From AIX to Zero-ops

A server’s journey�Pierre BAILLET - 27th, April 2017

Intro

About… this Talk

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• What drives companies?
• Why keep on top of technology?
• The server’s journey across the ages

About… me

• Pierre BAILLET, @octplane
• DevOps consultant, Technical Manager @ IPPON Technologies
• Developer since 1987, root since 1997, conference speaker since 2011
• Wrote my first bot in 1997

Behind this talk

• social evolution:
• Computer science is now taught in school
• New ways of training: better schools, mooc
• Developers, administrators, ops, devops: new jobs
• technical evolution:
• Languages
• Frameworks
• business evolution:
• Mondialization
• Digitalization: the headlamp example

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Companies

&

Technologies

What drives companies?

• Business!
• Business!
• Business!
• Business!

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What drives companies?

• Business first: the only value we should worry about
• Business Continuity: the metric that will keep our business alive
• Business TTM: the duration that will ensure our business lasts
• Business TCO: the cost that will make our business profitable

Why keep on top of technology?

• Spend less money: Leverage for Cost optimization
• Earn more money: Kill the competition
• Earn more money: create new uses: Disrupts the industry (uberization)
• Earn more money: create new markets: New perspectives
• Avoid bankruptcy: transform to adapt: Digital transformation

The Server’s Journey

1642 > The Golden era

• Blaise Pascal
• Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace
• Computers are mechanical machines
• They “compute”

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1970 >The transistor and lamp(!) ERA

• First Computers
• Huge machines, room sized: heavy industry: knobs and paper with holes
• Internet appears, first as a research project (ARPANET, CYCLADES): wires and electrical impulsions

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1980 > banks and universities

• Computers sneak in banks (COBOL anyone?)
• Actual computer scientists!
• Industry workers still use old industrial computers
• At the same time, rise of the first personal computers: Alice, Atari ST, Amiga, …
• Youngsters experiment Asm, Basics and 16/32 bit coding

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1991 > From the desktop to the datacenter

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New contenders:

• GNU/Linux by Linus Torvald
• Visual Basic by Microsoft, and later php

Era of home grown development:

• First web applications (CGI, PHP, ASP)
• First desktop rich applications (TCL/TK, VBA, VB, C++)

First datacenters, servers and racks.

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2006 > I.A.A.S.

• Infrastructure As A service, also known as the Cloud
• First public instance of a Cloud (AWS)
• Underlying structure for code applications : INFRA + METAL
• Servers, disks, virtual networks, …

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• Pay in Advance, Pay on demand

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2008 > P.A.A.S.

• Platform As A Service
• Lead by Google and its AppEngine
• Little by little, persistent services move behind the API interface : relational databases, nosql, ...
• Rise of smarter services : notifications, messaging, queues, …
• More and more vendor lock-in

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• Leverage the Cloud technology to let developers focus on their core job: application code.

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2014 > F.A.A.S.

• Function As A Service: The Serverless!
• A simple interface
• Scaling is infinite (!)
• Greener approach (?)
• Need an API Gateway

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• We only pay for the CPU slices we actually use
• Are we really zero-ops?

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2020 > X.A.A.S.?

• Everything As A Service
• Less coding competencies, more business/product skills
• The pizza team now includes business specialists
• IA is on the rise: replace some of the simplest development
• Vendor Lock-in at its maximum
• Open the path for new standards

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• Which side of the barrier will you stay on?

DEV

OPS

METAL

INFRA

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BIZ

Outro

Serverless - Where do we go from here?

• Cost reduction is the lead adoption factor
• Focus on the core business value
• There are still ops, but behind an API interface
• Vendor lock-in stronger than ever
• Community (dev’ framework) and norm (packaging) are slowly emerging

Any question?

Thanks!

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Up next! Operational Challenges with serverless Architecture - Laurent Bernaille