How ‘systems thinking’ is making the cloud transparent

http://ow.ly/buGDE

An article by James Urquhart posted on the gigaom.com website.

This article examines "systems thinking" and discusses how it is impacting the use of cloud computing.

The article defines "systems thinking", and states "Defined in Wikipedia as “the process of understanding how things influence one another within a whole,” systems thinking represents a modeling, analysis and design discipline that carefully explores “macro” aspects of highly interdependent systems. Systems thinking is heavily utilized in such fields as the social sciences, organizational dynamics, and industrial engineering to evaluate, model, and/or design how systems are composed and how they behave.

Systems thinking is difficult for those that have been educated to always apply reductionist thinking to problem solving. The idea in systems thinking is not to drill down to a root cause or a fundamental principle, but instead to continuously expand your knowledge about the system as a whole."

The article puts forth certain questions that must be raised in connection with the use of cloud computing systems, "What are the system’s boundaries? When everything is so highly interdependent (economies are linked to governments are linked to societies are linked to individual people, etc), how do you know where to start modeling, and where to stop?"

The article further points out, "Understanding where the boundaries of source code and data models lie is relatively straightforward, but understanding the boundaries of operations — monitoring, compliance, decision making, liability and so on in cloud-based applications — is not so straightforward."

The author further writes, "All of this leads me to what I think is the key conclusion that has to be reached about the future architecture of our shared cloud computing “system”: transparency is essential. Without a steady stream of feedback data from whatever sources we determine — over time — have a significant impact on the operation of our applications, we are doomed to be unable to properly find the right “boundaries” for those applications.

Information about the functioning state of infrastructure (like compute nodes and networks), services (like data stores and platform services) or even other applications (like SaaS or your partners’ applications) will be critical to evolving the automation that successfully enables resiliency."