Category Archives: People/Dell

2017 SRE & DevOps Influencers

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Seems fitting to start 2018 by finally posting this list I started in May while working on my DevOpsDays “SRE vs DevOps” presentation, I pulled an SRE and DevOps reading list from some of my favorite authors.  I quickly realized that the actual influencer list needed to be expanded some – additional and suggestions welcome.  A list like this is never complete.

Offered WITHOUT ordering… I’m sorry if I missed someone!  I’ll make it up by podcasting with them!

SRE & DevOps Focused

Developer, Open Source & Social Connectors

Completely non-technical, but have to shout out to my hard working author friends Heidi Joy Treadway @heiditretheway and Jennifer Willis @jenwillis.

Hey Dockercon, let’s get Physical!

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IMG_20170419_121918Overall, Dockercon did a good job connecting Docker users with information.  In some ways, it was a very “let’s get down to business” conference without the open source collaboration feel of previous events.  For enterprise customers and partners, that may be a welcome change.

Unlike past Dockercons, the event did not have major announcements or a lot of non-Docker ecosystem buzz.  That said, I miss that the event did not have major announcements or a lot of non-Docker ecosystem buzz.

One item that got me excited was an immutable operating system called LinuxKit which is powered by a Packer-like utility called Moby (ok, I know it does more but that’s still fuzzy to me).

RackN CTO, Greg Althaus, was able to turn around a working LinuxKit Kubernetes demo (VIDEO) overnight.  This short video explains Moby & LinuxKit plus uses the new Digital Rebar Provision in an amazing integration.

Want to hear more about immutable operating systems?  Check out our post on RackN’s site about three challenges of running things like LinuxKit, CoreOS Container Linux and RancherOS on metal.

Oh, and YES, that was my 15-year-old daughter giving a presentation at Dockercon about workplace diversity.  I’ll link the video when they’ve posted them.

https://www.slideshare.net/KateHirschfeld/slideshelf

Infrastructure Masons is building a community around data center practice

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IT is subject to seismic shifts right now. Here’s how we cope together.

For a long time, I’ve advocated for open operations (“OpenOps”) as a way to share best practices about running data centers. I’ve worked hard in OpenStack and, recently, Kubernetes communities to have operators collaborate around common architectures and automation tools. I believe the first step in these efforts starts with forming a community forum.

I’m very excited to have the RackN team and technology be part of the newly formed Infrastructure Masons effort because we are taking this exact community first approach.

infrastructure_masons

Here’s how Dean Nelson, IM organizer and head of Uber Compute, describes the initiative:

An Infrastructure Mason Partner is a professional who develop products, build or support infrastructure projects, or operate infrastructure on behalf of end users. Like their end users peers, they are dedicated to the advancement of the Industry, development of their fellow masons, and empowering business and personal use of the infrastructure to better the economy, the environment, and society.

We’re in the midst of tremendous movement in IT infrastructure.  The change to highly automated and scale-out design was enabled by cloud but is not cloud specific.  This requirement is reshaping how IT is practiced at the most fundamental levels.

We (IT Ops) are feeling amazing pressure on operations and operators to accelerate workflow processes and innovate around very complex challenges.

Open operations loses if we respond by creating thousands of isolated silos or moving everything to a vendor specific island like AWS.  The right answer is to fund ways to share practices and tooling that is tolerant of real operational complexity and the legitimate needs for heterogeneity.

Interested in more?  Get involved with the group!  I’ll be sharing more details here too.

 

Problems with the “Give me a Wookiee” hybrid API

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Greg Althaus, RackN CTO, creates amazing hybrid DevOps orchestration that spans metal and cloud implementations.  When it comes to knowing the nooks and crannies of data centers, his ops scar tissue has scar tissue.  So, I knew you’d all enjoy this funny story he wrote after previewing my OpenStack API report.  

“APIs are only valuable if the parameters mean the same thing and you get back what you expect.” Greg Althaus

The following is a guest post by Greg:

While building the Digital Rebar OpenStack node provider, Rob Hirschfeld tried to integrate with 7+ OpenStack clouds.  While the APIs matched across instances, there are all sorts of challenges with what comes out of the API calls.  

The discovery made me realize that APIs are not the end of interoperability.  They are the beginning.  

I found I could best describe it with a story.

I found an API on a service and that API creates a Wookiee!

I can tell the API that I want a tall or short Wookiee or young or old Wookiee.  I test against the Kashyyyk service.  I consistently get a 8ft Brown 300 year old Wookiee when I ask for a Tall Old Wookiee.  

I get a 6ft Brown 50 Year old Wookiee when I ask for a Short Young Wookiee.  Exactly what I want, all the time.  

My pointy-haired emperor boss says I need to now use the Forest Moon of Endor (FME) Service.  He was told it is the exact same thing but cheaper.  Okay, let’s do this.  It consistently gives me 5 year old 4 ft tall Brown Ewok (called a Wookiee) when I ask for the Tall Young Wookiee.  

This is a fail.  I mean, yes, they are both furry and brown, but the Ewok can’t reach the top of my bookshelf.  

The next service has to work, right?  About the same price as FME, the Tatooine Service claims to be really good too.  It passes tests.  It hands out things called Wookiees.  The only problem is that, while size is an API field, the service requires the use of petite and big instead of short and tall.  This is just annoying.  This time my tall (well big) young Wookiee is 8 ft tall and 50 years old, but it is green and bald (scales are like that).  

I don’t really know what it is.  I’m sure it isn’t a Wookiee.  

And while she is awesome (better than the male Wookiees), she almost froze to death in the arctic tundra that is Boston.  

My point: APIs are only valuable if the parameters mean the same thing and you get back what you expect.

 

We need DevOps without Borders! Is that “Hybrid DevOps?”

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The RackN team has been working on making DevOps more portable for over five years.  Portable between vendors, sites, tools and operating systems means that our automation needs be to hybrid in multiple dimensions by design.

Why drive for hybrid?  It’s about giving users control.

launch!I believe that application should drive the infrastructure, not the reverse.  I’ve heard may times that the “infrastructure should be invisible to the user.”  Unfortunately, lack of abstraction and composibility make it difficult to code across platforms.  I like the term “fidelity gap” to describe the cost of these differences.

What keeps DevOps from going hybrid?  Shortcuts related to platform entangled configuration management.

Everyone wants to get stuff done quickly; however, we make the same hard-coded ops choices over and over again.  Big bang configuration automation that embeds sequence assumptions into the script is not just technical debt, it’s fragile and difficult to upgrade or maintain.  The problem is not configuration management (that’s a critical component!), it’s the lack of system level tooling that forces us to overload the configuration tools.

What is system level tooling?  It’s integrating automation that expands beyond configuration into managing sequence (aka orchestration), service orientation, script modularity (aka composibility) and multi-platform abstraction (aka hybrid).

My ops automation experience says that these four factors must be solved together because they are interconnected.

What would a platform that embraced all these ideas look like?  Here is what we’ve been working towards with Digital Rebar at RackN:

Mono-Infrastructure IT “Hybrid DevOps”
Locked into a single platform Portable between sites and infrastructures with layered ops abstractions.
Limited interop between tools Adaptive to mix and match best-for-job tools.  Use the right scripting for the job at hand and never force migrate working automation.
Ad hoc security based on site specifics Secure using repeatable automated processes.  We fail at security when things get too complex change and adapt.
Difficult to reuse ops tools Composable Modules enable Ops Pipelines.  We have to be able to interchange parts of our deployments for collaboration and upgrades.
Fragile Configuration Management Service Oriented simplifies API integration.  The number of APIs and services is increasing.  Configuration management is not sufficient.
 Big bang: configure then deploy scripting Orchestrated action is critical because sequence matters.  Building a cluster requires sequential (often iterative) operations between nodes in the system.  We cannot build robust deployments without ongoing control over order of operations.

Should we call this “Hybrid Devops?”  That sounds so buzz-wordy!

I’ve come to believe that Hybrid DevOps is the right name.  More technical descriptions like “composable ops” or “service oriented devops” or “cross-platform orchestration” just don’t capture the real value.  All these names fail to capture the portability and multi-system flavor that drives the need for user control of hybrid in multiple dimensions.

Simply put, we need devops without borders!

What do you think?  Do you have a better term?

Transitioning from a Bossy Boss into a Digital Age Leader [Series Conclusion]

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Now that we are to the end of our 8 POST SERIES, BRAD SZOLLOSE AND ROB HIRSCHFELD INVITE YOU TO SHARE IN OUR DISCUSSION ABOUT FAILURES, FIGHTS AND FRIGHTENING TRANSFORMATIONS GOING ON AROUND US AS DIGITAL WORK CHANGES WORKPLACE DELIVERABLES, PLANNING AND CULTURE.

We hope you’ve enjoyed our discussion about digital management over the last seven posts. This series was born of our frustration with patterns of leadership in digital organizations: overly directing leaders stifle their team while hands-off leaders fail to provide critical direction. Neither culture is leading effectively!

Digital managers have to be two things at once

We felt that our “cultural intuition” is failing us.  That drove us to describe what’s broken and how to fix it.

Digital work and workers operate in a new model where top-down management is neither appropriate nor effective. To point, many digital workers actively resist being given too much direction, rules or structure. No, we are not throwing out management; on the contrary, we believe management is more important than ever, but changes to both work and workers has made it much harder than before.

That’s especially true when Boomers and Millennials try to work together because of differences in leadership experience and expectation. As Brad is always pointing out in his book Liquid Leadership, “what motivates a Millennial will not motivate a Boomer,” or even a Gen Xer.

Millennials may be so uncomfortable having to set limits and enforce decisions that they avoid exerting the very leadership that digital workers need! While GenX and Boomers may be creating and expecting unrealistic deadlines simply because they truly do not understand the depth of the work involved.

So who’s right and who’s wrong? As we’ve pointed out in previous posts, it’s neither! Why? Because unlike Industrial Age Models, there is no one way to get something done in The Information Age.

We desperately need a management model that works for everyone. How does a digital manager know when it’s time to be directing? If you’ve communicated a shared purpose well then you are always at liberty to 1) ask your team if this is aligned and 2) quickly stop any activity that is not aligned.

The trap we see for digital managers who have not communicated the shared goals is that they lack the team authority to take the lead.

We believe that digital leadership requires finding a middle ground using these three guidelines:

  1. Clearly express your intent and trust, don’t force, your team will follow it
  2. Respect your teams’ ability to make good decisions around the intent.
  3. Don’t be shy to exercise your authority when your team needs direction

Digital management is hard: you don’t get the luxury of authority or the comfort of certainty.

If you are used to directing then you have to trust yourself to communicate clearly at an abstract level and then let go of the details. If you are used to being hands-off then you have to get over being specific and assertive when the situation demands it.

Our frustration was that neither Boomer nor Millennial culture is providing effective management. Instead, we realized that elements of both are required. It’s up to the digital manager to learn when each mode is required.

Thank you for following along. It has been an honor.

When Two Right Decisions Make Things Wrong [Digital Management Series, 7 of 8]

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In this 7th Installation IN AN 8 POST SERIES, BRAD SZOLLOSE AND ROB HIRSCHFELD INVITE YOU TO SHARE IN OUR DISCUSSION ABOUT FAILURES, FIGHTS AND FRIGHTENING TRANSFORMATIONS GOING ON AROUND US AS DIGITAL WORK CHANGES WORKPLACE DELIVERABLES, PLANNING AND CULTURE.

The Duality Trap is one digital management danger that’s so destructive, we felt this series would be incomplete without a discussion. It’s especially problematic for The Digital Native managers and often mishandled by traditionally trained ones too.

Each apple is delicious. Which would you choose?

Each apple is delicious. Which would you choose?

The Duality Trap occurs when there are multiple right answers to a question. How often does this happen? Every single time. In fact, it’s a side effect of good digital management. Why?

In hierarchical management, the boss is always right so there’s no duality. Since we’ve thrown out hierarchical decision making, every team action is potentially subject to review by everyone on the team. The very loose structure that allows individual autonomy and rapid response has the natural consequence of also creating cognitive friction when individuals approach problems differently.

These different approaches are generally all valid ways to progress.

Digital natives fundamentally understand choice duality and may present alternatives just to ensure team diversity. Unfortunately, while where may be multiple valid solutions, the team can only pick one [1]. Nine times out of ten, the team will simply pick and move on. In that outlier case, they are counting on you, their digital manager, to resolve the selection.

Here’s the trap: resolving a duality does not mean “picking the winner” because having a winner implies the choices were unequal. If you’re team is stuck then there are at least two good choices.

If you are a traditional manager, the temptation to become Ronald “the decider” Reagan is nearly irresistible. Under the title=authority to decide model, you must justify your salary with making a “right” decision. You’ve been waiting for this moment to exert your authority for days. But, unbeknownst to “the decider,” this big moment will immediately undermine the team’s autonomy. On the other hand, If you are a digital native then this is the moment you’ve been dreading because you’ve got to be decisive. Despite 5 to 10 really good choices, you have to make ONE. So, a digital native can appear to be indecisive. However, not deciding is the worst possible choice. So what should you do?

First, remember that teams are strengthened when they are clearly aligned around an intent.

Resolving the duality trap is an opportunity to emphasize your intent. The best approach is to ask your team to review the options again in light of your shared objectives. In many cases, they will be able to resolve the issue from that perspective. If not, then you should:

  1. validate all options could work
  2. have the team state desired outcomes that can be measured
  3. pick the option that most aligns with your intent
  4. ask if the option your team does choose fit the overall agenda of; speed of delivery but quality drops, quality of deep diving into the project (upping the quality) but you may miss a crucial deadline (this may narrow down your choices.
  5. ask the team to monitor for the results

In this case, even as you are driving a decision, you are still sharing the responsibility for the outcome with the team. It’s important for the team that you focus on the desired results and not on which course was chosen. It is very likely that any of the choices would work out and achieve positive outcomes.

So it’s OK to get out of the trap of picking “best” options when there are multiple right choices.  

In an age of ambiguity, it is easy to fall into the duality trap. Just remember, there is no one way to get it all done these days. Which means a GREAT people manager realizes 2 things; a) your people need more of your support than ever. This comes in the form of training, finding solutions, and building a team that has the right chemistry. And b) getting out of their way.

Get ready as we wrap up this series in post 8: Transitioning from a Bossy Boss into a Digital Age Leader.

[1] If you are in a situation where you an allow divergence for minimal cost (like which phone brand people use) then do not force your team to choose!

Setting The Tempo: 12 Tips for Winning at Digital Management [post 6 of 8]

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In this 6th Installation IN AN 8 POST SERIES, BRAD SZOLLOSE AND ROB HIRSCHFELD INVITE YOU TO SHARE IN OUR DISCUSSION ABOUT FAILURES, FIGHTS AND FRIGHTENING TRANSFORMATIONS GOING ON AROUND US AS DIGITAL WORK CHANGES WORKPLACE DELIVERABLES, PLANNING AND CULTURE.

Our advice comes down to very simple concept: Today’s leaders MUST walk the talk.

Drummers Get The GirlsManagement authority in digital work comes from being the owner of the intention. Your team is working towards a shared goal. That is their motivation and it’s required for digital managers to provide a clear goal – this is what we call the intent of your organization.  So a manager’s job comes down to sharing your organization’s intent.

Like the 80’s “management by walking around,” walking the intent means that you spend most of your time helping your team understand the goals, not telling them how to achieve greatness. Managers provide alignment, not direction.

What does digital management look like:

  1. Pick a tone and repeat, repeat, repeat – You are the Jazz leader setting the tempo and harmony, your consistency allows others to improvise. If you set the stage, you can encourage others to take the lead off your base. Strong management is not about control. Strong management is about support. Support that streamlines productivity.
  2. Encourage cross-communication – Better, make people talk to each other. it’s OK to proxy, but don’t carry opinions for your reports as if they were your own. And don’t be upset if someone goes “above” you in the hierarchy. There is no such thing anymore.
  3. 1-to-1 communication is healthy – do a lot of it. 1) Don’t make decisions that way. 2) Don’t get stuck having 1-to-1 with the same people. 3) a lot of informal/small interactions are OK. Diversity is key. You may have to reply/rehash/proxy a whole 1-to-1 discussion for your team
  4. Learn your Culture – This may be the hardest thing for leaders to do because if they always assumed that culture didn’t matter. In today’s work environments, culture matters more than you could imagine. Just ask Peter Drucker!  Knowing who does what is important. Knowing how each individual communicates and what their strengths and weaknesses are is even more important.
  5. “Yes, AND…” The cornerstone of Improv is about saying yes to ideas, even fragile ones. Then it becomes about testing, experimenting and pushing boundaries. This is where innovation comes from. Saying yes and, instead of no but, ensures things get customized. Yes, you might fail, but fail fast, and move on.
  6. Be forceful on time keeping – make sure debates and discussions have known upfront limitations. Movement is good, uncertainty is frustrating.
  7. Check and adjust – check and don’t change is just as important. The key is to involve your team in the check-ups.  When you decide not to adjust, that’s also a decision to communicate.
  8. Don’t apologize for or delay making top down decisions – not all actions are team discussions. Sometimes, the team process is tiring and hard so the most strident voice wins.  No team always agrees so don’t be afraid to play the role of arbitrator.
  9. Fix personnel issues quickly – allowing people to abuse the system drives away the behaviors that you want. Focus instead on strengths, and become the mediator.  Be very sensitive to stereotypes and even mild no name calling. Focus on the work, the outcomes and how everyone can do better. then hold them accountable to their word.
  10. Ask people to define their own expected results – then keep them accountable. When they miss, have no-blame a post-mortem that focus on improvement. A term called the Feedback Sandwich helps by starting a difficult conversation with something a team member did right, then work your way through the conversation to the “meat” part of the sandwich: what they did that needed help, improvement or an admission that they might NOT be the person best qualified for that task. Let them state this on their own by asking better questions.
  11. Assume failures are from system, not individual – work together to fix the system. Communication and hand off are usually the biggest fails when meeting deadlines. Find solutions from the team. after all, who knows development operations better than the people working in it.
  12. Be careful about highlighting “grenade divers” [1] – All organizations need heroes, but feeding them will erode team performance. Once, they may have saved the day. When it becomes a habit, they might be creating the chaos they are always solving in order to have job security. After all, they seem to be the only one who can solve that problem…every time. In a symphony only a few get the solo. In Jazz, you play both solo and support. That flexibility gives your team strength.

These ideas may push your outside your comfort zone.  Find a peer for support!  You need to to be strong to lead from the back.  

Even without formal hierarchies, manager roles are still needed to drive value and make the hard calls. Before, that translated into make all the decisions. The new challenge is to allow for free falls (post 4) while sharing the responsibility.

If you walk your intent and communicate goals consistently then your team will be able to follow your lead.

Next up: When Two Right Decisions Make Things Wrong

[1] Grenade Diving or “wearing the cape” is a team anti-pattern where certain individuals are compelled to take dramatic actions to rescue an adverse situation.  While they often appear to be team heroes (Brad saved the batch of cookies again!  Who forget to set the timer?), the result always distracts from the people who work hard to avoid emergencies.  We want people to step up when required but it should not become a pattern.

Leading vs. Directing: Digital Managers must learn the difference [post 5 of 8]

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Fifth IN AN 8 POST SERIES, BRAD SZOLLOSE AND ROB HIRSCHFELD INVITE YOU TO SHARE IN OUR DISCUSSION ABOUT FAILURES, FIGHTS AND FRIGHTENING TRANSFORMATIONS GOING ON AROUND US AS DIGITAL WORK CHANGES WORKPLACE DELIVERABLES, PLANNING AND CULTURE.

On the shouldersDigital Management has a challenging deep paradox: digital workers resist direct management but require that their efforts fit into a larger picture.

If you believe the next generation companies we discussed in post #4, then the only way to unlock worker potential is enable self-motivated employees and remove all management. In Zappos case, they encouraged 14% of their workers to simply leave the company because they don’t believe in extreme self-management.

Companies like W. L. Gore & Associates, the makers of GORE-TEX, operate and thrive very well in a team-driven environment… This apparently loosey-goosey management style has brought about hundreds of major multibillion-dollar ideas and made W. L. Gore a leading incubator of consistently great ideas and products for more than fifty years. To an outside observer it looks as though the focus is on having fun. But to the initiated, it is about hiring intense self-starters who contribute wholeheartedly to what they are doing and to the team, and most important, who can self-manage their time and skill sets.

— Liquid Leadership by Brad Szollose, page 154

Frankly, both of us—Brad and Rob—are skeptical. We believe that these tactics do enhance productivity, but gloss over the essential ingredient in their success: a shared set of goals.

Like our Jazz analogy, the performance is the sum of the parts and the players need to understand how their work fits into the bigger picture. A traditional management structure, with controlling leadership and über clear, micromanaged direction, backfires because it restricts the workers’ ability to interpret and adapt; however, that does not mean we are advocates of “no management whatsoever” zones.  

The trendy word is Holacracy.  That loosely translates into removal of management hierarchy and power while redistributing it throughout the organization.  Are you scared of that free-fall model?  If workers reject traditional management then what are the alternatives?

We need a way to manage today’s independent thinking workforce.

According to Forbes, digital workers have an even higher need to understand the purpose of their work than previous generations. If you are a Baby Boomer (Conductor of a Symphony), then this last statement may cause you to roll your eyes in disagreement.

Directing a Jazz ensemble requires a different type of leadership. One that hierarchy junkies —orchestra members who need a conductor—would call ambiguous…IF they didn’t truly know what was happening.

Great musicians don’t join mediocre bands; they purposely seek out other teams that are challenging them, a shared set of goals and standards that produce results and success. This may require a shift in mindset for some of our readers.

Freedom in jazz improvisation comes from understanding structure. When people listen to jazz, they often believe that the soloist is “doing whatever they want.” If fact, as experienced improvisers will tell you, the soloist is rarely “doing whatever they want”.  An improvisational soloist is always following a complicated set of rules and being creative within the context of those rules.  From Jazzpath.com

In the past generation, there was no need to communicate a shared vision: you either did what you were told, OR just told people what to do. And people obeyed. Mostly out of fear of losing your job. But, in the digital workforce, shared goals are what makes the work fit together. Players participate of their own will. Not fear.

Putting this into generational terms: if you were born after 1977 (aka Gen X to the Millennials) then you were encouraged to see ALL adults as peers.  In the public school system, this trend continued as the generation was encouraged to speak up, speak out and make as many mistakes as possible…after all, THAT is how you learn. And the fear of screwing up and making mistakes was actually encouraged, as teachers also became friends and mentors.  Video games simply reinforced the same iterative learning lessons at home.

Thousands of years of social programming were flipped over in favor of iterative learning and flattened hierarchy.  Those skills showed up just in time to enable us to survive the chaos of the digital work / social media revolution.

But survival is not enough, we are looking for a way to lead and win.

Since hierarchy is flat, it’s become critical to replace directing action with building a common mission.  In individual-centric digital work, there are often multiple right ways to accomplish the team objective (our topic for post 7).  While having a clear shared goals will not help pick the right option, it will help the team accept that 1) the team has to choose and 2) the team is still on track even if some some individuals have to change direction.

Just listen to the most complex work out there that has been influenced by Jazz; the late Jeff Porcaro, pop rock drummer and cofounder of Toto admits to being influenced by Bo Diddley for his drum riffs on the song Rosanna. Or if you are a RUSH fan you know that songs like La Villa Strangiato owe the syncopated rhythms, chord changes and drum riffs to Jazz.

Or the modern artist Piet Mondrian who invented neoplasticism, was inspired by listening incessantly to a particular type of jazz called “Boogie-Woogie.”

Participants in this type of performance do not tune out and wait for direction. They must be present, bring 100% of themselves to each performance, and let go of what they did in the last concert because each new performance is customized.

You have until our next post to cry in your beer while whining that digital managers have it too hard.  In the next post, we’ll lay out 12 very concrete actions that you should be taking as a leader in the digital workforce.

PS: Brad some important insights about how their childhood experience shapes digital natives’ behavior.  We felt that topic was important but external to the primary narrative so Rob included them here:

Continue reading →

Short lived VM (Mayflies) research yields surprising scheduling benefit

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Last semester, Alex Hirschfeld (my son) did a simulation to explore the possible efficiency benefits of the Mayflies concept proposed by Josh McKenty and me.

Mayflies swarming from Wikipedia

In the initial phase of the research, he simulated a data center using load curves designed to oversubscribe the resources (he’s still interesting in actual load data).  This was sufficient to test the theory and find something surprising: mayflies can really improve scheduling.

Alex found an unexpected benefit comes when you force mayflies to have a controlled “die off.”  It allows your scheduler to be much smarter.

Let’s assume that you have a high mayfly ratio (70%), that means every day 10% of your resources would turn over.  If you coordinate the time window and feed that information into your scheduler, then it can make much better load distribution decisions.  Alex’s simulation showed that this approach basically eliminated hot spots and server over-crowding.

Here’s a snippet of his report explaining the effect in his own words:

On a system that is more consistent and does not have a massive virtual machine through put, Mayflies may not help with balancing the systems load, but with the social engineering aspect, it can increase the stability of the system.

Most of the time, the requests for new virtual machines on a cloud are immutable. They came in at a time and need to be fulfilled in the order of their request. Mayflies has the potential to change that. If a request is made, it has the potential to be added to a queue of mayflies that need to be reinitialized. This creates a queue of virtual machine requests that any load balancing algorithm can work with.

Mayflies can make load balancing a system easier. Knowing the exact size of the virtual machine that is going to be added and knowing when it will die makes load balancing for dynamic systems trivial.