Buckle-up, all infrastructure is software and your enterprise needs enterprise orchestration

The capabilities landscape for equipment manufacturers, service providers, and enterprises is rapidly changing, and within several years it will be fundamentally transformed from today.

There are several basic areas:

1. The creation of robust commercial Cloud services with a rich set of services all presented for allocation and configuration to the enterprise via a set of standard Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).
2. The emergence of the Software Defined Networking (SDN), offering the potential of flexible network services again presented to the enterprise for allocation and configuration as a set of APIs.
3. The transition of traditionally physical network-related devices to application that can be configured onto essentially standard computer servers, called Network Function Virtualization (NFV).

The battle that is the force driving these changes are between what I call the “new traditional” service providers and the “legacy” service providers.  Companies like Amazon and Google eschewed traditional wisdom of hardware providers and the paradigm of legacy service providers.  Driven by their application development and low-cost consumer mindset, their general approach is to strip-down to the necessary hardware and software functionality.  Bloated hardware and software with features and functionality not needed is removed.  The over 30 years of the evolution of Internet standards that defines to the control of network devices, embedded into expensive routers and switches, is discarded in part or whole for so called “white box” hardware and Open Source software as the basis for their control.

Legacy network service providers grew-up with the Internet, driving its standards within the common framework of a set of “autonomous systems” configured by the service provider with a set of defined end-user services.  Scant thought was given to providing end-users (in this case the enterprise customer) any meaningful end-to-end control of services, and almost without exception nothing that looks like a web-service RESTful API.  This is in stark contrast to the rich information and control APIs expected and provided by today’s commercial Clouds.

The figure below represents the recent past and much of the present.  Blue represents the legacy infrastructure approach.  Focusing on the network space, the enterprise has to contend with complicated device configurations and essentially static service configurations from their network services provider.  There is little if any coordination between the network and the applications development and operations environment other than at best service tickets and at worse verbal (and undocumented) direct staff-to-staff communications.

The expectations of enterprise Information Technology organizations will also drive the trend to a more software defined environment, as the use of Cloud services and it associated reporting and control will become the expectation, not the exception.  In fact, it is likely that more comprehensive “enterprise orchestration” systems will be developed that will cover all services, from internal application development lifecycles (i.e., Development and Operations), to control and management of end-to-end enterprise services delivery.

This leads to the view in the figure, below.  Red and green represent the new infrastructure trends and blue represents the legacy environment.  The significant change is that nearly all of the infrastructure is now software based, from SDN controlling and reporting of end-to-end network (including to and from Cloud resources), to the direct control of virtual network devices whether in the Cloud, at an enterprise location, mobile, or one of those Internet of Things devices using NFV.

When every resource or service is controlled by what appears to be a web-service and the same mechanism is used to obtain performance, usage, and other relevant from across the different traditional service domains (compute, storage, network, security, etc.) then everything looks like software.  Once this happens, one has to completely rethink an enterprise’s IT operation, as the same types of activity that is done to develop applications is now the fundamental discipline for orchestrating the enterprise, whether it is resource management, application development or rollout, or cyber security.

Buckle-up, time to become an enterprise orchestration programmer.