- 3. Februar 2016
- Posted by: Uzuner Solutions
- Category: Allgemein
It was Bill Clerico who came up with the comparison of IT system landscapes with an Italian dish.
(Bill Clerico from New York, who works for IBM – not to be confused with the other Bill Clerico, who works for WePay in California! But they often get confused and keep in lively contact with each other via Twitter, for example about the block of ice that WePay dropped in front of the Moscone Center 6 years ago before the PayPal Conference:
@billclerico @WePay https://t.co/pwhVdPEwri
— Bill Clerico (@bclerico) December 15, 2015
@billclerico@WePay Fond memories of the early days. The video still cracks me up! #DareToBeDifferent — Bill Clerico (@bclerico) December 15, 2015
… but that’s a completely different story.)
Right from the beginning, I have found the comparison plausible. In the worst-case scenario, it is a big mess to take out a spaghetto from a bowl of pasta mixed with sauce. The same holds true for moving a system that has thousands of interfaces and dependencies with the rest of the landscape. We should steer well clear from this and focus our attention to the meatballs instead.
In a webinar about „critical questions you need to answer before migrating to the Cloud“ in November 2015, Bill made the following comparison:
“The things that are easily relocatable are in fact the meatballs. They’re well-defined, they stand on their own, easy to access, you can get ahold of them easily and because of that you can easily relocate them or move them around to a different bowl of pasta, you can make a sandwich out of them, you could even throw them into a soup because they’re easy to access and easy to move around. The spaghetti in the bowl, that’s a whole different story. With some work and careful oversight that spaghetti can be moved, but I’m going to tell you it’s going to be messy and it will probably never make for a good sandwich.
Workloads that have meatball characteristics are good cloud candidates because even in the worst-case scenario they can easily be moved back to their original location.
Also, application complexity does not necessarily represent what I’d call an anti-meatball pattern. One could easily argue that an SAP application portfolio is complex, which in fact I believe to be true. However because SAP is a well-understood application and has well-defined application boundaries it has actually a pretty high meatball index, not to overplay this too much.
Meaning it’s actually relatively straightforward to move to a cloud-based hosting model and lots of vendors, IBM is one of them, has a lot of experience doing this so we really have an understanding of what that workload works like. The other end of the spectrum are the applications that have a lot of point-to-point integrations and mysterious application dependencies, and by mysterious I mean they’re either completely unknown or they’re just too difficult to unravel or figure out. There still might be some value in moving those applications or even just parts of them to the cloud, but the effort is going to be much greater than that of a meatball-like app.
So one of the things I spend quite a bit of time on with clients is helping them understand their meatball and spaghetti index and formulate a strategy for cloud adoption that delivers business value at every step of the way.”
Now I am wondering: Where do all the spaghetti come from? Would it not be better to make sure that you implement meatballs?
Because at some point, you also have to deal with the spaghetti…