Attack of the killer clouds and the coming IT storm

I mentioned it recently: Private cloud is killing the IT pro. However, I was being somewhat facetious, and my prediction applies solely to hardware IT “pros” who spend their days looking for red lights on server and switch bezels to swap out components. At this point, I’m not even sure we’re categorizing that job as a strictly IT-oriented profession. Isn’t that slowly blending into facilities management? For me, an IT pro covers both hardware and software: bezel green light configuration along with software server configuration.

Aside from my off-the-cuff mention, I’ve also recently read it elsewhere: Cloud computing is set to push the IT pro career over the cliff and into extinction. I can’t get onboard with that, not only because it would put a certain IT snark out of business, but because all evidence points at the opposite. IT pros, your gig isn’t going anywhere, but it is changing.

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Then again, when hasn’t change been the norm? From the bad old days of mainframes, pocket protectors, and sausage parties, we’ve evolved to Prada (sometimes), tablets, and supermodels buying us drinks in bars. OK, that last one’s a little optimistic, but you get the point. Our business has been under constant evolution, and it’s moving even more quickly right now. Still, that doesn’t spell doom for the IT pro. It’s change … again.

Death by cloud and virtualization

The specific IT dodo myth tends to revolve around the specter of virtualization combined with the private and public cloud. This multiheaded monster will turn all networks into self-sustaining, self-configuring, self-remediating benevolent SkyNets and, thus, kill the IT pro. When you have instant infrastructure provisioning, policy-based scalability, and a network that runs at the cut-and-paste level, not the crack-the-rack level, who needs IT pros?

But even with market studies showing increased adoption of the cloud for all those benefits, has it cost anyone their job? I’m really asking. Ping me if you are one of the deceased or witnessed the same.

Sure, you can hop onto AWS and provision a Windows Server in a few minutes. But is that enough for anyone? Combining a cloud network with your HQ network, from layer 2 to layer 7, keeping identity management clean, knowing when and where to implement security, creating all those instabuild workload-provisioning policies, testing and patching the whole thing — how is all that decreasing the need for IT?

The myth hangs that prediction mainly on automation. According to Microsoft and VMware, we can automate everything. Sure — and I have a bargain for you on a bridge to Brooklyn. To this day, those guys can’t even 100 percent agree on what a private cloud is, let alone how to automate one.

Just last year, I watched some poor sap try to build a full-on Microsoft private cloud. When he got to the app management and automation stage, he started crying and didn’t stop until a PowerShell witch doctor showed up, sacrificed a chicken, and coded what amounts to a black box made of scripts, Gandalf’s walking stick, and Harry Potter’s spleen. That was in a test environment — try it in a production environment under time and budget pressure and you’ll feel like you’ve been roped in to a trapeze act with your infant sister and a terrified Doberman.  

That raving lunatic also wasn’t paying much attention to virtual networking. Maybe someday software-defined networking will make network management easier, but not today. Network management is primarily about diagnostics, deep layer performance management, capacity planning, big-time security, and the usual patching and testing routine especially when the network suddenly expands locally or chews its way past your firewall. SDN doesn’t change a lot of that; it just moves it up a few layers.

SLAs are for suckers, and failure will find you

Cloud providers push SLAs as their primary benefit — your needs will be met because it’s virtualized for redundancy and copied to a public cloud for instant growth. That’s brochureware. You can’t guarantee availability based on that. That’s no haven from our storms. Failure domains still exist in that model, though moved around a little.

The cloud has actually made it more complex in that it ties workloads (applications and processes) directly to infrastructure and automates them. Along with an SLA, whether internal or commercial, that’s supposed to somehow guarantee those resources will always be available. Virtualization and cross-boundary clouds certainly sound like an easier proposition, but not really. Failures will happen. It’s the nature of our rabid beast. But now everything is floating on a software cloud that knows no boundaries and can change in an instant — by itself. Figuring out what’s wrong in that scenario isn’t a job for high school interns.

You can look at the recent failures of both AWS and Windows Azure; they’re public clouds, but at the data center level, they face the same problems as an enterprise, albeit on a much bigger scale and with more attention to multitenancy and recovering from security hacks by digi-pirates, tax-fueled government agencies, and bored middle schoolers. They’re supposedly using this new technology with the utmost expertise, yet they’ve dropped service for everything from DNS failures to API errors.

I don’t know about AWS, but if you’re an Azure customer, you can supposedly read exactly what happened for every failure and how Microsoft solved it as part of your SLA agreement. Do that sometime and let me know how many $15-per-hour IT dilettantes could have handled those fixes.

Also, those clouds don’t die on only a global level — they die on an individual customer level, too, for reasons that can stem either from the provider or your own network. The remedy requires cooperation between two IT organizations, neither of which is happy to take the blame. That’s fun and easy, right?

The cloud is hungry for more IT

I can go on and on about the need for skilled IT pros in a cloud-enabled world for integrating multiple platforms and networks (say, Dell deciding to make OpenStack a third viable option with Red Hat, no skills needed), the birthing of the mysteriously defined devops role, and of course, security. That’s without getting into cloud-enabled SaaS management, especially database services and ultrasmart cloud-style BI.

Here’s a heads-up: As part of app management, cloud vendors are selling your CIO on the wonderful possibility of multiple app “owners” and promoting the fantasy of exec-level folks pressing a magic button to create what they need, when they need it, and wherever they need it. Meanwhile, a smaller IT staff composed of minimum-wage wingnuts who went to high school at Fry’s will spend its days coloring automation policies in a kindergarten-level iconized interface, sipping coffee, and watching the sorcery happen. Who really believes that?

If you’re a hermit crab and figured you could base your entire career on an MCSA and Server Manager, you’re in trouble. You might want to revisit your barista training, but not because the data center is going to become so simplified that no one needs you anymore. They’re going to drop you because they need people with more and deeper skill sets.

Better yet, you’ll need experience, lots and lots of it. Get involved in the hard projects, learn what you need to get things done, and up those communication skills. You’ll not only keep your gig; you’ll move it forward. It sounds hard, but if you’ve been in the biz for more than three years, change and upkeep shouldn’t be new to you. If it is and you weren’t expecting it, buckle up and get ready for a bumpy reality.

This article, “Attack of the killer clouds and the coming IT storm,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the crazy twists and turns of the tech industry with Robert X. Cringely’s Notes from the Field blog, follow Cringely on Twitter, and subscribe to Cringely’s Notes from the Underground newsletter.