Iterating on IT Service

To quote Yogi Berra, "it's déjà vu all over again." I could not shake that feeling after reading an article entitled "Providing a CMDBf Query and Registration Service" that appeared in the Eclipse Wiki on the COSMOS project page. Eclipse is an open source community and COSMOS (Community-driven Systems Management in Open Source) is an Eclipse incubator group for building open source systems management tools. (A number of CA developers contribute code to COSMOS.) The Wiki article includes an open source implementation of the CMDBf Query and Registration services. I believe this implementation will go a long way toward promoting the adoption of the new CMDBf specification for federating CMDBs.

Quicker than you can say "disco ball," I was transported back to the eighties, working with one of the most successful standards I have ever worked with: SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol). The IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) published the RFCs (Request For Comment) for SNMPv1 in 1988. Around that time, I was consulting at a large aero-space corporation, writing network management software. Of course, RFC 1065, RFC 1066, and RFC 1067  became hot topics soon after they came out and the "yellow book"--Marshall Rose's The Simple Book: Introduction to Network Management--showed up in every cubical. The best part of SNMP was the sample implementation documented for reference that was available over something new: the Internet. I don't remember who wrote it, but I do remember FTPing the sample code down to my work station, poring over it, compiling it, and finally writing it into the tools I was working on.

Without that reference implementation, SNMP probably would not have made it into our tools. We were under no compulsion to follow any particular standard. We were more worried about SNA than TCP/IP at that time anyway. But SNMP was not only simple, it was easy to implement by following the lead of the sample implementation. If it had not been so easy, we probably could not have justified including it in our tools.

I see a lot of similarity between SNMP twenty years ago and the CMDBf spec today. The CMDBf is a great idea, but no one is holding a gun to anyone's head about implementing it. The success of the spec depends on the bang for the buck. The vendors in the consortium have already put money and IP on the table by writing the spec. It's in their interest to implement it. But the rest of the community has to make up their minds based on the return on their investment.

The return is there. I don't think anyone questions that configuration item (CI) management data must be federated, and that vendor-neutral federation makes tremendous sense. The problem is on the investment side. Until there is a critical mass of implementations working together, there won't be much return on any single implementation of the CMDBf services.

Just like the SNMP reference implementation, an open sample CMDBf implementation reduces the investment required to implement CMDBf services, smoothing the way for acceptance.