I was remembering back to 1997 when I was working in IT for a fortune 500 as the stir for Y2K upgrades were on the rise, buyouts of smaller companies were daily and the transition from copper pair telecommunications systems were being replaced by VOIP. The latter was an odd transition; the use of a somewhat new thing (Ethernet) was being retasked to now handle phone traffic which heretofore was managed not by IT but rather by tel-co. This transition meant that the phone systems which had to date been managed by groups of switch technicians and troubleshooting performed with tone generators, butt-sets and amplifiers where now handled by neck-bearded pale-faced sociophobes in the basement  (not exactly) where no one dared venture. Many lost their jobs unable to embrace the change, many couldn’t make the transition believing it would pass and some embraced it striving to stay on the curve.

Enter 2011, a new revolution has been well under way reminding me of those days long since passed; the cloud. While some see the cloud as just the most recent fad, a passing annoyance or the next thing to crash and burn; I however believe this is the next revolution. There will be those that will lose their jobs refusing to embrace the inevitable, more will not make the transition believing it will pass and some will successfully embrace it riding the curve. Much like the tel-co department of old, ops groups will now have to begin thinking more like a developer; it will require them to become part of the development process designing and interacting with aspects not specifically relating to the assets and hardware. Similarly, developers will have to become more mindful of ops related requirements that intersect their daily thought processes; considering technical details of deployment, concurrency and the like. The ability for even the most meagerly funded organizations to have as robust and thoroughly sound infrastructure as a Fortune 500, by which they may build, grow and continuously deliver their message to the world; making the cloud a cornerstone that is here to stay.