A few months ago, Dean Nelson, who for many years ran the eBay data center strategy shared his vision of Infrastructure Masons ( http://www.infrastructuremasons.org ) with me and asked us if we were interested in participating. He invited us to attend the very first Infrastructure Masons Leadership Summit which is being held November 16th at Google HQ in Sunnyvale, CA. We were honored and are looking forward to it.
In short, the Infrastructure Masons organization is comprised of technologists, executives and partners entrusted with building and managing the physical and logical structures of the Digital Age. They are dedicated to the advancement of the industry, development of their fellow masons, and empowering business and personal use of infrastructure to better the economy, the environment, and society.
During our conversation, like water, electricity, or transportation, Dean explained his belief is the majority of internet users expect instant connectivity to their online services without much awareness of the complexity and scale of the physical infrastructure that makes those services possible (I try to explain this to my children and they don’t care) and is taken for granted. Dean wants people and organizations that enable connectivity to receive more recognition for their contributions, share their ideas, collaborate and advance infrastructure technology to the next level. With leaders from FaceBook, Google and Microsoft (RackN too!) participating, he has the right players at the table who are committed to help deliver on his vision.
Managing multiple clouds, data centers, services, vendors and operational models should not be an impediment to progress for CIOs, CTO’s, cloud operators and IT administrators but an advantage. The overwhelming complexity in melding networking, containers and security should be simple and necessary. In the software-defined infrastructure, utility-based computing needs to be just like turning on a light or running a water faucet. RackN believes the ongoing lifecycle of automating, provisioning and managing hybrid clouds and data center infrastructure together under one operational control plane is possible. At RackN, we work hard to make that vision a reality.
Looking forward into the future, we share Dean’s vision and look forward to helping drive the Infrastructure Masons mission.
Want to hear more? Read an open ops take by RackN CEO, Rob Hirschfeld.
Author: Dan Choquette, Co-Founder/COO of RackN
Jan Wiersma is also partner of iMasons.