Promise Theory for Dummies

“Software Defined” seems to be the new buzzword in IT in 2012.  Software Defined Networks (SDN) and Software Defined Data-centers (SDD) have dominated most of the 2012 discussion.  Over the past few years it has been Infrastructure as Code (IAC) with products like CFengine, Puppet and Chef dominating most of the IT management conversation.  The interesting thing is that Mark Burgess presented these concepts at CERN over 20 years ago. It took almost 10 years for the IT industry to catch on to this idea and another 10 for it to become what we call today a “hot” idea.  Almost eight years ago Mark Burgess presented us with another interesting idea called “Promise Theory”, where he discussed the ideas of autonomous cooperative models to control complex IT management.   It is this author’s firm belief that as IT complexity and scale continue to grow at an exponential rate over the next 5 years it is inevitable that we will be practicing the ideas of “Promise Theory”.  Join me in an overview of “Promise Theory” and a discussion of it’s future impact on IT management.