{"id":44,"date":"2022-08-31T21:10:07","date_gmt":"2022-08-31T21:10:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.psu.edu\/jaredmcuevas\/?p=44"},"modified":"2022-08-31T21:10:07","modified_gmt":"2022-08-31T21:10:07","slug":"topic-1-digital-disruption-progressive-terms-for-it-concepts-technology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jaredmcuevas.com\/?p=44","title":{"rendered":"Topic 1.2 – Progressive IT Terminology"},"content":{"rendered":"

Summary.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/strong>This week’s second post is about familiarization with new terms in modern IT:\u00a0 AWS, microservices, virtual machines, containers, SOA, and DevOps.\u00a0 The sections below highlight and categorize these important progressive concepts and suggest implications of their use from a strategic perspective.<\/p>\n

Background.\u00a0 <\/strong>In reviewing this week\u2019s assigned readings for Penn State University\u2019s College of Information Sciences and Technology’s graduate course, EA874 \u2013 Enterprise Information Technology Architecture, several leading-edge terms are prevalent.\u00a0 These are:<\/p>\n

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA).\u00a0 <\/strong>SOA is an architecture discipline which focuses on combining other services into a final service for a customer.\u00a0 To explain, it helps to contrast this concept with a \u201cmonolithic\u201d or \u201ctraditional\u201d IT structure, in which architecture was primarily self-containing and all-encompassing.\u00a0 The service-oriented architecture leverages existing external services (aka, outsourcing) \u2013 such as separate customer verification, payment, and high-strength computing systems \u2013 to provide a new end to the customer.\u00a0 A good example of this is presented in the simplified video below, courtesy of Edureka, in a \u201ccoffee shop\u201d example: \u00a0 https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=_dFJOSR-aFs<\/a><\/p>\n

Microservices <\/strong>(& Amazon Web Services \/ ‘AWS’<\/strong>).\u00a0 \u00a0Microservices is a continuation of the SOA concept.\u00a0 This concept is premised on dividing outsourced functions into the smallest possible components, and both marketing (selling) and updating (maintaining) them individually.\u00a0 The intent of the microservices design concept is to provide flexibility and agility for IT designers;\u00a0 IT designers can outsource individual components of the system, and then update or modify those components after implementation as feature improvements become available.\u00a0 There are, however, risks to this approach;\u00a0 as sub-systems become individualized, requirements for systems administrators increase \u2013 requiring higher levels of education, training, and daily labor from those SYSADMINS to manage increasingly complex and nuanced systems.<\/p>\n

Sources: \u00a0\u00a0https:\/\/aws.amazon.com\/microservices\/ \u00a0 <\/a>https:\/\/mkdev.me\/posts\/what-and-who-is-devops<\/a><\/p>\n

Virtual Machines & Containers<\/strong>:\u00a0 Virtual machines seek to emulate physical infrastructure (hardware) by logical (software) means.\u00a0 This is accomplished by complex software codes which divide a single piece of hardware into smaller buckets, or \u2018virtual machines\u2019.\u00a0 The software \u201ccontainer\u201d concept is similar, but operates in a modified way to increase efficiency.\u00a0 Whereas virtual machine divisions create entirely separate copies of an operating system (i.e., Windows), containers accomplish the same ends by \u2018tricking\u2019 software applications into functioning as if they have the same.\u00a0 But in reality the container is sharing multiple files (resources) between applications.\u00a0 Essentially, containers increase efficiency by making better use of shared resources.<\/p>\n

Source:\u00a0 https:\/\/blogs.sap.com\/2018\/06\/05\/cloud-native-with-containers-and-kubernetes-part-2\/<\/p>\n

Development Operations (DevOps).\u00a0 <\/strong>DevOps refers to the strategy or practice of combining software development with IT administration.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 DevOps is implemented by forming cross-functional teams and ensuring implementers (for example, systems administrators) are part of the design process.<\/p>\n

Summary for Strategic Relevance.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/strong>Several key concepts stand apart in describing the strategic context of the above terms.\u00a0 First, the idea of containers \u2013 it\u2019s not unlike the revolution which occurred in the shipping industry, and the irony of its title is not lost:<\/p>\n

\u201cJust 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\u2019s deploying on a developer\u2019s laptop, a local test environment, or a production environment on the cloud, a container abstracts away any differences in OS distributions and underlying infrastructure<\/em>.\u201d\u00a0 BMC Blogs:\u00a0 https:\/\/www.bmc.com\/blogs\/containers-vs-microservices\/<\/a><\/u><\/p>\n

Second, from our Penn State EA required readings, the following summarizes well how EA impacts non-IT-focused interests and stakeholders:<\/p>\n

\u201cTechnology 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\u2014all of which enable this value\u2014are too often applied selectively by businesses in narrow pockets of their organization, particularly in sales and marketing<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Source:\u00a0 Tunde Olanrewaju (principal) and Paul Willmott (director) at McKinsey\u2019s London office.\u00a0 https:\/\/www.mckinsey.com\/business-functions\/mckinsey-digital\/our-insights\/finding-your-digital-sweet-spot<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Summary.\u00a0 \u00a0This week’s second post is about familiarization with new terms in modern IT:\u00a0 AWS, microservices, virtual machines, containers, SOA, and DevOps.\u00a0 The sections below highlight and categorize these important progressive concepts and suggest implications of their use from a strategic perspective. Background.\u00a0 In reviewing this week\u2019s assigned readings for Penn State University\u2019s College of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jaredmcuevas.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jaredmcuevas.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jaredmcuevas.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jaredmcuevas.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jaredmcuevas.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=44"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jaredmcuevas.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jaredmcuevas.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=44"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jaredmcuevas.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=44"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jaredmcuevas.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=44"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}