The EOL Conundrum

Originally posted February 14, 2012

If you have worked in IT, then you have been faced with The EOL Conundrum. On more than one occasion, you have probably had some hardware or an operating system or an application or something that came up for End of Life (EOL). What do you do? Most people would say "migrate to the next version of course". That answer isn't always the best or easiest one.

Andrew Wood wrote about a great example of this here. So what do you do when your application delivery platform hits EOL before the OS it is running on? If you use the easy answer of migrate, you quickly realize that this option can lead to great complexity and headache. In this example, the issue is migrating to the next version of the application delivery platform requires an upgrade of the OS. So now you are faced with two simultaneous migrations, the application delivery platform and the OS. No big deal right? Wrong! You are now faced with the issue of application compatibility with the OS and delivery platform. Another issue to consider is the complexity of the migration. If your application delivery platform does not support multiple versions or OS’s being managed at the same time you will be faced with maintaining multiple separate environments. These environments will require different sets of tools and rely on different resources. Sound like a nightmare yet? To some it might not be because you have prepared for this type of event with the ability to band aid the hell out of any environment until you find another job (To those in upper management, given the nature of this event and the resources the admins wont have at their disposal, this is a very likely scenario). To the rest of you, it’s ok to cry. We all understand. Now that you got that out of your system, you can look to the future.

Ideally if you are faced with the requirement of implementing a whole new environment just because your application delivery platform vendor didn't have the hindsight to ensure they supported all of their features on an OS until the OS vendor’s EOL date, you can choose to implement a solution from another vendor. That is the great thing about being the consumer. You make the decision on what solutions you can standardize on. Originally you probably didn't have much of a choice. But as technology grows, new choices emerge. If you are faced with the example in Andrew’s article then you would benefit yourself greatly by evaluating all of your options. Hopefully you can find a solution vendor that can provide you with everything you need to face The EOL Conundrum. A solution vendor that can provide the ability to discover your applications and their usage, determine their compatibility with your OS and delivery platforms, manage multiple OS versions within a single management instance and even provide end to end monitoring of your overall environment. I wonder if a vendor like that exists.