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IT automation is key to IT efficiency, agility and control. Here are some of my recent thoughts on this topic. Please feel free to share yours.

People and Automation  Read more... (285 words, estimated 1:08 mins reading time)

• All automations ultimately start from people, not the other way around.
• Although automation has a role, it never takes the place of a good system administrator.
• Not everything can be automated, and not everything is worth being automated.

Recently I stumbled at a book Things That Make Us Smart by one of my favorite authors Donald Norman. In the book, he shared many insights on the complex human machine interactions, “arguing for the development of machines that fit our minds, rather than minds that must conform to the machine.” By the way, I highly recommend his another book The Design of Everyday Things.

Because I just blogged about IT automation, I still have that topic on my mind. So when I read the book, I did quite a lot of reflective thinking around IT automation. In general, I feel  Read more... (425 words, estimated 1:42 mins reading time)

Weeks ago I had a great conversation with Vanessa Alvarez (@VanessaAlvarez1) who is an analyst with Forrest Research. Among other topics, we discussed datacenter automation because we’re both interested in it. After Vanessa tweeted about her automation dream, several follow-up tweets came up.

In general, I think automation is a vague word in IT world, and it mostly means different things to different people. This is especially true when we talk about automation together with integration. This article tries to define automation from my understanding and perspective. Please feel free to share your thoughts in comments.

From high level, automation is the opposite to  Read more... (934 words, estimated 3:44 mins reading time)

I recently came across a book which I got from LISA conference last November. It was written by Jake Sorofman who is VP, Product/Marketing at rPath. I thought it’s just another typical book from a vendor, therefore I didn’t read it until two weeks ago while sorting my bags. It’s not. After reading it, I found this 75 page booklet pretty easy to read and very insightful.

Here are 6 musts Jake discussed in his book:  Read more... (177 words, estimated 42 secs reading time)

1. Get your platforms under control
2. Get your applications under control
3. Version control everything

As I quoted VMware CMO Rick Jackson in my previous blog, cloud computing is a journey. You may wonder, “If so, what are the phases for that journey?”

A great question! Understanding the phases helps us to better plan our journey and have a smooth transition from phase to phase.

In this blog, I will introduce 3 phases one by one: 100% virtualization, private cloud, and federated cloud. I will go over each of them and discuss the challenges in each.  Read more... (646 words, estimated 2:35 mins reading time)