Ninja Ops Team

These guys are totally awesome and that's a fact. Ninjas are fast, smooth, cool, strong, powerful, and sweet.

REAL Ultimate Power , On Ninjas 2009

In The Cloud, no one can hear your computers scream

(Apologies to Ridley Scott)

Cloud Computing on demand is going to change the nature of operations and operators.

The dominant noughties paradigm split product creation into application development engineered by programmers, and installation and maintenance of that application on site by operations teams. Cloud computing means that servers and storage are just instructions programmed.

Agile (Like A Ninja)Agility

Computation provision for small clusters

Typical for Java EE applications

is typically fixed. Hardware is usually specified early, before the software is ready and before demand is really understood. Operations are not deeply involved with the software architecture, and so this hardware is often generic. Utilisation is often poor overall but with serious performance degradation at peak usage. The split between operations and development means that cost benefit analysis to compare hardware and software solutions to performance issues is rarely performed. Scaling through hardware addition is not part of the operations culture.

This needs to change. Computing on demand allows a more agile approach.

Development has become more agile but Ops are still stuck in a timewarp. It's time that Ops did the timewarp. For cloud applications, Ops need to work much more closely with development throughout the process.

Expert (Like A Ninja)

In a conventional data center, the maximum cost to a business of a mistake by an operator is limited by the cost of the hardware they have access to and the cost done to the business of that hardware being down.

For on demand computing , the plastic limit applies. Operators will be able to run up costs until the credit capacity of the business is exceeded. Businesses working in the Cloud are going to want experts who do not make expensive mistakes.

Conversely, IaaS will reduce the number of low level operators required.

Expect to employ fewer operators of higher quality.

Invisible (Like A Ninja)

In the Cloud there is no co- to be located at and all operations are potentially distributed. Operators are going to need to be able to work from anywhere with an internet connection using mobile devices.

Insisting that the Ops team are sat down at desks with desktop computers just means having to pay for desks, office space and computers, (on top of mobile internet devices). Allowing them to work from wherever they happen to be is more cost effective. Efficient Ops team will be invisible.

Killer Tools (Like A Ninja)KillerTools

The killer applications will be the configuration, management and message tooling. Most of this tooling is still required.