DSI and the SDM

Last time I made a fleeting reference to the DSI initiative. I think this is really, really cool. As IT Pros, we need to on a daily basis understand how the environment and applications are running. If any one component is not working correctly then the business suffers. Not cool. When we're deploying solutions that developers have made often theres a bunch of educated guesswork and testing that goes into understanding what the load of the system is going to be and how we should deploy it effectively without costing the business too much money but at the same time understanding the performance needs. Enter DSI and SDM. DSI stands for the Dynamic Systems Initiative. Its designed to allow developers to write into their application frameworks a definition model (SDM) of how the application hangs together and what resourcing it needs to work effectively. It also allows for dynamic changes such that if for example you have a web farm running and you need more capacity, you can quickly and easily add it without altering the architecture in any way. VS 2003 had some bits of this to begin the concepts but VS2005 gives you a lot more with Service-Oriented Application Designer and Logical Infrastructure Designers to allow developers to build this model.

There are some infrastructure product solutions aswell that include components of DSI like MOM 2005 and SMS 2003 and of course System Center 2005 when it releases aswell.