The Software Architect Elevator

Chapter 14. If Software Eats the World, Better Use Version Control!

When Your Infrastructure Becomes Software-Defined, You Need to Think Like a Software Developer

Software eats infrastructure

If software does indeed eat the world, it will have IT infrastructure for breakfast: the rapidly advancing virtualization of infrastructure from VMs and containers to serverless architectures turns provisioning code onto a piece of hardware into a pure software problem. While this is an amazing capability and one of the major value propositions of cloud computing, corporate IT’s uneasy relationship with code (Chapter 11) and lack of familiarity with the modern development life cycle can make this a dangerous proposition.

SDX: Software-Defined Anything

Much of traditional IT infrastructure is either hardwired or semi-manually configured: servers are racked and cabled, network switches are manually configured with tools or configuration files. Operations staff, who endearingly refer to their equipment as “metal,” are usually quite happy with this state of affairs: it keeps the programmer types away from critical infrastructure where the last thing you need is bugs and stuff like “Agile” development, which is still widely misinterpreted (Chapter 31) as doing random stuff and hoping for the best.

This is rapidly changing, though, and that’s a good thing. The continuing virtualization of infrastructure ...