-a-function-based, or serverless, types of computing. These innovators basically say, “Hey, I want to consume a service from someplace, from an HTTP endpoint, and I want to do that very quickly.” They very effectively are using service-oriented methodologies and the model of containers.

We are seeing a lot of innovation in these function-as-a-service (FaaS) capabilities that some of the public clouds are now providing. And we are seeing a lot of innovation in the overall operations at scale of these hybrid cloud environments, given the portability of containers.

At HPE, we believe the cloud isn’t a place -- it’s an experience. The utilization of containers provides a great experience for both the development community and the IT operations community. It truly helps better support the business objectives of the company.

Investing in intelligent innovation 

Gardner: Mark, for you personally, as you are looking for technology strategy, how do you approach innovation? Is this something that comes organically, that bubbles up? Or is there a solid process or workflow that gets you to innovation? How do you foster innovation in your own particular way that works?

Linesch: At HPE, we have three big levers that we pull on when we think about innovation.

The first is we can do a lot of organic development -- and that’s very important. It involves understanding where we think the industry is going, and trying to get ahead of that. We can then prove that out with proof of concepts and incubation kinds of opportunities with lead customers.

We also, of course, have a lever around inorganic innovation. For example, you saw recently an acquisition by HPE of Cray to turbocharge the next generation of high-performance computing (HPC) and to drive the next generation of exascale computing.

The third area is our partnerships and investments. We have deep collaboration with companies like Docker, for example. They have been a great partner for a number of years, and we have, quite frankly, helped to mature some of that container management technology.

We are an active member of the standards organizations around the containers. Being able to mature the technology with partners like Docker, to get at the business value of some of these big advancements is important. So those are just three ways we innovate.

Longer term, with other HPE core innovations, such as composability and memory-driven computing, we believe that containers are going to be even more important. You will be able to hold the containers in memory-driven computing systems, in either Dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) or storage-class memory (SCM).

You will be able to spin them up instantly or spin them down instantly. The composition capabilities that we have will increasingly automate a very significant part of bringing up such systems, of bringing up applications, and really scaling and moving those applications to where they need to be.
One of the principles that we are focused on is moving the compute to the data -- as opposed to moving the data to the compute. And the reason for that is when you move the compute to the data, it's a lot easier, simpler, and faster with less resources.

One of the principles that we are focused on is moving the compute to the data -- as opposed to moving the data to the compute. And the reason for that is when you move the compute to the data, it’s a lot easier, simpler, and faster -- with less resources.

This next generation of distributed computing, memory-driven computing, and composability is really ripe for what we call containers in microseconds. And we will be able to do that all with the composability tooling we already have.

Gardner: When you get to that point, you’re not just talking about serverless. You’re talking about cloudless. It doesn’t matter where the FaaS is being generated as long as it’s at the right performance level that you require, when you require it. It’s very exciting.

Before we break, I wonder what guidance you have for organizations to become better prepared to exploit containers, particularly in the context of composability and leveraging a hybrid continuum of deployments? What should companies be doing now in order to be getting better prepared to take advantage of containers?

Be prepared, get busy

Linesch: If you are developing applications, then think deeply about agile development principles, and developing applications with a microservice-bent is very, very important.

If you are in IT operations, it’s all about being able to offer bare metal, virtualization, and containers-as-a-service options -- depending on the workload and the requirements of the business.
How to Manage Your Complex
Hybrid Cloud More Effectively
I recommend that companies not stand on the sidelines but to get busy, get to a proof of concept with containers-as-a-service. We have a lot of expertise here at HPE. We have a lot of great partners, such as Docker, and so we are happy to help and engage.


We have quite a bit of on-boarding and helpful services along the journey. And so jump in and crawl, walk, and run through it. There are always some sharp corners on advanced technology, but containers are maturing very quickly. We are here to help our customers on that journey.

Thursday, September 12, 2019

The venerable history of IT systems management meets the new era of AIOps-fueled automation over hybrid and multicloud complexity


The next edition of the BriefingsDirect Voice of the Innovator podcast series explores the latest developments in hybrid IT management.

IT operators have for decades been playing catch-up to managing their systems amid successive waves of heterogeneity, complexity, and changing deployment models. IT management technologies and methods have evolved right along with the challenge, culminating in the capability to optimize and automate workloads to exacting performance and cost requirements.

But now automation is about to give an AIOps boost from new machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities -- just as multicloud and edge computing deployments become more common -- and demanding.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Read a full transcript or download a copy.

Stay with us as we explore the past, present, and future of IT management innovation with a 30-year veteran of IT management, Doug de Werd, Senior Product Manager for Infrastructure Management at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). The interview is conducted by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: Management in enterprise IT has for me been about taking heterogeneity and taming it, bringing varied and dynamic systems to a place where people can operate over more, using less. And that’s been a 30-year journey.

Yet heterogeneity these days, Doug, includes so much more than it used to. We’re not just talking about platforms and frameworks – we’re talking about hybrid cloud, multicloud, and many Software as a service (SaaS) applications. It includes working securely across organizational boundaries with partners and integrating business processes in ways that never have happened before.

With all of that new complexity, with an emphasis on intelligent automation, where do you see IT management going next?

Managing management 

de Werd
de Werd: Heterogeneity is known by another term, and that’s chaos. In trying to move from the traditional silos and tools to more agile, flexible things, IT management is all about your applications -- human resources and finance, for example – that run the core of your business. There’s also software development and other internal things. The models for those can be very different and trying to do that in a single manner is difficult because you have widely varying endpoints.

Gardner: Sounds like we are now about managing the management.

de Werd: Exactly. Trying to figure out how to do that in an efficient and economically feasible way is a big challenge.

Gardner: I have been watching the IT management space for 20-plus years and every time you think you get to the point where you have managed everything that needs to be managed -- something new comes along. It’s a continuous journey and process.

But now we are bringing intelligence and automation to the problem. Will we ever get to the point where management becomes subsumed or invisible?

de Werd: You can automate tasks, but you can’t automate people. And you can’t automate internal politics and budgets and things like that. What you do is automate to provide flexibility.
How to Support DevOps, Automation,
And IT Management Initiatives
But it’s not just the technology, it’s the economics and it’s the people. By putting that all together, it becomes a balancing act to make sure you have the right people in the right places in the right organizations. You can automate, but it’s still within the context of that broader picture.

Gardner: When it comes to IT management, you need a common framework. For HPE, HPE OneView has been core. Where does HPE OneView go from here? How should people think about the technology of management that also helps with those political and economic issues?

https://www.hpe.com/us/en/what-is/hybrid-it-management.html

de Werd: HPE OneView is just an outstanding core infrastructure management solution, but it’s kind of like a car. You can have a great engine, but you still have to have all the other pieces.

And so part of what we are trying to do with HPE OneView, and we have been very successful, is extending that capability out into other tools that people use. This can be into more traditional tools like with our Microsoft or VMware partnerships and exposing and bringing HPE OneView functionality into traditional things.
The integration allows the confidence of using HPE OneView as a core engine. All those other pieces can still be customized to do what you need to do -- yet you still have that underlying core foundation of HPE OneView.

But it also has a lot to do with DevOps and the continuous integration development types of things with Docker, Chef, and Puppet -- the whole slew of at least 30 partners we have.

That integration allows the confidence of using HPE OneView as a core engine. All those other pieces can still be customized to do what you need to do -- yet you still have that underlying core foundation of HPE OneView.

Gardner: And now with HPE increasingly going to an as-a-service orientation across many products, how does management-as-a-service work?

Creativity in the cloud 

de Werd: It’s an interesting question, because part of management in the traditional sense -- where you have a data center full of servers with fault management or break/fix such as a hard-drive failure detection – is you want to be close, you want to have that notification immediately.

As you start going up in the cloud with deployments, you have connectivity issues, you have latency issues, so it becomes a little bit trickier. When you have more up levels, up the stack, where you have software that can be more flexible -- you can do more coordination. Then the cloud makes a lot of sense.  
https://www.hpe.com/us/en/what-is/hybrid-it-management.html
Management in the cloud can mean a lot of things. If it’s the infrastructure, you tend to want to be closer to the infrastructure, but not exclusively. So, there’s a lot of room for creativity.

Gardner: Speaking of creativity, how do you see people innovating both within HPE and within your installed base of users? How do people innovate with management now that it’s both on- and off-premises? It seems to me that there is an awful lot you could do with management beyond red-light, green-light, and seek out those optimization and efficiency goals. Where is the innovation happening now with IT management?

de Werd: The foundation of it begins with automation, because if you can automate you become repeatable, consistent, and reliable, and those are all good in your data center.
Transform Compute, Storage, and Networking
Into Software-Defied Infrastructure
You can free up your IT staff to do other things. The truth is if you can do that reliably, you can spend more time innovating and looking at your problems from a different angle. You gain the confidence that the automation is giving you.

Automation drives creativity in a lot of different ways. You can be faster to market, have quicker releases, those types of things. I think automation is the key.

Gardner: Any examples? I know sometimes you can’t name customers, but can you think of instances where people are innovating with management in ways that would illustrate its potential?

Automation innovation 

de Werd: There’s a large biotech genome sequencing company, an IT group that is very innovative. They can change their configuration on the fly based on what they want to do. They can flex their capacity up and down based on a task -- how much compute and storage they need. They have a very flexible way of doing that. They have it all automated, all scripted. They can turn on a dime, even as a very large IT organization.


And they have had some pretty impressive ways of repurposing their IT. Today we are doing X and tonight we are doing Y. They can repurpose that literally in minutes -- versus days for traditional tasks.

Gardner: Are your customers also innovating in ways that allow them to get a common view across the entire lifecycle of IT? I’m thinking from requirements, through development, deployment, test, and continuous redeployment.

de Werd: Yes, they can string all of these processes together using different partner tools, yet at the core they use HPE OneView and HPE Synergy underneath the covers to provide that real, raw engine.
By using the HPE partner ecosystem integrated with HPE OneView, they have visibility. Then they can get into things like Docker Swarm. It may not be HPE OneView providing that total visibility. At the hardware level it is, but because we feed into upper-level apps they can adjust to meet the needs across the entire business process.

By using the HPE partner ecosystem integrated with HPE OneView, they have that visibility. Then they can get into things like Docker Swarm. It may not be HPE OneView providing that total visibility. At the hardware and infrastructure level it is, but because we are feeding into upper-level and broader applications, they can see what’s going on and determine how to adjust to meet the needs across the entire business process.

Gardner: In terms of HPE Synergy and composability, what’s the relationship between composability and IT management? Are people making the whole greater than the sum of the parts with those?

de Werd: They are trying to. I think there is still a learning curve. Traditional IT has been around a long time. It just takes a while to change the mentality, skills sets, and internal politics. It takes a while to get to that point of saying, “Yeah, this is a good way to go.”

But once they dip their toes into the water and see the benefits -- the power, flexibility, and ease of it -- they are like, “Wow, this is really good.” One step leads to the next and pretty soon they are well on their way on their composable journey.

Gardner: We now see more intelligence brought to management products. I am thinking about how HPE InfoSight is being extended across more storage and server products.
How to Eliminate Complex Manual Processes
And Increase Speed of IT Delivery
We used to access log feeds from different IT products and servers. Then we had agents and agent-less analysis for IT management. But now we have intelligence as a service, if you will, and new levels of insight. How will HPE OneView evolve with this new level of increasingly pervasive intelligence?

de Werd: HPE InfoSight is a great example. You see it being used in multiple ways, things like taking the human element out, things like customer advisories coming out and saying, “Such-and-such product has a problem,” and how that affects other products.

If you are sitting there looking at 1,000 or 5,000 servers in your data center, you’re wondering how I am affected by this? There are still a lot of manual spreadsheets out there, and you may find yourself pouring through a list.

https://www.hpe.com/us/en/integrated-systems/software.html

Today, you have the capability of getting an [intelligent alert] that says, “These are the ones that are affected. Here is what you should do. Do you want us to go fix it right now?” That’s just an example of what you can do.

It makes you more efficient. You begin to understand how you are using your resources, where your utilization is, and how you can then optimize that. Depending on how flexible you want to be, you can design your systems to respond to those inputs and automatically flex [deployments] to the places that you want to be.

This leads to autonomous computing. We are not quite there yet, but we are certainly going in that direction. You will be able to respond to different compute, storage, and network requirements and adjust on the fly. There will also be self-healing and self-morphing into a continuous optimization model.

Gardner: And, of course, that is a big challenge these days … hybrid cloud, hybrid IT, and deploying across on-premises cloud, public cloud, and multicloud models. People know where they want to go with that, but they don’t know how to get there.

How does modern IT management help them achieve what you’ve described across an increasingly hybrid environment?

Manage from the cloud down 

de Werd: They need to understand what their goals are first. Just running virtual machines (VMs) in the cloud isn’t really where they want to be. That was the initial thing. There are economic considerations involved in the cloud, CAPEX and OPEX arguments.

Simply moving your infrastructure from on-premises up into the cloud isn’t going to get you where you really need to be. You need to look at it from a cloud-native-application perspective, where you are using micro services, containers, and cloud-enabled programming languages -- your Javas and .NETs and all the other stateless types of things – all of which give you new flexibility to flex performance-wise.

From the management side, you have to look at different ways to do your development and different ways to do delivery. That’s where the management comes in. To do DevOps and exploit the DevOps tools, you have to flip the way you are thinking -- to go from the cloud down.

https://www.hpe.com/us/en/solutions/infosight.html

Cloud application development on-premises, that’s one of the great things about containers and cloud-native, stateless types of applications. There are no hardware dependencies, so you can develop the apps and services on-premises, and then run them in the cloud, run them on-premises, and/or use your hybrid cloud vendor’s capabilities to burst up into a cloud if you need it. That’s the joy of having those types of applications. They can run anywhere. They are not dependent on anything -- on any particular underlying operating system.

But you have to shift and get into that development mode. And the automation helps you get there, and then helps you respond quickly once you do.

Gardner: Now that hybrid deployment continuum extends to the edge. There will be increasing data analytics, measurement, and making deployment changes dynamically from that analysis at the edge.

It seems to me that the way you have designed and architected HPE IT management is ready-made for such extensibility out to the edge. You could have systems run there that can integrate as needed, when appropriate, with a core cloud. Tell me how management as you have architected it over the years helps manage the edge, too.
Businesses need to move their processing further out to the edge and gain the instant response, instant gratification. You can't wait to have an input analyzed by going all the way back to the cloud. You want the processing toward the edge to get that instantaneous response.

de Werd: Businesses need to move their processing further out to the edge, and gain the instant response, instant gratification. You can’t wait to have an input analyzed on the edge, to have it go all the way back to a data source or all the way up to a cloud. You want to have the processing further and further toward the edge so you can get that instantaneous response that customers are coming to expect.

But again, being able to automate how to do that, and having the flexibility to respond to differing workloads and moving those toward the edge, I think, is key to getting there.

Gardner: And Doug, for you, personally, do you have some takeaways from your years of experience about innovation and how to make innovation a part of your daily routine?

de Werd: One of the big impacts on the team that I work with is in our quality assurance (QA) testing. It’s a very complex thing to test various configurations; that’s a lot of work. In the old days, we had to manually reconfigure things. Now, as we use an Agile development process, testing is a continuous part of it.

We can now respond very quickly and keep up with the Agile process. It used to be that testing was always the tail-end and the longest thing. Development testing took forever. Now because we can automate that, it just makes that part of the process easier, and it has taken a lot of stress off of the teams. We are now much quicker and nimbler in responses, and it keeps people happy, too.
How to Get Simle, Automated Management
Of Your Hybrid Infrastructure
Gardner: As we close out, looking to the future, where do you see management going, particularly how to innovate using management techniques, tools, and processes? Where is the next big green light coming from?

Set higher goals 

de Werd: First, get your house in order in terms of taking advantage of the automation available today. Really think about how not to just use the technology as the end-state. It’s more of a means to get to where you want to be.

Define where your organization wants to be. Where you want to be can have a lot of different aspects; it could be about how the culture evolves, or what you want your customers’ experience to be. Look beyond just, “I want this or that feature.” 


Then, design your full IT and development processes. Get to that goal, rather than just saying, “Oh, I have 100 VMs running on a server, isn’t that great?” Well, if it’s not achieving the ultimate goal of what you want, it’s just a technology feat. Don’t use technology just for technology’s sake. Use it to get to the larger goals, and define those goals, and how you are going to get there.