Very much enjoyed listening to Mark Burgess (@markburgess_OSL) at the Cloudstack Collaboration Conference Europe in Amsterdam. Some of my takeaways:
- Need for interoperability of infrastructures
- Infrastructures -> pervasive & decentralized
- The cloud is more than the cloud - think about the various other bits and pieces that you depend upon
- What are the promises that we can keep?
- The system's environment pokes and prods at systems from the outside - things fail
- Systems are grown in captivity and then thrown out into the wild
- Systems thinking: Dynamics (what do systems do?) & Semantics (what is intended, the purpose, the human part)
- We miss the causes of failure if we ignore the environment
- DevOps: Dev = semantics (intent) & Ops = Dynamics (behaviour)
- We have to understand both in a balanced way
- Continuous delivery requires continuous automation (analogy: storm drain that prevents flooding)
- No such thing as an immutable system (no intended change is not the same as no change at all)
- An operating system is a city
- Failures are semantic; processes are dynamic
- Talk to business executives about IF THEN MAYBE in terms of risks and gambling
- Uncertainties in IT (see photo)
