EMA Blog: Business Intelligence and IT Management

Azure Container Service (now AKS where the K stands for Kubernetes) is now offers managed Kubernetes as Tech Preview. This new service provides single-line install (az aks create –n myCluster –g myResourceGroup), automated upgrades, self-healing, and scaling. Microsoft promises that the Azure control plane for Kubernetes will remain free (AWS charges for management servers), with customers only paying for worker nodes running applications. Like all other major vendors, Microsoft declares Kubernetes the winner of the container orchestrator and scheduler race and stresses its contribution to the open source project (only 37 commits, compared to 114 by IBM, 668 by Red Hat, and 1543 by Google as of October 25, 2017). Microsoft also stresses the importance of its Draft project (acquired through Deis) to make Kubernetes accessible to developers without any container experience. Today, Amazon does not offer managed Kubernetes, but it is expected that there will be an announcement in this regard at re:Invent in November.

What Happened?

Docker used the picturesque setting of its Copenhagen DockerCon event to announce Kubernetes support for both, Docker Enterprise Edition and Docker Community Edition. The company plans to deliver betas for end of 2017.

Despite some recent obituaries published by my peers, software-defined networking is not dead. But perhaps certain aspects of it are dead or dying. If that’s the case, I say: “SDN is dead. Long live SDN.”

I’m excited to kick off this project, as no other topic in IT seems to have so many different aspects to consider and so many points to attack it. As, hopefully, in all our EMA research projects, we will look at this topic from all angles without any predetermined outcomes. The project will be exclusively guided by what’s best for the customer when it comes to ramping up a container strategy.

“Machine learning (ML) today is frustrating. There is so much potential and the algorithms are all there, but I just do not know how I can leverage it for my organization,” says the CTO of a major professional services firm. “My CEO wants me to ‘leverage ML to lower OPEX and differentiate our service offerings, but there is nothing out there in the market that would allow me to get this done in a manner that has a high probability of success.” Then of course he asks me what I would do and where I would start, because the guy with “Machine Learning and AI” in his job title must know for sure…

I admit, “end-user support” sounds kind of old-fashioned. But in many respects just the opposite is true. In the digital age the need for easy access to new services is on the rise, and even with a much ‘hipper’ (and increasingly impatient) end-user population, the need for support and guidance remains. It is just taking different forms than in the past.

What should machine and artificial intelligence (ML/AI) do for IT operations, DevOps and container management? The following table represents my quick outline of the key challenges and specific problem ML/AI needs to address. The table is based on the believe that ML/AI needs to look over the shoulder of IT ops, DevOps, and business management teams to learn from their decision making. In other words, every virtualization administrator fulfills infrastructure provisioning or upgrade requests a little bit differently. Please regard the below table as a preliminary outline and basis for discussion. At this point, and probably at no future point either, I won't claim to know the 'ultimate truth.'

What should machine and artificial intelligence (ML/AI) do for IT operations, DevOps and container management? The following table represents my quick outline of the key challenges and specific problem ML/AI needs to address. The table is based on the believe that ML/AI needs to look over the shoulder of IT ops, DevOps, and business management teams to learn from their decision making. In other words, every virtualization administrator fulfills infrastructure provisioning or upgrade requests a little bit differently. Please regard the below table as a preliminary outline and basis for discussion. At this point, and probably at no future point either, I won't claim to know the 'ultimate truth.'