If there’s one thing that I know for sure, it’s that change, especially in IT, is the only constant.
Photo by Dylan Lee (https://www.flickr.com/photos/canon_dlee/40565384360/)
Eleven years ago, I was working in the web hosting industry. At the time, I was invited to visit a customer who owned some of the best and biggest Tier 4 data centers in Germany. These facilities were mostly operated by banks and large brands like Equinix, Global Crossing, and others, and they had thousands of racks, servers, and cables.
This customer was one of many companies who leased data center space and resold web hosting services like dedicated servers or Virtual Private Servers (VPS). These guys were particularly smart and spent a lot of time trying to automate their services so that their customers could monitor the infrastructure and take control if needed. Most of that software was written in Perl (I actually remember a big book about Perl on their desk!) and it was absolutely scrappy, a few charts, some commands to reboot servers, and so on.
I was curious. Instead of reselling hardware and space, why didn’t they focus on software? Continue reading “Multi-cloud and SaaS are eating the world”