Alastair Cooke is an independent analyst and consultant working with virtualization and datacenter technologies. Alastair spent eight years delivering training for HP and VMware as well as providing implementation services for their technologies. Alastair is able to create a storied communication that helps partners and customers understand complex technologies. Alastair is known in the VMware community for contributions to the vBrownBag podcast and for the AutoLab, which automates the deployment of a nested vSphere training lab.
I am intrigued by the design decisions that are made as products are developed. I find it amazing how often problems are solved in completely different ways in different products. Sometimes these decisions show up when you are not expecting them. I encountered one such example at a vBrownBag TechTalk presentation at the OpenStack Summit in …
Continue reading “Hyperconverged Design: Limit CPU Consumption by Limiting Storage Performance”
Recently I wrote about advanced simplicity. This is the idea that a great software product hides complexity from its users behind a simple interface. As an illustration, I’d like to discuss a piece of software that exposes lots of complexity, then examine how it would be easier to use if the user interface were different. As my example, …
Continue reading “Advanced Simplicity Is All About User Interface”
There is no doubt that the pace of business change is not slowing. With this business rate of change comes the need for business applications to change at great speed. What may be less visible is the direct relationship between the speed of application change and the need for new application architectures.
There has definitely been a trend for simplification in IT infrastructure startups for a while. We have seen a whole lot of simplification in how IT infrastructure is managed. We have also seen a trend for infrastructure products that are easy to deploy. Is easy to deploy a good thing? Does easy deployment lead to …
When we were first introduced to Docker containers, we were told that they should be ephemeral and stateless. It turns out that there are lot of great uses for Docker containers that are either stateful or long-lived. The stateful part is leading to a bunch of startups that have storage products to deliver persistent storage to these …
The news is out: you can now have the dominant enterprise hypervisor in the dominant public cloud. This is a pretty major shift for both vendors, and it will take a while to get enough details of the business and technical sides. Right now, we know that AWS will offer physical ESXi servers in its …
