Shulou(Shulou.com)06/02 Report--

Picture: from Zoommy

Recently, I talked with a venture capitalist about the trade war between China and the United States. He was very pessimistic about the future, but I was dismissive of it.

In his eyes, the United States has listed China as a competitor, and the former eldest brother has assumed the posture of "if you don't die, you will never stop". No matter how you compromise, please, or even kneel down, I am afraid that the eldest brother will never stop. Therefore, Zeng's younger brother can only reluctantly return the posture of "if you work hard, accompany you to the end." Try not to deal with the vital Sino-US economic relationship without wayward and impulsive behavior.

At the end of the party, he said: "but only in this economic context can we tell the authenticity of corporate value. after all, when the economic tide recedes, we will know who is swimming naked. Do you see how many Internet companies that are shouting 'Huawei wolf culture' are still alive today? On the contrary, it is those timid and cautious' turtle-like traditional enterprises', although the tight cost control has limited the development of the Internet architecture, but they are basically still alive. "

However, in my opinion, in the cold winter, even if traditional enterprises have hoarded enough food and resources, in the eyes of many technological men, it is still a dream to go to Internet enterprises, and traditional enterprises seem to have long been spurned by history. Who cares if it's dead or alive?

What will happen to IT in traditional enterprises?

In traditional enterprises, there is not much relationship between general system applications, which can be divided vertically according to business functions. Unicom or interaction is solved by relational database, and connecting multiple databases at the same time is nothing more than a few more connection pools.

When faced with the implementation of business requirements, there are usually two ways to respond:

First, if you want to add a new function to the original application, or expand a function, it is nothing more than slowly developing a smaller system into a larger system, which is suitable for less demands. and the iterative speed is not required.

Second, start a new stove, overthrow the original system, and redesign and develop according to the new needs.

Figure 1. Traditional IOE architecture

As the saying goes, what kind of soil is suitable for planting what kind of plants, after talking about the technical perspective, let's talk about the perspective of corporate culture.

In traditional enterprises, we often hear the argument that "technology is not important, don't put too much emphasis on it". It seems that the main goal of industry IT is to develop and support business application systems, no matter what technology is used, as long as it is reliable, safe and "mature", and can do the application system functions according to the requirements of the business department.

What technological innovation, what high scalability, the scenario that can be solved by adding machines is not a problem. It doesn't matter whether it's JAVA or Craft, or whatever else, it's a good job to deliver goods on time and go online without any problems.

For example, in the financial industry under strong regulatory control, no matter what bullshit technology is used, regulation puts forward a new requirement, whether you use outsourcing or self-research, everything will be fine.

For example, if the boss of your technical team is very technical and wants to develop a set of message middleware independently, the team must first want to do it from the bottom of his heart. but the premise is that it can only be done without affecting the progress of business-oriented projects, giving full play to "subjective initiative", spontaneously working overtime, or hiding at home as a part-time interest. Because in the eyes of senior executives, the proportion of technical resources is calculated according to the corresponding business functions, assuming that system A requires five R & D and one test according to industry standards, and the operation and maintenance work can be shared. You said you want to add two people to do something that has nothing to do with the business? I'm sorry, I don't understand, and second, I don't understand. third, please come up with the value chain-oriented formula and use the logical relationship that non-technical people can understand to understand the interest relationship between input and return.

In my opinion, in most traditional enterprises, the executives who make the final decisions are not only born in the front desk business, but also have never experienced the baptism of Internet culture, and their understanding of technology and technology only stays at the instrumental level. How do you understand this sentence? For example, A salespeople can bring 1000W profits to the company every year, while B salespeople can only bring 800W profits to the company every year, then A salespeople are bound to receive more spiritual recognition and material rewards, this logic is easy to understand. But if executives want to understand the secrets of a set of messaging middleware, coupled with the fact that IT people are naturally clumsy, they naturally don't understand why they need to invest in resources that don't pay off.

In my opinion, the IT characteristics of traditional enterprises can be summarized as follows:

What is the real reason for the abandonment of traditional architecture?

In the eyes of many people, "high cost of resources" and "difficulty in recruiting talents" are the two most fundamental reasons for the abandonment of the traditional structure. I think this view is one-sided and not objective.

First of all, let's talk about the "high cost of resources". Some people criticize commercial software such as Oracle and WebLogic, which is not only expensive in License, but also must run on expensive hardware resources (such as minicomputers). Using MySQL is not only free, but also on the cloud, which is both cheap and affordable.

Take the Oracle10g that I once worked in an e-commerce company as an example, the expenses can generally be divided into the following five parts:

Purchase Oracle License

Purchase Oracle third-party servic

Hire a database administrator

Database server hardware

I remember having roughly taken into account that the annual cost input was about 2 million. If you switch to MySQL, apart from License can save some money, the rest may not save much. But some people will still say angrily that Oracle cannot go to the cloud, MySQL can go to the cloud, and the cost of going to the cloud is much cheaper than that of private IDC. Why don't you count this part?

Take my current company as an example, we have roughly calculated the cost in order to launch the cloud. If it is a public cloud, it can indeed save a lot of costs, but for financial and other strong regulatory areas, it is not feasible from the policy dimension. If it is a private cloud, the cost of hardware alone will be more than 20% higher than that of the traditional computer room. In addition, if you buy some PaaS services and press a calculator, you will also murmur.

Let's talk about "the difficulty of recruiting talents". Some people criticize that there are only a handful of engineers who know business software such as Oracle and WebLogic, and that these technologies have long been thrown into the rubbish heap of history. Just take a look at your resume, which is full of keywords like Redis, MySQL and MQ, either proficient or familiar.

There is a phenomenon called, "the direction of technology selection of enterprises does not come from the superiority of the technology itself, but usually from the emotional hobbies of the people in charge of the technology."

In today's post-90s era, there are many technical managers or directors. From the day he entered the technology circle, his mind has been filled with the classic passage of "so-and-so treasure cloud service, so-and-so goes to IOE". Let's not judge whether this dogma is right or wrong, at least it is objective, and it affects people's consciousness and judgment. Therefore, as long as you write the keywords Redis, MySQL and MQ on your resume, you will get more interview opportunities, and as long as you have more experience in the technical principles and scenarios of Redis, MySQL and MQ, you will get better opportunities for promotion and raise.

Why do traditional enterprises also come to engage in Internet architecture?

Some people say that if you say so, traditional enterprises should honestly engage in IOE. But there is a strange question: why are banks and manufacturing alike holding up the banner of the Internet architecture and waving flags and shouting to arch inside?

There is no denying that the traditional architecture has some disadvantages, which can not meet the business evolution needs of traditional enterprises.

For example, engineering efficiency, the business suites of many enterprises often take a long time to launch new business with the efficient development of demand, but the current business starts the rhythm of "quick trial and error, fast iteration". It is impossible to re-launch the whole process and do it all over again after it is launched.

For example, due to the lack of flexibility, many traditional enterprises adopt a budget system in the input of IT resources, that is, at the beginning of the year, they have determined the number of users they support, how much they want, and how many people count them. With the rapid development of the business, or even when the business is declining, the traditional architecture, whether the expansion or reduction of hardware or the License of software, can not be quickly controlled and decreased (for example, Oracle License is paid annually. For example, cloud nodes are charged according to the usage time, the capacity is expanded during peak hours, and the capacity can be scaled back during low peak hours.

For example, in the technological atmosphere, traditional enterprises, like Internet enterprises, all hope to attract excellent engineers, but also hope to be led and led by head engineers. in this way, it can drive the whole team to carry out the collision of new ideas, new technologies and new ideas across industries and from other places, so as to avoid that ideas and culture are always in a closed environment, which is not only conducive to the stability of the team. It is also more conducive to technological inheritance, and Haoyi can also come up with some technical achievements to show at a certain technical conference to meet the spiritual demands of everyone.

Summary and thinking

Whether this is the trend of history or the direction of the hearts of the people, although the degree of popularity does not represent the degree of suitability, it is an indisputable fact that the traditional structure is gradually dying out in the waves of this wave.

However, any technology exists for business services, and any technical solution that is separated from the business is just a means of hooliganism. Although Internet architecture in traditional enterprises sometimes feels lonely, afraid, and not recognized, an excellent technology leader should be a compound figure with optimism, positive attitude and self-discipline, when he sees opportunities for innovation. I will think of using the combination of new technology and traditional business to create more effective value.

Who stipulates that enterprises engaged in traditional business cannot use the most cutting-edge and interesting technology? Who rules that traditional enterprises can't attract good engineers?

The matter is man-made, not in conflict.

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