If you have spent any time with military pilots you have inevitably heard them debate turbo prop vs. jet engines. Sometimes to the point where you have to throw a beer at their heads. If you haven’t heard of this it can be funny the first 5 times but you can imagine it gets old.
But it got me thinking jets and props have specific use cases, jets are fast, very maneuverable but not very efficient, where as props allow for greater mass movement and are reliable. Or so the two sides say I am not an aeronautical engineer. Similarly IT organizations looking at private and public clouds are faced with a decision. Do they use what they know and has worked for them their on-premises datacenter and IT team (TurboProps) or do they leverage the capability of a hosted cloud provider (Jet engines).
Invariably during the conversation with the military aviators, I bring up the C-130 Hercules. It’s one of my favorite airframes since it has been in service for next to forever. But my favorite part of it is, growing up as a Navy brat I went to a lot of airshows. The Blue Angels were my favorite act and I have tons of memorabilia including signed posters. The Blue Angels fly around with a C-130 nicknamed Fat Albert. Fat Albert is for logistical support and carries show gear etc, but it also is part of the show. The coolest part if you ask me. What it does is it demonstrates a C-130 tactical short runway take off. Here is a pic.
Notice something? Yeah the flames coming out of the aft of the plane those are jets that help provide lift. This is where things get interesting because that C-130 is pretty widely respected as a beast and it uses both props and jets when the use case requires it.
I know I am a sonofbitch for what I just did but the light hopefully clicks this is where a hybrid cloud approach makes sense. If not my thinly veiled story of military aviation was at least entertaining.
The industry understands it, Amazon has made announcements around their hybrid cloud strategy, VMware has been talking hybrid cloud for years, and EMC has the Enterprise Hybrid Cloud (EHC) offering that I as an EMC vSpecialist talk about so much that I have to change the slide deck weekly to keep it interesting for the non-technical people in the room who have heard it a million times.
Garner has been talking about Bi-modal IT lately the point of their buzz word is less about the IT transformation which, if you are in Simon Wardley’s camp is more of a tri-modal approach, and more about the CIO\CTO level realization that traditional internal IT approaches are failing the business needs. It’s evolve or die time and if the industry doesn’t start rocking towards a bi or tri modal approach than they will be left for the carrion.
I don’t believe in scare tactics I swear I don’t, I think fear can be a motivator but it’s not for me to make someone scared of situation or impending event. Instead though I see this as an opportunity to embrace the change. I think the time to do so is running out. We are closer today to the end of silo’d traditional IT stacks than we are to it’s beginning. Scaling approaches and abstraction technologies are already evolving beyond where we were. This is a cyclical event like all things in IT, but this time the distributed to converged model is going to be done in the cloud. Hybridity is the first step to public hosted acceptance. Once we get there workloads won’t be coming back, once the cost models are fully fleshed out and applications are Platform 3 micro-services and not platform 2. This is going to happen, it’s happening now. The argument of we are not Netflix isn’t going to fly when you need Netflix like flexibility and agility to meet business needs. You may not need to run Chaos Monkey but you can not rest on your laurels and expect to be ahead in 6 months to a year.
The business you are in won’t matter either, the argument of we have workloads that will never go to the cloud is only true until they do move to the cloud. We used to say we weren’t moving apps to x86 or to virtual platforms until we did. Accept and embrace the change, change is life, stagnant water kills you with bacteria, flowing water is more potable.
Whether you are ready to rock a jet or are in a sports class Cessna and eyeing the gulfstream, look at Hybrid Cloud as a viable path to get that next airframe certification.
Just as a fun side note I did a little bit of digging and found that the Navy’s first jet was also a hybrid with a prop on the front. Here is the really cool history.
