Manageability refers to how easily a technology deployment can be operated, maintained, updated, and decommissioned over its lifetime. The architecture choices made at rollout directly determine the long-term cost and complexity of ongoing management.
Manageability in Technology
When you roll out new technology, there's at least some element of management that happens after you roll it out. Well, there's a cost to this, and that cost can actually be quite high. So we want to make sure when we roll things out that we're rolling them out in a manageable way.
Here we have Susan, and Susan is connecting to a web server. So she's going to make a request of the web server, and she's going to get information that is not free. There's connection costs from your ISP that you need to have. It takes power to power the server. There's cooling. It takes up space, and so we need to rent space or we need to buy space. There's hardware that's involved in here to set up these servers. There's software that we install, and a lot of times that software has licensing involved.
We need to create it. There's an amount of creation that we have to do to go and create this, energy I have to put into it, and my time has a certain value to it. I have to maintain those servers, so I've got to go and do patching on it, and I have to make sure that they're up to date, that they're doing backups on them. And then I maybe have to decommission it at some point in time.
A lot of times we account for the cost of connection, power, cooling, space, hardware, software. Those are a little bit more tangible and we can calculate those, and so we have an actual dollar amount. But what often we don't see, and often fail to calculate, is how much time is it going to take to create those? How much maintenance is going to go into those? How much is backup going to cost? How much is it going to cost to decommission?
And a lot of times if we do calculate it, it's so nominal that a lot of times we say, well, it doesn't really take much time to maintain that server. And that's probably true, it probably doesn't. But when you're talking about hundreds or thousands of servers that certain companies have, there is a cost to it, it does cost money. And the more resources you have, the more complicated some of the maintenance of all of this is.
Cost comes in the form of time that you spend doing this, or actual dollar amounts that you are spending on this. Ultimately, you can calculate this all to dollars, how much dollars you're spending on maintaining it.
Well, when we roll out new technologies, we need to think about the maintenance and what the maintenance is going to cost us. We call that manageability. How easy is it to manage it? And there are some ways that we can architect things that are very easy to manage, and then there are ways that we can architect things that are very difficult to manage. And so how we architect things really is going to determine how easy is it to manage in the future.
So manageability is the ease of deployment, the ease of management, the ease of updating it, the ease of recovery, or anything that really just goes into how we manage this. How much time and resources are we spending in managing these devices and these services and these different products?
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