Infrastructure: Acknowledge the Creativity behind Commodity

Almost a decade back, I first heard about a sharp statement from my sales colleague, wherein, it was referred that Infrastructure is a commodity and needs no brains to buy from market. I felt little intimidated by the statement & rightly so (at that time), as this trend caught up very wildly , Life adjusted to it. Today, one may not know the rates of vegetables in local market, but they can very well predict the rates of storage or compute in next few months or years.

Some questions that one must ask today to self about this model.

1. Did we belittle the creativity aspects behind this IT Service and further endangered the pursuits of research & development in this sector?
2. While shaping market forces for standardization of commodities, are we ignoring the asks of business & application landscape in future by binding them to current catalogues?
3. Are we buying Infrastructure as commodity without understanding the recipes & spices required to cook them better for Business & Application requirements?
4. Are we buying it for today or keeping tomorrow in mind, where agile business merges through application streams and Infrastructure dissolves into mainstream not as commodity by as key ingredient to final service or product?
5. Have we fundamentally understood the Infrastructure definition beyond the storage & compute synergy requirements when they scale today from simplistic container to biggest Kubernetes cluster across the AI, Security, Compliance, End User threads to application interoperability?

Many questions pointed above, might look fundamentally commercial or procurement driven but the choices on table are for the Delivery & Business owners to ascertain them.

I wish to bring in some arguments that will try to bring acknowledgement to creativity inside the bunkers of Datacentres to the re-imagined workplaces. They come to my mind as a gratitude to the millions of engineers, who designed, engineered and operated them.

1. Today my laptop has same configuration as my first Dell Server that I racked and bolted in Y2K. Compare this fast-paced development in any Industry, across the human civilization, there is no parallel to it. Speed came with serenity of pure technological play of creativity.
2. My Digital Bank was a privilege's few decades back, but it is a norm today with billions of extra transaction volume per day. It wouldn't have been possible without the scale up from OS390 to multiple breeds of 64-bit computing in world of ZoS, Power Computing, Grid computing or with Cloud & Quantum Computing. Power comes from creative pursuit to stretch beyond its periphery
3. While some dream of MF sunset, the technology footprint came up evolution up to Z15, almost every 18 months, a new Avatar to sustain the business demands with proficiency. What we call compute sharing was probably with them many decades back. Concepts re-evolve in dimension of technology & these seed Ideas will never die but regrow in new morph forms
4. Long Before Java & MS Camps used to fight over garbage collectors in VC++ , when the computing powers were accelerating, RMI or Beans or DCOMs had started processing massive XML over high speed Networks from few Kbs to 10 mbps to 100 mbps to 10 gbps throughputs. We never realized how the network roads from copper to optical fibres made it possible. Burden of the code will be on shoulders Network & stand on legs of Compute with secure vests.
5. In the Silken fabric of virtualization, hyper virtualization WVDs to tangible Citrix clients from those intangible thin client worlds, we have been inheriting the fundamental workplace tenants, pursued with dream of ever green models. Today's Covid challenges couldn't have been met successfully, unless the creative pursuit to Secure border less Workspace would have evolved from Win 95 or Mac Machines. Legacy is an evolutionary Journey of our persistence & steadfast visions of technology solution

What I presented is a glimpse of the creativity that led to our evolution and there are millions of examples, far better than what I presented above to drive home only one point . There is creativity behind every commodity. While Infrastructure might not be best Art forms, but it certainly represents our creative pursuit.

“Don’t think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it’s good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.” - Andy Warhol