Alexander Ljungström, Strategic Advisor at Einar & Partners – was recently featured in the new “IT Experience Podcast” from ServiceNow. In the episode, Alexander discusses the role of modern architecture and how it shapes the CMDB. Topics such as DevOps, tags and containers is getting more and more relevant when building a data-layer for the modern enterprise.
Together with Usman Sindu, product director for ITOM at ServiceNow, Alexander gives some insight into the European market for AIOps and ITOM.
Modern architecture on the rise?
What do we mean when we say modern architecture when it comes to the IT- and IT-infrastructure landscape? To understand in what direction a modern architecture is heading we have to first look at what a traditional infrastructure is.
Back in the day, during the times a lot of us, now working in IT there were mainframes, for example AS400 servers. They were the backbone of modern civilization in those times and their legacy still lives today in “long forgotten” closets at banks and insurance companies. After that we progressed on to the now ubiquitous Linux and Windows environments, where we had dedicated physical machines which eventually evolved into virtualized environments hosting multiple machines on one physical device. Along with that the traditional infrastructure evolved on the network side to become ever more advanced to keep up with the advances in servers. Today we are more and more looking at moving away from owning our own data centres and instead relocating servers to different cloud environments, all thanks to the advances previously made in hardware and software.
But this is still all what could be defined as traditional as cloud computing is what we would call “someone elses data centre”.
The modern IT-landscape is more and more moving into an IT-architecture that’s infrastructure as code, and dev-ops driven. What does this mean then? While we previously had to spin up say a Windows or linux server and then install everything from scratch we can instead today, by using infrastructure as code, simply use existing images and provision them through code that we push to for example AWS, Azure, Googel Cloud, etc. while the the development department is dealing more and more with containerized environments and simply working in a development pipeline of dev-test-prod. All of this is influences how we approach the CMDB in the in the modern IT-landscape.
What companies do we see taking the first steps towards this change, where are the late adopters and what impact will this have on the CMDB as we view it today? Listen to the podcast and hear the thoughts of Alexander on the matter.
Check Out: ServiceNow ITOM Trends 2023
Who are we?
Einar and Partners is a small but highly specialized company focused on the area of ITOM, IT Operations Management, where we provide advisory and guidance in how organizations are to implement solutions in that area. If you have any questions about ITOM, don’t hesitate to contact us at ping@einar.partners and we will get back to you as soon as possible. Are you interested in the philosophy behind a modern CMDB? Then contact Alexander Ljungström directly on alexander@einar.partners.
