If a new stack is to take root in the modern enterprise, then something has to give. Not only must an old infrastructure make room for a new way of work, but the new stack must open itself up to the prospect of interoperability and co-existence with something that, at least in our frame of reference, is no longer new.

The first wave of virtualization involved taking workloads off of unmanageable physical servers, transporting them onto virtual layers, and then pooling the resources beneath those layers to make virtual machines into devices the size of planets. Well, that was Stage One. Stage Two was moving these virtual machines onto a cloud platform layer that was designed for virtualization. Now, Stage Three involves the retooling of software to become purpose-built for virtualization, so that it “lives” in this new environment, not as a refugee, but rather a native.

That puts us in a situation where we find ourselves reconciling the new stack with the old one: the support structures and context of the services we’re devising for continuous deployment and stateless distribution.

The Move Back Home

Software-defined storage firm Nutanix introduced us to a situation we hadn’t quite considered much — a part of the problem of making both of these stages interoperable that honestly has never really been discussed.