Digital disruption is a digital capability-driven change that shakes the industry’s core [1]. The fact that the traditional technology architecture, infrastructure, and software supporting the application and data layers of Enterprise Architecture (EA) has been “disrupted” is indisputable. Gartner says there are three outcomes that practitioners should focus on to drive disruption: quality, speed, and agility [2]. Let’s explore how technology architecture has modernized and how the advancements have increased quality, speed, and agility in today’s organizational ecosystems.
Before we explore today’s technology, let’s look at the progression of technology architecture. In 1834, the first mechanical computer, the Babbage Difference Engine, was announced [3]. The first mainframe wasn’t released until 1966 [4]. The United States Department of Defense created ARPANET in 1969; ARPANET eventually became known as the birth of what we know as “the Internet” [3]. In 1981, IBM released the first Personal Computer (PC) [3]. Microsoft released its first version of Windows in 1985 [5]. Since then, there has been an explosion of technological advancements, such as the introduction of “the cloud” by Amazon Web Services in 2006 [6]. There have even been major technological advancements since then that have revolutionized technology architecture, becoming what we know as the technologies that are disrupting industries today.
As you can see, we have come a long way since the Babbage Difference Engine in 1834. But exactly what technology
Figure 1: Compute Evolution [7].
Arun Chandrasekaran of Gartner Inc. explains that VMs abstract server hardware capabilities and imitate dedicated hardware for an application, allowing different operating systems to share servers seamlessly and provide better hardware utilization [7]. Server virtualization is a mature market today, and some practitioners no longer consider VMs as “modern.” Regardless of where your opinion falls, the delivery methods of VMs have shifted in two ways that are modern and bleeding edge.
The introduction of Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) has foundationally changed the VM market. HCI is a software-defined IT infrastructure that virtualizes all elements of hardware-defined systems. HCI includes virtualized computing or VMs, software-defined storage, and virtualized networking, all of which can run on off-the-self servers [8]. Robert Sheldon from TechTarget.com provides a list of numerous HCI benefits, including simplified deployments and management, easy upgrades, scalability, agility, and improved performance [9]. As a user of HCI, I can confirm these benefits. The technology is relatively new, causing practitioners to work around quirky bugs; however, the performance benefits and cost savings can be astounding. During a recent system implementation, I found that database servers were booting too fast when running on HCI. My team and I had to adjust the services on the server to start them in the appropriate order because services that used to take a minute or more to start now start immediately upon boot.
The second shift of VM modernization is how servers are provisioned. Cloud service providers such as Amazon Web Services offer cloud-native tools (CloudFormation) to enable Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC). Microsoft says, “IaC uses DevOps methodology and versioning with a descriptive model to define and deploy infrastructures, such as networks, virtual machines, load balancers, and connection topologies [10].” Imagine IaC as source code; it generates the same output every time it’s executed. IaC offers numerous benefits, including server delivery speed, increased quality and consistency, auto-scaling and provisioning of VMs, and enabling Information Technology (IT) teams to self-service VM builds. IaC can provision VMs and other infrastructure without waiting days or weeks for busy IT teams to work through their build queues to deliver infrastructure to support an initiative.
If you are an IT practitioner that works closely with software development teams, you may have heard of containers or containerization. Chandrasekaran (2022) tells us that containers virtualize an operating system, allowing many instances of an operating system user space to share a single operating system kernel [7]. This packaging approach includes libraries and other runtime dependencies required to run an application, allowing containers to be highly standardized and consistent to run across the software development life cycle (SDLC) and hybrid environments [7]. Kubernetes, an open-source system for managing containers, is today’s leading container platform in the IT industry. In the modern world, cloud providers offer services such as Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) that virtually eliminate the need to manage complex on-premises infrastructure to support Kubernetes deployments (and other container providers), enabling practitioners to focus on delivering value, not managing intricate infrastructure.
“By 2026, more than 90% of global organizations will be running containerized
applications in production, which is a significant increase from less than 40% today.” – Gartner, Inc. [7]
The last major foundational infrastructure architecture modernization I want to review today is “Serverless,” sometimes referred to as Functions as a Service (FaaS). Chandrasekaran describes serverless computing as “a way to build and/or run applications and services without having to manage infrastructure” [7]. Serverless computing eliminates the runtime environment and is perfect for applications with unpredictable scaling needs as it scales vertically on demand. As an IT leader with over 15 years of infrastructure experience, I can safely say that Serverless computing has many benefits that organizations may not even realize. To me, the most prominent benefits are the auto-scaling nature of serverless computing and the fact that you no longer have to manage and secure the underlying infrastructure. Meaning practitioners no longer need to upgrade or replace operating systems or rebuild server environments every four years to ensure applications are running in a compliant environment.
From experience, I have been involved in multiple “Server Conversion Projects” where you must migrate applications spread across hundreds of servers to servers with new operating systems. These projects require numerous staff members from many different IT disciplines, costing thousands, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars in capital and operational expenses.
“By 2026, more than 50% of global enterprises will have deployed serverless functions as a service (FaaS), up from less than 25% today.” – Gartner, Inc. [7]
Containers and serverless computing are still relatively immature and developing; however, it’s a safe bet to say they are here to stay and will foundationally change the infrastructure architecture layer and how industries build systems. Gartner notes that IT practitioners have fewer skills and experience with containers and serverless computing than hypervisor technology (VMs) [7]. My recent experience as one of the leaders of a major cloud initiative confirms Gartner’s observations. Technology architecture modernization is occurring faster than organizations are adapting, leaving early-adopting organizations in a position to excel in their markets by delivering quality infrastructure faster, making organizations more flexible.
References
[1] A. J. Arduini, “To disrupt or not to disrupt?,” 29 August 2022. [Online]. Available: https://sites.psu.edu/aja6921/2022/08/29/to-disrupt-or-not-to-disrupt/. [Accessed 8 October 2022].
[2] Gartner, Inc., “The top strategic technology trends for 2022,” 18 October 2021. [Online]. Available: https://ssofed.gartner.com/sp/startSSO.ping?PartnerIdpId=urn:mace:incommon:psu.edu&TargetResource=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.gartner.com%2Fdocument%2F4006913%3Fref%3Dd-linkShare. [Accessed 8 October 2022].
[3] Pandora FMS team, “Historical events that you should know as an IT person,” PandoraFMS, 27 August 2021. [Online]. Available: https://pandorafms.com/blog/computer-history/. [Accessed 8 October 2022].
[4] C. Tozzi, “Mainframe history: how mainframe computers have changed over the years,” 5 March 2021. [Online]. Available: https://www.precisely.com/blog/mainframe/mainframe-history#:~:text=First%20mainframe%20%E2%80%93%20By%20most%20measures,ready%20for%20use%20until%201943.. [Accessed 8 October 2022].
[5] The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Microsoft Windows,” Britannica, [Online]. Available: https://www.britannica.com/technology/Windows-OS. [Accessed 8 October 2022].
[6] K. D. Foote, “A brief history of cloud computing,” Dataversity, 17 December 2021. [Online]. Available: https://www.dataversity.net/brief-history-cloud-computing/. [Accessed 8 October 2022].
[7] A. Chandrasekaran, Compute evolution: VMs, Containers, Serverless – Which to use when?, Gartner, Inc., 2022.
[8] Wikipedia, “Hyper-converged infrastructure,” [Online]. Available: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper-converged_infrastructure. [Accessed 9 October 2022].
[9] R. Sheldon, “11 main benefits of hyper-converged infrastructure,” TechTarget.com, 11 August 2020. [Online]. Available: https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatacenter/tip/11-main-benefits-of-hyper-converged-infrastructure. [Accessed 9 October 2022].
[10] Microsoft, “What is infrastructure as code (IaC)?,” Microsoft, 18 August 2022. [Online]. Available: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/devops/deliver/what-is-infrastructure-as-code. [Accessed 9 October 2022].
[11] Gartner, Inc., “Gartner Glossary,” Gartner, Inc., [Online]. Available: https://www.gartner.com/en/information-technology/glossary/digital-disruption. [Accessed 28 August 2022].