Inchoate Curmudgeon

Red Hat CTO elaborates on lofty ‘cloud’ vision discusses the effort Red Hat is making to engage its customer base on Wall Street:

“In terms of engaging its customer base, for example, Red Hat has worked with Wall Street’s financial institutions to simplify data center operations by capturing a single operating system image, including hardware and software. The payoff: IT has only one image to update and manage, which can be deployed across the network, he said. Currently, Red Hat is testing this technology by burning an OS image onto a USB key and using it to boot up servers, desktops and laptops, he said.”

The thing to note that an effective virtualization strategy does not virtualize the existing, diverse landscape, it redeploys into a highly standardized infrastructure with uniform configurations. Furthermore, the effective process involves discovering the 80% solution, the small set of standard virtualization strategies and standards, that meet the vast majority of workload requirements for the target workloads.

I agree with the list of What coworkers need to noodle for 2010…, but its missing at least one thing: Web 2.0.

I’m not sure its an oversight, even though posted at 7:30AM on Saturday, way before my coffee. (Milk and cookies kept you awake, eh James?). The only obvious technology or technical architectural features related to Web 2.0 are AJAX and RSS. The rest of it is social and political. Maybe this is why it isn’t on the list?

Then again, architecture isn’t just about technical things, I think sometimes it would be nice if it were. An architect that can’t swim in ambiguity isn’t an architect, he’s an engineer. This isn’t a slam on engineers, its just a skill set for a different problem and solution space.

For example, none of the issues affecting the implementation of IT Governance are technical, although the lack of adequate governance models cause a lot of non-value added technical chaos. At least Web 2.0 doesn’t include the highly-charged inter-personal and organizational politics that implementing adequate governance models does.

I’m looking forward to Web 2.0, ambiguity and all, for now anyway.