Did Batch Scheduling Change Your Life?
I'd like to introduce you to Plato - The Little IPC That Could. Here lies the original machine where AutoSys (now called CA Workload Automation AE) was developed in a short period of 5 months. Talk about agile development! Upon the release in 1991 the IT landscape was forever changed with the introduction of Batch Scheduling (distributed), the ability to schedule recurring jobs. Say what? Let's break that down for those following along at home. A job is a collection of one more processes that run together. A reoccurrence is pretty straightforward, something that happens more than once. Lastly, the schedule. Specific execution criteria defined to the job. Seems pretty straight forward in theory but introduce volume and remove the scheduling aspect and you're swimming in chaos!
Fast forward to 2012 and the market has evolved from Batch Scheduling to IT Workload Automation. Over the past 20 years the demand for this technology has increased dramatically. Just look at the history of AutoSys. The product has been acquired by two different companies since it's inception. With demand comes growth, complexity, and a necessity to automate which brings us to current time.
Is automation the final answer? Are the challenges of managing high volume and massive complexity conquered with a state of the art IT Workload Automation solution? Improved, yes! Conquered, far from it! With efficiency gains comes increased risk. Now more than ever an anlytical, SLA driven approach to understanding performance is paramount. Unless you can stand up and confidently say "all my jobs complete on time every single day", you need analytics to understand how jobs ran in the past, how they are currently running, and how they intend to finish in the future. And most importantly, a clear visual understanding of how these jobs interconnect and the potential downstream impact of how one job running as little as two minutes late can negatively impact multiple SLA's and your business as a whole.
Did Batch Scheduling change your life? Has IT Workload Automation made it Better? We would love to hear your thoughts!
