One of the visible signs of an unrecognized (and therefore, unresolved) dilemma is oscillation between two poles.
I got this from the late Eli Goldratt and the problem-solving tools he created. One of those tools is the "Evaporating Cloud," which is a way to visualize a dilemma of some kind.
I'd suggest that there is an unresolved dilemma here: Should we rent or own data centers?
Over a period of years or decades, you can watch these things flip-flop between two extremes.
It's interesting to me that this dilemma is kind of like a specialization (in OO terminology) of a more generic dilemma, which might be something like: "In general, do we want to own or rent the things we need to run our business?"
If your turn your head a bit, close your eyes a bit and squint, you can see how a dilemma like this can apply to things like "What should be our policy regarding employees vs. contractors? Should we try to hire and retain over a long period of time, or should we rent the people we need to get the job done and release them as soon as we are done with them?"
The overall point is that whenever you see flip-flopping between two poles, think "Unrecognized dilemma."
Often it’s simply the principle of the excluded middle.
If not for the rent seeking behavior of AWS and its cohort, the answer to ”own or rent” would be clear. The answer is “yes”.
Running a data center means you have your own sheep, which means you need shepherds. Shepherds are very useful to have when you have a question about sheep, especially when those questions are about how to manage or use sheep to best effect.
An approachable shepherd can save the rest of the company a lot of money on missteps and bad assumptions, but if you start getting rid of all the sheep, the shepherd will leave too.
We should be using cloud providers for DR, and for regional load balancing. But the company should be maintaining at least one data center of their own, in the same time zones as most of their developers.
I mostly blame Dell and IBM for this. IBM experimented with making server rooms easier to maintain 15-20 years ago and didn’t make it stick. Others ran with some of those ideas. Dell… I don’t know what Dell has done but I know nobody has been writing about it, so from a visibility standpoint they have done nothing.
If/when someone makes it easier (reduced labor) to manage your own servers, the pendulum will swing back.
You're right, I mean, this was the vision for Multics. They would rent computing as a utility to all the businesses, big and small, backed by their computers. At the time it didn't pan out but it was definitely a desire.
One of the visible signs of an unrecognized (and therefore, unresolved) dilemma is oscillation between two poles.
I got this from the late Eli Goldratt and the problem-solving tools he created. One of those tools is the "Evaporating Cloud," which is a way to visualize a dilemma of some kind.
I'd suggest that there is an unresolved dilemma here: Should we rent or own data centers?
Over a period of years or decades, you can watch these things flip-flop between two extremes.
It's interesting to me that this dilemma is kind of like a specialization (in OO terminology) of a more generic dilemma, which might be something like: "In general, do we want to own or rent the things we need to run our business?"
If your turn your head a bit, close your eyes a bit and squint, you can see how a dilemma like this can apply to things like "What should be our policy regarding employees vs. contractors? Should we try to hire and retain over a long period of time, or should we rent the people we need to get the job done and release them as soon as we are done with them?"
The overall point is that whenever you see flip-flopping between two poles, think "Unrecognized dilemma."
Sorry if this is vague.