trends in IT infrastructure: the changing role of database and system administrators
October 25, 2009 – 10:44 pmWhile “cloud” infrastructure is all the hype these days, I’ve found one of its subtle consequences particularly interesting. With “cloud-like” services (used very loosely to describe on-demand internet and IT infrastructure resources) like amazon web services, google app engine, heroku, and many others, we have effectively removed barriers, once requiring specialized expertise, for developing and managing complex web applications. Web developers are essentially taking back control and they deserve it.
As a former system administrator and datacenter addict, I can attest to the significance of this shift. Part of our job at the time was to setup “barriers” (yup, the stories about the angry sysadmins are true) for developers in order to keep them out of trouble and, more importantly, keep the underlying infrastructure manageable. But as the physical infrastructure layer disappears and the bar for creating dynamic web applications gets lower, not surprisingly, we will start to see a lot more dynamic and complex web applications come online. Just as we saw with the deployment of static web sites after it became as easy as “point and click” to get stuff online. Today’s web developers want it all: flexibility, scalability and manageability. And “all” is becoming possible. Recently for example, the hardcore development team at github announced its move to rackspace because of some of these same drivers.
As a modern web developer, you don’t need to know how to provision, maintain or scale your web application’s physical infrastructure (or need access to kick-ass sysadmins) – which, by the way, is a serious killer feature. And with abstractions like Active Record, Hibernate or SimpleDB, you don’t even need to know as much about the intricacies of your database or backend store. And with storage services like Amazon’s S3 you have easy access to scalable data storage on-demand. This is without a doubt an over-simplification but a powerful and noteworthy trend nonetheless.
All web developers need to do now is focus on creating web products that people want to use…less excuses, no barriers, more code.
