TL;DR. I’m hosting a webinar with Citrix about application deployment in the context of a modern data center — containers, NFV, etc. They are bringing nerds, and I am going to ask them questions. There’s a live demo at the end, so they’ve promised me. You should register and attend. The event is soon – Wednesday, June 22, 2016.
For a while now, I’ve espoused the notion that the data center is an engine: a group of discrete, yet tightly integrated parts that serve a single purpose. That purpose is delivering applications.
In the past, delivering those applications has been via “cylinders of excellence.” In other words, technology silos. Each engineers with his or her speciality would grind away at their little bit of infrastructure provisioning, making it do what the application needed. Many weeks later, when everyone was done their part and with a bit of luck, the application would work.
Hooray for us. We are infrastructure engineering. Only, that’s a terrible way to go about provisioning apps in an era where businesses want to stand up applications independent of an infrastructure engineer’s efforts.
The GIFEE movement (listen to Datanauts podcast #28 for an intro) is bringing automation, hybrid cloud, and — dare I include another buzzword — devops to bear on any environment willing to make the culture shift. But like any culture shift, we don’t know what we don’t know.
As GIFEE takes off, we’re finding challenges in the new approach to deploying applications. For example…
- How, exactly, do you manage an explosion of containers?
- Containers aren’t VMs, and you don’t access them via the networking services we’re used to. How do you handle that?
- How do traditional load balancers fit into a GIFEE scheme? Or are they dead at this point?
- Where does the human stop and automation start?
- Why has modeling (think YAML) become so important in the modern data center?
- How do you keep control over network performance, when services could be running in the public cloud across a high latency link?
I’m going to quiz Citrix engineers about all of this stuff. We’ve been working offline on the topics to cover. Even if you don’t give a hoot about Citrix, you should learn something, especially if you’re unfamiliar with containers and modern data center application delivery approaches. Register for this webinar here.