Stuart Charlton from Elastra is covering cloud computing and the next generation of enterprise architecture. I’m in the back of a packed room, hard to see the slides, so forgive what follows.
Elastra is focused on governance, configuration management and hybrid clouds for enterprises.
Session objectives:
- Does cloud computing change the importance and role of enterprise architecture and IT service management?
- Explore a reference model for the cloud.
- Bridge gap between architectural intent and getting stuff done.
He speaks of enterprise architecture as dealing with logic for the business. He claims (wrongly) that business architecture is what used to be called business analysis. He does (rightly) say that the chief business architect of a large business is the COO.
He’s quoting Weill & Ross’ EA as strategy. Operating model concept. No need to explain this to my readers.
Next in the EA tour – you guessed it – Zachman. He has a chart with rows 1 and 5 with “a miracle occurs” as the transition from 1 to 5. I can buy that. He also says cloud computing doesn’t change this. Architecture doesn’t go away. The need for architecture doesn’t go away.
The trick, Stuart shares, is to determine if cloud computing helps to shrink the time “of the miracle occurs”.
Now, he’s talking about how we manage IT. Talks about role-led techniques, developer-led (code management & controls), manager-led, architect-led (modeling focused), operations-led (ITSM). Calls out that each trying to solve same problem, but from their own viewpoints, and disconnected.
Current debate on Cloud computing & ITIL – does cloud computing destroy ITIL? One theory, “Google secret sauce theory” is the recipe for IT has changed – architecture and implementation. Of course, everything needs to be re-written. Does this fundamentally change the nature of IT and EA? [need to think about the degree to which this is true]
Cloud provider continuum from retail ecosystem (force.com) to supplier ecosystem (amazon). Retail is closer to developer and user. Supplier is closer to sysadmin & operations. More commonly referred to as platform-as-a-service and infrastructure-as-a-service.
Qualities of an enterprise cloud:
- on-demand, services-oriented computing
- variable cost consumption
- self-service
- elastic scalability
- mandatory network
- governance and compliance
Cloud computing is not just about outsourcing. “It’s an on-demand, services-oriented environment. Drastic reduction of lead-time to enable change in my environment.”(I like that)
Calls out Cisco’s unified computing initiative as something to watch.
Enterprises will only work with a handful of cloud providers. In response to question, believes there will be PCI compliant clouds. So, characteristics of clouds will include compliance models.
Reference model layers:
- begin with data center; global, possibly cross-organizational, exposes power & cooling information
- add trust, identity & licensing; control point for compliance, auditing, distributed action w/o replicated credentials
- add configuration and resource management software; have more stuff, need tools to deal with it; resource management deals with flip side of scarce resources
- add some visibility; hyperlinked model of metadata; (what uses/contains other things), lifecycle (when and how can things change?)
- add some real world context: governance, constraints & policies, testing, monitoring & operations; gets interesting when applications (business scenarios) span clouds
Slides will be available on Slideshare.
Sees a movement towards Enterprise Cloud Servers. Need to grab the slide to best explain that concept.
EA to Implementation Gap – architecture aware system, policy and configuration management. I see common themes with SOA governance and Service Management. Because, you know, it’s all services.
This concludes my coverage. Hope it gave you some things to think about. I’ll be following up this “reporting” with some “analysis”. Just not today!
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