I recently read some material on VCF 9.0, and it discussed how one of the major improvements of VCF 9.0 was that it created a single UI and thus a single control plane.
As a control and management plane architect, I found those discussions and proposals infuriating. The idea that the problem with an extensive, complex system’s operation was just about providing more convenient dials and knobs struck me as absurd.
I could not figure out why PMs, GMs, and vendors pushed this approach until I met a set of customers.
As a software engineer, the control plane is the thing that reads from a database and updates the datapath. The part that updates the database, reads from it, and returns information to the user is the management plane.
But when I spoke to the product operators while an architect at VMware, customers said the control plane was the UI.
At first, I found that odd, but then upon deeper reflection, I realized that they were right from their point of view. They saw themselves as the control plane, controlling the system.
The database was in their heads, and they used the UI to configure the system.
That -aha- was profound because it highlights the foundational tension in IT and infrastructure: where is the boundary between the human control plane/computer control plane?
My observation was that the more you can push to the computer, the more robust and reliable your infrastructure is. You can do more, react faster, and provide better reliability if the computer is in control.
Building a UI improves human productivity if you believe the gating productivity factor is the human. If you believe that the system is optimal and that the only path forward is to improve human productivity, improving the UI is the right answer.
I find the idea that we have the optimal infrastructure architecture absurd.
Saying to your business partner, “This is wrong!” And then they ask you – “So what do we do?” And you answering, “I dunno.” And then demanding nothing be done is absurd. In the absence of any other option, you do what is ridiculous. You optimize what you can. Fixing the UIs was the best answer, because the other answers weren’t that much better.
For years, I didn’t know how to build the right control plane that eliminated UI workflows relying on a human to be the control plane. And like most things, the answer stared me in the face.
It’s so absurdly obvious, it hurts to say it: to build an automated control plane, the control plane must be able to control and configure an entity fully, AND when the entity cannot be controlled by the control plane, it must stop within a guaranteed, bounded time frame.
Because for non-Nutanix customers, such a control plane doesn’t exist, and manual steps are necessary to handle the AND clause, it is fair to say that a single UI is an essential step to improve productivity. But it is an incremental step. A tiny, incremental step.
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