By Richard Scannell

The Everlasting Gobstopper was one of the wonders of Willie Wonka’s Chocolate factory – the envy of every child in that no matter how long it was sucked, it never declined in size. We learn that it is the lure set up to trick the kids with the golden tickets into stealing one gobstopper for a supposed arch-enemy of Wonka’s – therefore identifying the one true child, who refuses to go along with the chicanery. The Everlasting Gobstoppert is a fitting, if not understated analogy for the IT estate of many large organizations. For over twenty years, I’ve been around, part of, or lead initiatives to “standardize” server operating environments so that, ahem, “once and for all”, the IT support teams could walk into a proverbial Sev-1 battle armed with at least a basic understanding of who the enemy was – OS versions, patching history, file system namespace, app revision level etc. But as anyone with the said battle scars can attest, the more things change, the more they stay the same. No sooner would one standardization effort be compete, but it was already out of date as last year’s Strategic Project slid quickly into the ranks of legacy and yet another five new projects were being kicked off with new platform models, OS versions, patch revisions and applications specs. Once again, we were back to multiple variants of everything and with no time to maintain currency, cracks would again start to appear in our standardized environment. And that was the good old days…

With the push to all things virtual, yesterday’s standardization problem for hundreds, or possibly a thousand, servers is today multiplied by a factor of 10, or in some cases 50. It’s now routine for me to speak with IT leaders managing tens of thousands of OS instances – with some breaking the 100,000 mark. In discussions about Cloud adoption, two things tend to come up over and over – one being Security, the other being, well, just the challenges of adoption. Security is the topic of lots of talk and innovation, to say nothing of bogeymen, but adoption is the true head scratcher in many ways. There are numerous issues at hand – initial economic business case, fear (nay, terror) of lock-in in the public cloud space, unknown future growth that is not as easily controlled when anyone in the company can just procure additional capacity with a couple of clicks and, of course, the desire to “clean things up” prior to moving to Cloud. However, if we have learned nothing from the acceleration of IT procurement of the past decade, we’ve learned that things are only going to continue to accelerate and the consumerization of IT will make the scale of any such standardization projects seem even more futile. In what I can only assume is an effort towards such a concept of consistency, some Public Cloud providers are now insisting on customers migrating servers onto “clean” images presented by them… good luck! Fluidity in Cloud environments will have to be based on the ability to move the operating stack from one operating location to another – from public, to private, across hypervisor architectures, out of one Cloud management framework and into another, etc. Without such fluidity, we will remain stuck, waiting to “standardize” prior to migration. Such efforts will soon seem as futile as trying suck down the Everlasting Gobstopper. The call to action for Cloud adoption is to enable enterprizes to do just that – adopt – get in… and get out – easily. Those service providers who do that stand a far greater chance of winning than those who are insistent on “standardization”. Remember, five kids got golden tickets, only the one who saw beyond the Everlasting Gobstopper won the factory!