View From the Floor: Ten Signatures

By Eric Hanselman
published: Friday, September 04 2009

Leostream's Eric Hanselman blogs from VMworld 2009.

If you’ve spent much time reading or talking to information technology analysts, you’ve probably heard about the Gartner Hype Cycle.  The general idea, for those few that have managed to avoid it, is that new technologies go through a progression of perceptions.  After starting with optimistic views of new technology, crashing through disillusionment, we eventually wind up at reality.  Paul Martiz’s opening address pointed out just how far this irrational exuberance has gone.

He talked about a conversation with customers who were frustrated with having to get ten signatures to provision a machine.  They knew that the cloud would fix this for them.  They didn’t know how, but they knew it would happen.  Is this the audacity of hope about the cloud?  Does it translate more broadly with virtualization?  Is this a shared delusion?  Paul accurately described this as a mythical quality of the cloud.

The ten signatures are a result of an enterprise process.  However extreme this example may be, if we’re going to minimize the depth of the trough of disillusionment, we have to acknowledge that there is a transition that has to be made from our existing operational models.  Virtualization won’t fix this.  There is huge potential to make our operational lives simpler.  We need to be realistic about what can be changed without breaking some safeguards that need to exist.

Most large enterprises have processes for change management.  Paul’s comments are apt to strike fear into the hearts of audit and compliance teams because of the implication that deploying from templates would be enough to satisfy this process.  Steve Herrod reiterated this today with his happy splash of “Signature Avoidance” in his presentation.  This approach seems to be missing a fundamental point or two about how a production application actually gets to production.  If there were automated tools to really validate what someone is about to do, we might be close to a signature-free life, but I haven’t seen a tool that can tell the future, yet."

To get to a brave new future, we have to transition.  We can’t just jump.  Paul is right that we need to start wrapping bubbles around pieces to deliver gradual change.  We need to approach deployment and change processes with an eye to how we can reduce steps by taking advantage of virtual world advantages.  We have to seize the improvements in agility that they provide.  We need to do it in a way that maintains the reliability and availability that we’ve worked so hard to achieve.

We need to look before we leap.