Abstraction Is the Future

The IT industry is abstracting everything it can, from hardware, to networking, to storage and more. “Abstract and build an API, and the world becomes better” seems to be the motto. Abstraction has become the goal of many subsystems. Many people seem to believe that if you move everything to software, everything will be better—and that if you use …

ITOA Types of Data

Any part of any infrastructure, application, or cloud is data. Data is used by applications, and myriad data is presented to IT organizations for their use, edification, insights, and more. But what really is this data? Can we classify the types of data in some way? Data classifications should not be just “structured” and “unstructured”; they must go deeper than …

The Small Business IT Skill Challenge

I live in a small city in a small country. As a result, there are a lot of small businesses all around me. Law firms with three partners, shipping companies with a couple of dozen trucks, and building companies with under a hundred staff. Almost all of the businesses where I live are small. Take …

Rightscale Publishes State of the Cloud Report for 2016

Rightscale just published a report called “State of the Cloud Report: DevOps Trends“.  The report focuses on the adoption of DevOps and containers across both enterprises and SMBs. To nobody’s surprise, adoption rates of both containers and DevOps are on the rise. What is interesting is the rate of adoption, especially in large enterprises. Here …

Flip Side of the Coin: Automation Tools of the Trade

In my last post I started the discussion on the tools of the trade for automation and orchestration. The post mainly focused on Microsoft PowerShell as one of the primary tools of the trade when working within Microsoft, VMware and Citrix virtualization and orchestration solutions. One of the main reasons that I focused on Microsoft PowerShell. So why PowerShell? Quite simply it is a very powerful platform that has a very strong community to help support it and companies outside of Microsoft have invested a great deal of time and development to use this technology as one of the main administration and management platforms for working with VMware vSphere and Citrix Xen. For the sake of this discussion, I am going to refer to PowerShell as one side of the automation coin and now concentrate on the flip side of the automation coin.