What Infra teams can learn from web-scale IT

MUMBAI, INDIA: Gartner, Inc. said that capacity planning and performance management skills within IT infrastructure and operations (I&O) teams are no longer sufficient to meet business needs in the digital economy era.

By 2016, the availability of capacity and performance management skills for horizontally scaled architectures will be a major constraint or risk to growth for 80 per cent of major businesses.

"While major organizations continue to maintain and sustain their conventional capacity-planning skills and tools, they need to regularly re-evaluate the tools available and develop the capacity and performance management skills present in the Web-scale IT community," said Ian Head, research director at Gartner. "Web-scale IT organizations do things differently — they learn from one another. Conventional IT organizations can use some of the Web-scale techniques heading for mainstream adoption in the next three years."

To help I&O professionals focus their efforts, Gartner recommends the following actions like embracing stateless application architectures and horizontally scaling infrastructure architectures to improve capacity and performance management.

Web-scale organizations extend the virtualization concept by architecting applications to be stateless wherever possible (i.e., not recording and relying on user session data to function) and to work within a horizontally scaling infrastructure that facilitates rapid and near-real-time reallocation of resources.

Furthermore, workloads associated with these applications must be standardized and categorized (e.g., latency-sensitive and compliance-driven workloads) to enable the infrastructure team to assign infrastructure resources appropriately. These vital characteristics of Web-scale IT form the foundation for capacity and performance management.

Services constructed in this way are better equipped to scale geographically and share multiple data centers with limited impact on user performance. This approach also blurs the lines between capacity planning, fault-tolerant designs, and disaster recovery. Because individual virtual machines, nodes and then larger parts of the infrastructure may be lost, careful adjustment of both application and infrastructure will allow graceful performance degradation.

Demand shaping uses various techniques to adjust the quantity of resources required by any one service so that the infrastructure does not become overloaded. Gartner predicts that through 2017, 25 per cent of large organizations will use demand shaping to plan and manage capacity, up from less than one per cent in 2014.

Techniques for demand shaping include limited launches — sometimes known as "canary launches" — where new functionality is released to a limited section of the user base. The take up and load can then be measured and extrapolated to the wider user base and decisions made to allocate more or fewer resources to the new services as they are rolled out to different segments of users. "Dark launching" is also used to estimate and shape demand. In this case, functionality is released, usually to a subset of the user base, but users are not notified that the functionality is available.

Such techniques will allow limited IT resources to be shared among different applications, providing an acceptable user experience and keeping vital applications running in the event of any difficulties with IT infrastructure.