Foreword

Automators – the future kingmakers

Scale.

The future is always about scale—bigger, faster, and stronger.

As we sit here in a time when, once again, both application and infrastructure architectures are shifting, a trend emerges, and this time it is automation. IT has always been about building bigger; something I continually talk to customers about is how they need to look backwards to look forwards. Look at what you were doing 5 years ago in IT; it is very different from now. Now, you are doing more: managing more machines, supporting more applications, embracing more technologies, developing more business models, and simply put—more. Look 5 years ahead from now and there is even more.

However, you only have one pair of hands. So the answer is automation. Each growth phase in architecture drives you to abstract yourself up one layer and find ways of simplifying to stay ahead. Skills that used to be valuable, such as racking servers and plugging them in (where I started!), become commoditized. Now, building and managing individual VMs is also becoming an activity that is undifferentiated as architectures move to microservices and scale-out decoupled layers instead of the classic tightly coupled stacks.

The future kingmakers are those who can build those layers, automate them to within an inch of their lives and communicate through APIs.

The future belongs to those that can say to applications' teams, "I've got an API for that."

As someone who has picked up this book, you have already realized that, and are taking the right steps and are building your own future.

Enjoy.

Joe Baguley

VP & Chief Technology Officer

VMware EMEA