Summary. This week’s second post is about familiarization with new terms in modern IT: AWS, microservices, virtual machines, containers, SOA, and DevOps. The sections below highlight and categorize these important progressive concepts and suggest implications of their use from a strategic perspective.
Background. In reviewing this week’s assigned readings for Penn State University’s College of Information Sciences and Technology’s graduate course, EA874 – Enterprise Information Technology Architecture, several leading-edge terms are prevalent. These are:
Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). SOA is an architecture discipline which focuses on combining other services into a final service for a customer. To explain, it helps to contrast this concept with a “monolithic” or “traditional” IT structure, in which architecture was primarily self-containing and all-encompassing. The service-oriented architecture leverages existing external services (aka, outsourcing) – such as separate customer verification, payment, and high-strength computing systems – to provide a new end to the customer. A good example of this is presented in the simplified video below, courtesy of Edureka, in a “coffee shop” example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dFJOSR-aFs
Microservices (& Amazon Web Services / ‘AWS’). Microservices is a continuation of the SOA concept. This concept is premised on dividing outsourced functions into the smallest possible components, and both marketing (selling) and updating (maintaining) them individually. The intent of the microservices design concept is to provide flexibility and agility for IT designers; IT designers can outsource individual components of the system, and then update or modify those components after implementation as feature improvements become available. There are, however, risks to this approach; as sub-systems become individualized, requirements for systems administrators increase – requiring higher levels of education, training, and daily labor from those SYSADMINS to manage increasingly complex and nuanced systems.
Sources: https://aws.amazon.com/microservices/ https://mkdev.me/posts/what-and-who-is-devops
Virtual Machines & Containers: Virtual machines seek to emulate physical infrastructure (hardware) by logical (software) means. This is accomplished by complex software codes which divide a single piece of hardware into smaller buckets, or ‘virtual machines’. The software “container” concept is similar, but operates in a modified way to increase efficiency. Whereas virtual machine divisions create entirely separate copies of an operating system (i.e., Windows), containers accomplish the same ends by ‘tricking’ software applications into functioning as if they have the same. But in reality the container is sharing multiple files (resources) between applications. Essentially, containers increase efficiency by making better use of shared resources.
Source: https://blogs.sap.com/2018/06/05/cloud-native-with-containers-and-kubernetes-part-2/
Development Operations (DevOps). DevOps refers to the strategy or practice of combining software development with IT administration. It is synonymous in other industries of combining production (administration) with engineering (development) functions on project teams. The purpose of DevOps is to decrease friction and increase synergy between designers and implementers of technology concepts. DevOps is implemented by forming cross-functional teams and ensuring implementers (for example, systems administrators) are part of the design process.
Summary for Strategic Relevance. Several key concepts stand apart in describing the strategic context of the above terms. First, the idea of containers – it’s not unlike the revolution which occurred in the shipping industry, and the irony of its title is not lost:
“Just like how shipping containers standardized transportation of cargo globally bringing about efficiency and speed, software containers solve the problem of how to get software to run reliably when moved from one computing environment to another. Whether it’s deploying on a developer’s laptop, a local test environment, or a production environment on the cloud, a container abstracts away any differences in OS distributions and underlying infrastructure.” BMC Blogs: https://www.bmc.com/blogs/containers-vs-microservices/
Second, from our Penn State EA required readings, the following summarizes well how EA impacts non-IT-focused interests and stakeholders:
“Technology drives value in businesses in four ways: enhanced connectivity, automation of manual tasks, improved decision making, and product or service innovation. Tools such as big-data analytics, apps, workflow systems, and cloud platforms—all of which enable this value—are too often applied selectively by businesses in narrow pockets of their organization, particularly in sales and marketing.”
Source: Tunde Olanrewaju (principal) and Paul Willmott (director) at McKinsey’s London office. https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/finding-your-digital-sweet-spot