An explorer in his own space, famous British film director Peter Greenaway once noted the significance of maps and cartography. “A map tells you where you’ve been, where you are and where you’re going,” he noted in fascination, “in a sense, it’s three tenses in one.”
As a pioneer myself (in digital transformation), I couldn’t agree more. In my last blog I shared with you the awesomely ugly truth about how we decentralized operations at Microsoft and the intricacies and nuances we experienced as we adopted the DevOps model.
In talking to many of our customers, I know some of you are just starting out on your own cloud computing journey. So let’s go back in time, to the very beginning, and share what happened the exact moment when our leadership gave the orders to set foot on our Expedition Cloud.
Our IT organization is split into horizontal services (compute, storage, network, security) and vertical Line of Business (LOB) teams that provide solutions to our internal end users (Finance IT, HR IT, etc.). As the horizontal, our job is to ensure that our application teams have the appropriate computing systems and that those assets are tracked for cost and inventory purposes.
When we got the announcement from management to start moving assets to the cloud, we simply did not know where to begin. Our first thought was to grab some “low hanging fruit” by targeting servers going out of service. We took a hard look at our physical and virtual inventory and soon realized that we weren’t even sure what was there.
My team took this opportunity to evaluate our inventory processes and assess how inaccurate our Configuration Management Database (CMDB) was—very! We found systems in datacenters that didn’t have any records. We found records in the CMDB for systems that no longer existed. Cleaning this up became someone’s part-time job (when it really could have been a full-time one).
