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 ...
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