Anyone who works in IT or a slightly related field will tell you that you’ve got to be constantly up to date with the latest technology lest you find yourself quickly obsoleted. Depending on what your technology platform of choice is the time frame you have to work in can vary pretty wildly, but you’d be doing yourself (and your career) a favour by skilling up in either a new or different technology every 2 years or so. Due to the nature of my contracts though I’ve found myself learning completely new technologies at least every year and its only in this past contract that I’ve come back full circle to the technology I initially made my career on, but that doesn’t mean the others I learnt in the interim haven’t helped immensely.
If I was honest though I couldn’t say that in the past I that I actively sought out new technologies to become familiar with. Usually I would start a new job based on the skills that I had from a previous engagement only to find that they really required something different. Being the adaptable sort I’d go ahead and skill myself up in that area, quickly becoming proficient enough to do the work they required. Since most of the places I worked in were smaller shops this worked quite well since you’re always required to be a generalist in these situations. It’s only been recently that I’ve turned my eyes towards the future to figure out where I should place my next career bet.
It was a conversation that came up between me and a colleague of mine whilst I was on a business trip with them overseas. He asked me where I thought were some of the IT trends that were going to take off in the coming years and I told him that I thought cloud based technologies were the way to go. At first he didn’t believe me, which was understandable since we work for a government agency and they don’t typically put any of their data in infrastructure they don’t own. I did manage to bring him around to the idea eventually though, thanks in part to my half decade of constant reskilling.
Way back when I was just starting out as a system administrator I was fortunate enough to start out working with VMware’s technology stack, albeit in a strange incarnation of running their workstation product on a server. At the time I didn’t think it was anything revolutionary but as time went on I saw how much money was going to waste as many servers sat idle for the majority of their lives, burning power and providing little in return. Virtualization then was a fundamental change to the way that back end infrastructure would be designed, built and maintained and I haven’t encountered any mid to large sized organisation who isn’t using it in some form.
Cloud technologies then represent the evolution of this idea. I reference cloud technologies and not “the cloud” deliberately as whilst the idea of relying on external providers to do all the heavy lifting for you is extremely attractive it unfortunately doesn’t work for everyone, especially for those who simply cannot outsource. Cloud technologies and principles however, like the idea of having massive pools of compute and storage resources that can be carved up dynamically, have the potential to change the way back end services are designed and provisioned. Most importantly it would decouple the solution design from the underlying infrastructure meaning that neither would dictate the other. That in itself is enough for most IT shops want to jump on the cloud bandwagon, and some are even doing so already.
It’s for that exact reason why I started developing on the Windows Azure platform and researching into VMware’s vCloud solution. Whilst the consumer space is very much in love with the cloud and the benefits it provides large scale IT is a much slower moving beast and it’s only just now coming around to the cloud idea. With the next version of Windows shaping up to be far more cloud focused than any of its predecessors it seems quite prudent for us IT administrators to start becoming familiar with the benefits cloud technology provides, lest we be left behind by those up and comers who are betting on this burgeoning platform.
