1 / 11

Managing Complex Systems A Call to Arms! (and a Plea ...)

Managing Complex Systems A Call to Arms! (and a Plea ...). Jacques Sauvé - UFCG LANOMS 2007. The Problem (1). IT-based systems are becoming extremely complex Extreme distribution Hundreds of thousands of nodes Extreme heterogeneity Every system is “one-off”

anatola
Download Presentation

Managing Complex Systems A Call to Arms! (and a Plea ...)

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. Managing Complex SystemsA Call to Arms! (and a Plea ...) Jacques Sauvé - UFCG LANOMS 2007

  2. The Problem (1) • IT-based systems are becoming extremely complex • Extreme distribution • Hundreds of thousands of nodes • Extreme heterogeneity • Every system is “one-off” • Extreme rate of technology change • Your system isn’t client-server? (1980s-1990s) • Your system isn’t Web-based? (1990s-2000s) • Your system isn’t SOA-based? (2000s-?) • Your aren’t yet into Web 2.0? (2000s-?) • Your aren’t using mashups? (2000s-?)

  3. The Problem (2) • Managing these systems is becoming extremely complex • After decades, we still haven’t solved basic configuration management • We can’t even agree on basic metrics • Ex. How do you define/measure “availability”? • Management maturity evolves (ex. ITSM) but the business wants more (governance, lower risk, ...) • Wow! You’re not using ITIL? • Wow! You’re not using COBIT? • Wow! You’re not handling SOX compliance? • We don’t know how to measure risk, calculate Return On Investment (ROI), choose SLOs, ...

  4. The Problem (3) • We have a huge system (IT) supporting another huge system (a business) and someone comes along saying... • Align one with the other! • Couple them (oh no!) to give IT “visibility” into the business • Manage them autonomically ... • We don’t know how to do this ...

  5. Why? A Message ... • We can build complex systems but we don’t understand them! • How do usersbehave? • How do systems fail? • What is theemergentbehaviorofcomplex systems?

  6. About methodology (1) • We work too much like engineers (build) and not enough like scientists (observe) • Scientists observe nature; they let nature talk to them • We should observe our systems to learn • How do they run? • How do they break? • What emergent behavior do they have? • How does one (IT) affect the other (business)?

  7. About methodology (2) • Usingoursubjective, finger-in-the-air approach won’tyieldinsight • Insight comes aftersurprise • Surprise comes fromobservationnot design • Weshould build modelslater, afterwehaveobserved • Roentgen: “I didn’tthink, I experimented.” • Wedon’tevenagreeonmetricsyet • We can't even baseline well • Because IT services and infrastructure change too fast

  8. A Call to Arms! • Let us do more Experimental Computer Science using a scientific observation-based methodology to gain insight • Who better than us, the “monitoring people”? • This is somewhat of a break from tradition • Tradition can hinder discovery • Some can stick to tradition but some must seek new ways

  9. A Plea • Make Experimental Computer Science glamorous • Today, it is (wrongly) ignored • You have to be a builder to be glamorous • Add this to the conference Call For Papers • Let’s train our students better • Let’s share data! • Providers: make real data on huge systems available • Must we keep working on toy scenarios? • What insights will we get?

  10. What are the incentives? • Surely, with time, wewillgainnewinsightsandmakeclearercontributions • Surely, with time, wewill come to trustthe systems we build

  11. Thank you.

More Related