Is HCI and ops automation really threatening your job?

Reg reader survey The march of automation is unavoidable. This is as true in IT as it is in any other profession. From a jobs perspective, some people will win and some will lose. Either way, things will often get shaken up and the status quo threatened.

A useful proxy for automation in general in an IT operations context is ‘hperconverged infrastructure’ (HCI). It’s a tangible example of what some refer to as the ‘software defined datacentre’ (SDDC). The idea is to delegate many of the aspects of hardware provisioning, configuration, and ongoing operation to clever software that takes care of everything to do with devices and other aspects of physical infrastructure. This allows you to manage at the level of virtual resource pools, with compute and storage capacity served up as needed in a flexible and scalable way.

If this sounds a bit like a cloud, it’s no coincidence. The principle of hiding infrastructure complexity behind an automation layer to simplify service delivery and management is the same. Indeed, some in the industry are now using the terms HCI, SDDC and cloud interchangeably.

So how is life in IT affected when you throw this kind of technology into the mix? Will operations jobs be under threat, or is it more that the nature of traditional roles will change?

Tell us what you think in our latest reader survey.