Enterprises ask: “What good is a ‘single pane of glass’ when three or four groups are all trying to see through it, looking for different things?”
Virtualization, in a data center of an enterprise or a cloud provider, is a three-layer process. The bottom layer is the resource pool, the servers and platform software. There’s a set of management tools associated with them, The top layer is a “mapping” layer that creates the virtual elements from the resource pool and exposes them for applications and application management. Astride both, in parallel, is the network layer, which provides connectivity throughout. This layer is run by different people, and in fact different teams.
The enterprise experts pointed out that the network piece of this cake had special challenges. Its critical to keep the two other layers separated, at least to ensure that nothing from the user-facing layer could see the resource layer, which of course would be supporting other applications and, in the case of the cloud, other companies. It’s also critical in exposing the features of the cloud to customers. The network layer, of course, includes the Domain Name Server (DNS) system that converts our familiar URLs to actual IP addresses for traffic routing; it’s the system that played a key role in the AWS problem, and as I’ve noted, it’s run by a different team.
The internet is layered, too. We have ISPs who offer access, a mixture of commercial and government players who provide and manage global connectivity, physical and logical (URL) addressing, and security offerings at the content end, the consumer end, and (as Cloudflare shows) as an intermediary process. It’s like a global dance, and even if everyone has the steps right, they can still trip over each other. (See also: Why cloud and AI projects take longer and how to fix the holdups)
Complexity is increasing in every one of our layers in both the internet and cloud, because the business case depends on efficient use of resources and reliable quality of experience. Operations is more likely to be a problem in each of the layers, and given their interdependence, cooperation in operations is essential. Yet we separate the people involved. All the layer-people dance, and sometimes trip up on the crowded floor.
Why not combine the groups? Enterprises ask: “What good is a ‘single pane of glass’ when three or four groups are all trying to see through it, looking for different things?”
Enterprises don’t see the notion of a combined team or an overlay, every-layer team, as the solution. None of the enterprises had a view of what would be needed to fix the internet, and only a quarter of even the virtualization experts express an opinion on what the answer is for the cloud. That group agrees with the limited comments I’ve gotten from people I know in the cloud provider world. The answer is templates, simulations, and world models, and I think that could work for the internet too, since many of our major internet issues, including Cloudflare’s issue, really come down to software configuration and operations.
