Automation, which seams to me right after cloud computing the hottest issue these days, comes in many flavours. Nearly every vendor offers some kind of  “Automation” solution. Especially in times, where the admin/server ratios skyrocketing from 1:5 up 1:10000 there seems to be some logical link between these two topics. Is Automation the key to managing clouds and enterprise cloud computing?

To enrich the discussion and enlighten you about the different types of Automation, I wrote an article on Chris’ Boos Automation-blog.

http://www.hcboos.net/article-and-essays/types-of-automation

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I’m really looking forward to your comments.

Roland

“What would you do if you had 1,000 times more data?” asked Google Senior Software engineer Christophe Bisciglia some time ago. To me this seems to be THE big point with cloud computing. After learning about economical and market forces driving the cloud wave, I still think that money and flexibility alone are only half the truth. Even if those two arguments are important for most private and corporate IT users, there are a number of drawbacks like security issues or the question of who is in control of the data.

My guess is, that clouds will have their final breakthrough when we’ll have more applications that exploit the new possibilities the cloud computing paradigm offers. More stuff like Google and Amazon. Or even smaller but innovative like Gigaspaces.

I just saw a great offering from Sun for startups that prefer serverhugging

It is titled “Jumpstart Your Startup“.

Not only one gets cheap SUN hardware and access to hosted offering (DataPipe, Joyent, Layeredtech) but you also get free software and, here comes the twist, free VC connections. Isn’t this great?  To me this isn’t realy that cool offering, I waited for. The emphasis is still on hardware. I wonder, what kind of metal you’ll get for 750$ bucks.

Please notice the cloudfree sky in the image, maybe that is a hint, where the journey goes to…

It looks like the financial crisis will help to clean not only financial markets, but also puts some pressure on top 2009 IT issues.

After breaking news in 2008 that Novell is extending their stand in IT Service Managment and Data center automation with acquiring Platespin and Managed Objects <HERE>,  these days SUN is shifting gears by buying QLayer <READ_HERE>. Sure, they lost ground in recent months and they had to move. Let’s wait and see how other big competitors like Cisco respond. Not to ask what Big Four will pull out of their hats. And there are other minor albeit open conquerors which are quite successful.

To me clouds in all their facets and IT Automation (in different disguise – <READ_HERE>) are tight close together, because they scale IT Operations to dimensions far from beeing able to be handled manually. Maybe it’s a good time for digging out old (and new) autonomic computing concepts and to put flesh on the bones.

2009 will be an interesting year, possibly bringing some groundbreaking advances to IT and business.

So let’s tell everyone to stop whining about recession but rather to look forward.

Roland