100 years of infrastructure: A future history

RFC-1 was published 50 years ago. Infrastructure management emerged as a discrete field two decades later, and devops a decade after that. As we work to realize the full potential of networked computing and the decentralized organizations it enables, what will the next 50 years bring, and what can we do to hurry things along?

In this talk, we’ll touch on some of the roots of current infrastructure management tools and the motivation and computing science theory behind them. We’ll attempt to reconcile some long-lasting disconnects by referring to current thinking in distributed consensus systems. Finally, we’ll (carefully) extrapolate forward to see what the community likely will be working on between now and mid-century, and we’ll announce some new initiatives in that direction.