Digital infrastructures serve, nearly always, multiple customers. These customers therefore share the resources provided by these digital infrastructures. With that sharing comes the potential for conflicts over those resources.
When I talk to my friend over the phone, we share a connection, and that is exactly when sharing is part of the value of that infrastructure. But when multiple users draw computer capacity from the same pool, there is a risk that the pool is too small, and some users will not get the capacity that they require.
That is a conflict of interests, and it can play out in a variety of places.
When the service is offered on a market (as is the case with a public cloud provider), the conflict is between the provider and the consumer, who are not getting what they think they have contracted. Secondly, there is a conflict between the delivery team, who are not getting the resources that they need to realize the service level objectives, and the sales teams who have sold more than can be delivered.
In an in-company situation (for example, a private cloud), the conflict is more likely to occur out between various internal consumers. I have seen more than one example where a department with a lot of ego and budget manages to get their way at the expense of less politically savvy departments. Bullying your way into monopolizing resources may be effective for the bully, but it is not necessarily the best outcome for the organization as a whole.
That is a governance issue, and there should be leadership supervising these conflicts and setting policies for their resolution. Failure to do so is a failure of governance and leadership. We’ll talk more about that in another unit.
For the moment we’ll end here with the observation that in digital infrastructures it can involve technical and architectural insight to understand these resource conflicts and the means through which they can be resolved. I have seen governance fail in these situations because the leadership is not properly educated on these finesses.
For example, capacity in an infrastructure setting could refer to storage, bandwidth, or processing power. These differ seriously in how their capacity can be managed.
Where understanding is missing, politics, power, and ego, fill the void.