<\/p>\nI know what you\u2019re thinking, yet another car analogy, but bear with me, I think you\u2019ll like it\u2026eventually <\/p>\n
When I was a kid, like around 11 or 12, during the summers I would ride my bike into town to go to the municipal pool to hang out with my friends and basically have fun.\u00a0 On my way to the pool I used to ride past a garage and body shop in my neighborhood and sometimes I would stop to look around.\u00a0 One day I found it had a back lot where there were a bunch of cars parked amongst the weeds, broken concrete and gravel.\u00a0 I don\u2019t remember thinking about why the cars were there except that maybe they were in various states of repair (or disrepair as the case may be\u2026lots of rust, not a lot of intact glass) or that they were just forgotten about and left to\u00a0slowly disintegrate and return to nature. <\/span><\/p>\n Back then I do remember that I was seriously on the path toward full-on car craziness as I was just starting to dream of driving, feeling the wind in my hair (yeah, it was that long ago) and enjoying the freedom I imagined it would bring.\u00a0 I was a huge fan of \u201cCar Toons<\/a>\u201d which was sort of the Mad Magazine of cars and basically lusted after hot rods, dragsters and sports cars.\u00a0 I was endlessly scribbling car doodles on my note books and in the margins of text books.\u00a0 I thought of myself as a cross between Big Daddy Don Garlits<\/a> and a sports car designer.\u00a0 In fact, I used to spend hours drawing what I thought was the perfect car and would give the design to my dad who, back then, was a car designer for the Ford Motor Company. I have no idea what ever happened to those designs but I imagine they were conspicuously put in his briefcase at home and dumped in the trash at work.<\/p>\n Anyway, among the various shells of once bright and gleaming cars in that back lot, almost hidden amongst the weeds was a candy-apple red Ford Pantera<\/a> or, more accurately; the De Tomaso Pantera that was designed and built in Italy and powered by a Ford engine (and eventually imported to the US to be sold in Lincoln\/Mercury dealerships).\u00a0 The car sat on half-filled radial tires (relatively new to the US) and still sparkled as if it just came off the showroom floor\u2026haa ha, or so my feverish car-obsessed, pre-teen brain thought it sparkled.\u00a0 It was sleek, low to the ground and looked as if it were going 100 miles an hour just sitting there.\u00a0 It was a supercar before the word was coined and I was deeply, madly and completely in love with it.<\/p>\n Of course, at 12 years old the only thing I could really do was dream of driving the car\u2014I was, after all, 4 years away from even having a driver\u2019s license\u2014but I distinctly remember how vivid those daydreams were, how utterly real and \u201cpossible\u201d they seemed.<\/p>\n Fast forward to now and to the customers I consult with about their desires for a building a cloud infrastructure within their environments. They are doing exactly what I did almost 40 years ago in that back lot; they are looking at shiny new ways of doing things: being faster, highly flexible, elastic, personal, serviceable\u2014more innovative\u2014and fully imagining how it would feel to run those amazingly effective infrastructures\u2026but\u2026like I was back then, they are just as unable to operate those new things as I was unable to drive that Pantera.\u00a0 Even if I could afford to buy it, I had no knowledge or experience that would enable me to effectively (or legally) drive it.\u00a0 That is the difference between being Functional and Capable.<\/p>\n The Pantera was certainly capable but *in relation to me<\/strong>* was not anywhere near being functional.\u00a0 The essence and nature of the car never changed but my ability to effectively harness its power and direct it toward some beneficial outcome was zero; therefore the car was non-functional as far as I was concerned.\u00a0 The same way a cloud infrastructure\u2014fully built out with well architected components, tested and running\u2014would be non-functional to customers who did not know how to operate that type of infrastructure.<\/p>\n In short; cloud capable versus cloud functional.<\/p>\n The way that a cloud infrastructure should be operated is based on the idea of delivering IT services and not the traditional ideas of servers and storage and networks being individually built, configured and connected by people doing physical stuff.\u00a0 Cloud infrastructures are automated and orchestrated to deliver specific functionality aggregated into specific services; fast and efficiently, without the need for people doing \u201cstuff.\u201d\u00a0 In fact, people doing stuff is too slow and just gets in the way and if you don\u2019t change the operations of the systems to reflect that, you end up with a very capable yet non-functional system.<\/p>\n Literally, you have to transform how you operate the system\u2014from a traditional to a cloud infrastructure<\/a>\u2014in lock-step with how that system is materially changed or it will be very much the same sort of difference between me riding my bicycle into town at 12 years old and me driving a candy-apple red Pantera.\u00a0 It\u2019s just dreaming until the required knowledge and experience is obtained\u2026none of which is easy or quick\u2026but tell that to a 12 year old lost in his imagination staring at sparkling red freedom and adventure\u2026<\/p>\n I know what you\u2019re thinking, yet another car analogy, but bear with me, I think you\u2019ll like it\u2026eventually When I was a kid, like around 11 or 12, during the summers I would ride my bike into town to go to the municipal pool to hang out with my friends and basically have fun.\u00a0 On…Read More »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[104,179],"tags":[113,18],"class_list":["post-3345","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cloud-computing","category-featured","tag-automation","tag-cloud"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3345","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3345"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3345\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3345"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3345"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3345"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n<\/img><\/a>
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