Let’s talk about virtual machines, containers and what’s the attraction for NonStop customers. But first, the big question; with mission critical applications, are they relevant?
When it comes to myths and fables there is perhaps none
more the subject of speculation than the existence of King Arthur and his
fabled magician, Merlin. Modern speculation goes so far as to suggest Merlin
was an original “Time Lord” of Dr. Who’s fame. Others suggest he was the model
for J.R.R. Tolkien’s Gandalf. As for Harry Potter, well it is not so much a
case of speculation so much as it’s a case of dropping into a pure fantasy. Merlin
even made an appearance in the movies; Transformers: Last Knight.
Myths carry with them the expectation that wondrous
things occurred and that without their featured characters, societies would
have been lost. When it comes to technology there has always been a sense of
fantasy and of the unbelievable and yet, here we are entering the seventh
decade of commercial IT where nothing surprises us any longer.
Looking further afield at what might happen when ML
(Machine Language) and AI (Artificial Intelligence) go mainstream, the level of
surprise looks unimaginable at this time. We simply don’t know what will happen
even as we aren’t all that sure that society as a whole will benefit from the
transformation that is beginning to be unleashed.
One prime example of where technology and magic begin
to blend is our mobile phone. Perhaps even more magical, what’s happening to
our watch! It was famed British science fiction writer, Arthur C. Clarke, who
came up with Clarke’s three laws the last of which stated, “Any sufficiently
advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
It was Clarke who postulated that one day, as if indeed
by magic, the earth would be surrounded by satellites in geostationary orbits
thereby revolutionizing communications – and this was an idea that he made
popular back in the 1940s! Who is to say then what might come next – will H.G.
Wells’ Time Machine appear from out of nowhere?
In the last couple of posts to this blog I have written
about assumptions we might make that are false even as we can be readily
deceived by what looks real. Perhaps just as relevant today are the many myths
surrounding IT that have a lot to do with the rise in popularity of the cloud.
For instance, without planning and foresight ahead of
deployment, taking a production application and simply deploying it as is on a
cloud soon turns out to be an expensive proposition. Should the application
need to run 24 x 7, then there are no short cuts – you have to pay for the resources
to be available without exception. It’s one thing to move the application
off-site (and yes, out of sight), but nothing really changes.
And yet, as the argument goes, you cannot run
traditional applications in the cloud. This is because traditional applications
are mostly monolithic. Huge chunks of code, no matter how many times Merlin
waves his magic wand, remain simply that; large chunks of code. Members of the
NonStop community are beginning to take a longer look at virtual NonStop but is
it the best option for all applications?
Because you have a private cloud made up of x86 servers
where you have virtual machines deployed, do you want to go down that path?
Even more controversial perhaps, could you skip virtual machines entirely and
deploy your NonStop applications within containers and if so, to what end?
Couldn’t you drop all of your NonStop solution into a container as is?
In his post of January 15, 2021, to the HPE community
blog, Busting
the myths around cloud-native cores, HPE Solution Marketing
Director, Telecom Worldwide, Oded Ringer, delved into this topic. “In many
cases, vendors have skipped the whole process of decomposing and redesigning
their software,” said Ringer.
“Instead, they’ve taken the same old monolithic network
applications and just dropped them into a giant VM running inside a container:
‘Voila,’ they say, ‘now we’re cloud-native!’ Well, not quite.” Ringer then notes
that while you can say you are using these “cloud-washed” functions in a
containerized architecture “you won’t get the benefits that cloud-native software
is supposed to deliver.”
On the stories from the past where Merlin was able to
simply wave his wand to dispel enemies, CIOs don’t quite have the same degree
of magic at their disposal. Yes, they have access to some amazing technology
that might look like magic – and yes, easy to do; drop it all in a container!
However, what looked magical on the whiteboard (or in the PowerPoint slides),
may simply end up leaving CIOs dependent on yet another layer of infrastructure.
According to Ringer, this is where these CIOs will lose
out as when “it comes to deploying, scaling, and updating them, the process is
just as slow and complicated as running a monolithic application—because that’s
basically what they are.”
Returning to NonStop the first myth to overcome is that
NonStop applications may not be monolithic in the same way as they were
implemented on other systems. “NonStop has never recommended a monolithic
application architecture,” said a NonStop technologist. “The advantage one gets
with containers strung across many physical / virtual servers is the same
advantage Pathway has claimed for what, 40 years?”
Furthermore, to those familiar with Pathway, “we could say
our architecture – requestor / server- was a pre, pre, pre architecture to
cloud native. Cloud native is about contained code and massive scale-up
and scale-down, items NonStop has had for decades.”
However, looking at another myth maybe there is something
that NonStop users need to take into consideration. When you look at the
characteristics of any cloud-native application “you will see that it’s not
just that they utilize a container-based infrastructure, that they present an
architecture built around microservices, or that they are maintained using
continuous integration / continuous delivery (CI/CD),” as our NonStop
technologist reminded me, but what struck me was how this looked like support
for ease-of-portability.
Run it on cloud services provider A one day and then
fire it up on cloud services provide B the next. But this is of no benefit
whatsoever when it comes to mission critical applications operating 24 x 7! But
then again, if you elect to run outside of the cloud and indeed outside of containers
can you say with a straight face that your application is modern?
There will be situations where NonStop benefits from
running in a cloud environment but they will be few and far between. There is
no question that leveraging the microservices many cloud services providers
deliver has benefits and stringing a selection of these services together via
the APIs these vendors afford us can be done rather easily, but when finished,
the resultant solution more likely than not will need to run 24 x 7 – it’s
mission critical after all – and it’s something NonStop does natively.
Has the time come to consider putting on the brakes
when it comes to moving to virtual NonStop under the pretense of being “cloud
native?” To what end? There will be legitimate reasons as to why virtual NonStop
will be a good path to go down but in all seriousness, consider what you
already have, especially when you have leveraged the benefits of Pathway? Too
much of a stretch? Well, why do you think NonStop supports Java running within
Java virtual machines (JVMs) that are managed by Pathway?
Merlin may have existed: We will probably never know
for sure. Cloud computing promises many things but is it really the only path
to modernization? For years we have talked of NonStop being a cluster-in-a-box,
but just as importantly, today we might want to begin talking about NonStop
being a cloud-in-a-box. Much of the same flexibility is afforded applications
as no better system can scale out as well as NonStop.
Perhaps what we do know about Merlin is that his magic
wand no longer can be waved over today’s data centers to make them modern and
indeed, for the NonStop community, this is probably a good thing. There will
always be mission-critical applications that run day-in, day-out,
uninterrupted. Not for them is there a need to provision them on the fly or to
regularly turn them on and off and on again.
Before you head into your next meeting to discuss cloud
native, shouldn’t you at least take a good look at what NonStop is providing
today? Perhaps the myth we should be debunking is that not all traditional
applications are legacy. Perhaps what we should be focused on is just how
modern our NonStop systems have become. And yes, perhaps we shouldn’t be so
anxious to stick our heads in the clouds!
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