Application-centric information technology is putting resources like compute, network and storage in their place. New application architectures like microservices and containers (a virtualized method for running distributed apps) are saying, “Jump,” while infrastructure answers, “How high?” Human infrastructure provisioners can’t keep up. 

The solution is an intelligent, automatic marketplace from which they can pick their own resources, according to Ben Nye (pictured), chief executive officer of Turbonomic Inc. “You’re going to need to think about how to resource those things at a scale that humans can’t possibly manage,” he said.

What about recommendation engines? Can they assist admins in resourcing apps? They can, but what distributed apps at scale really need is automatic resourcing, according to Nye. “Recommendations … are like opinions,” he said. In other words, they still require human time and effort to make the final call. 

Apply analytics and artificial intelligence for IT operations, or AIOps, to available resources produces a system so accurate, it can automatically and reliably select the right resources, Nye explained.

Nye spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Cisco Live event in Barcelona, Spain. They discussed automated resourcing for distributed apps in multicloud. (* Disclosure below.)

Microservices apps to infra: ‘Jump.’ Workload automation: ‘How high?’

Turbonomic uses the principles of economics to manage and allocate resources. Those who study markets are familiar with supply and demand — this is how apps pick from a number of available resources in different environments with AIOps. The workload picks the resources on which it need to run.

An abstraction in Turbonomic’s workload automation for hybrid cloud sees various vendors’ products as a vast resource pool.

To a workload, all the flavors of storage just looks like input/output, input/output operations per second, and disk, so they can trade them. They choose based on demand for that resource. “That’s how markets work; we have to have a common currency,” Nye stated. 

This selection supply-and-demand model ensures performance and manages cost. It exploits the price elasticity of cloud, which many cloud newbies are ill-educated about, according to Nye. In fact, many wind up in over their heads budget-wise for this reason. 

Cisco Systems Inc. sells Turbonomic under the product name Cisco Workload Optimization Manager to deliver automatic IT.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Cisco Live event. (* Disclosure: Turbonomic Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Turbonomic nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE