Inchoate Curmudgeon

I was on a staff call this morning where the subject of red-shift came up. Its a hot topic with the Sun Executive, promoted to help balance our focus between bread-and-butter data center solutions and supporting atypical, non-traditional, hyper-growth markets requiring massively scaled, extreme-availability solutions.

Of course, it’s easy to pick a heated discussion in relation to what is and what isn’t red-shift, but at its core, it means acceleration, speed and massive scale. Things are fast and getting faster, big and getting bigger, and more of this trend is happening disproportionately in non-traditional markets and start-ups over traditional, enterprise operations.

For Sun, red-shift impacts and opportunities are a key engineering focus. Most apparently, this revolves around transforming the data center from a spaghetti-like, hodge-podge mass of mind-crushingly complex interactions into a massively-scaled, computing powerhouse; transforming a pile of machines into a far more cohesive and efficient whole.

I also read an blog post bemoaning the tendency for technical staff in organizations to hoard arcane information and knowledge for gain.

It might not be readily apparent, but these things are related.

The ability for the market to absorb and effectively leverage the decreasing cost and increasing power of computing is related the ability of developers and architects to rapidly develop, deploy and manage solutions. This is the true story of the power of Ruby on Rails, and this is not a technological story.

Rails developers of all kinds are able to develop and deploy applications at astonishing speed. Although the technology doesn’t get in the way, it’s not the whole story.

If you were to go onto the Ruby on Rails IRC, at irc.freenode.net, #rubyonrails, you will find at any time of the day or night, no less than 500 developers, conversing. These developers are asking and answering Rails questions, at amazing speed and in astonishing numbers, in real time. My mailbox is filled daily with digests of Rails mailing list activity. This is a very active, friendly and helpful community.

This is the real key to the power of Rails. Rails is a Web 2.0 technology, if there is such a thing, eating its own dog food in a big way.

There is no particular advantage given a large organization versus a small one in leveraging this kind of ready on-line technical capability. Small organizations and individuals who may have been developing slowly and alone using other frameworks are now powerfully enabled, and I’d argue more enabled, to develop useful, effective solutions than their enterprise brethren. Locality to a cult of Wizards is not required to become an effective Rails developer.

In fact, in the information marketplace cultivated by the Ruby Rails community, enterprises are extraordinarily disadvantaged on many levels. For example, when the small development organization, in that small company, is ready to deploy, the answer is increasingly solutions like Joyent, Engine Yard and many others. Who needs a data center?

The classic barriers to anyone, large or small, rapidly developing and deploying massively scaled solutions are evaporating. Can a typical enterprise developer ditch his IT organization to deploy a new application in 5 minutes instead of 5 months? Leaving aside the 10-20% of solutions that no-way fit an out-servicing model, isn’t out-servicing a viable 80% solution?

So, at all levels, traditional approaches to building and managing technology are being disadvantaged, and will be swept away, by the think small, move fast, get things done alternatives. This trend will be able to consume all the red-shifted engineering Sun can generate. Does anyone remember when the PC killed the mainframe? This is a classic, inside-out, David versus Goliath story unfolding right now. Don’t blink.

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