“When I go to the grocery store, I just buy the bananas” - Amazon/Whole Goods, J(2)EE, building your own kubernetes stack

Episode 104 · August 25th, 2017 · 1 hr 3 mins

About this Episode

Come Monday, we’ll see what full-on “digital transformation” looks like when Amazon fully owns Whole Foods. Also, Oracle is looking to move JEE to a foundation, closing out a long era of Java stewardship: how will “open source” like this work in a mature market? We also discuss the trend of private equity buying tech firms and GitHib’s write-up of building their own platform with kubernetes and series of small bash scripts.

Traveling to China

  • Coté is a terrible work-trip tourist.
  • AA 263, DFW to PEK, seat 19K. Exit row seat is good, but the front part of the airplane looked good too (rows 8 to 13?).
  • Pack some breakfast tacos.
  • This VPN situation is a mess, rather, I didn’t prepare correctly. Sometimes Cloak works, sometimes it doesn’t. LTE seems better than hotel wifi, but the speeds are high.

Amazon Whole Foods update

  • All done on Monday, August 28th. See NY Times article as well.
  • John Mackey interview.
  • Cheaper private label (I think they were top three or five sold in US).
  • Return items in Amazon lockers.
  • Cheaper groceries is cool, but for us, the interesting/instructive things to watch will be how Whole Foods goes full on digital transformation (or, even more eyebrow raising, does not!).
  • Will they move everything to AWS?
  • true Omni-channel and digital madness.
  • Alexa: ”You look fat in that t-shirt, Michael, would you like me to order you some organic kale smoothies from Whole Foods?”
  • Also, the potential for a culture clash seems high.
  • As a side-effect, expect grocers to be trying out new computer stuff more, and observe their experience. How will the razor thin margin set cope with Amazon who’s been consistently rewarded for loosing money?
  • Walmart and Google Hub thing, Andrew on the AI winter.

The Undying J(2)EE

Kubernetes at GitHub

  • Just a few bash scripts, eh? Here, hold my beer.
  • Real world discussion about moving one of their most popular services to Kubernetes. Sounds like the real deal, but there are a few bumps in the road. # PE to do 25% of tech M&A
  • At least the analysis confirms this notion.
  • That said, the underlying numbers are weird: “Between direct acquisitions and deals done by portfolio companies, PE firms are on pace to purchase roughly 900 tech companies in 2017.”
  • Who exactly are these 900 tech companies?
  • Speaking of, a PE firm bought ThoughtWorks.
  • ICO stuff, Coté is confused.

BONUS LINKS! Not covered in show.

Alibaba Dwarfs Amazon

  • That’s a lot of revenue growth.
  • Not on the cloud computing side yet, but definitely on the retail side.
  • Coté: what’s the deal with Alipay being so hard to setup for Yankees? They really, really want a bankcard. Also, I don’t speak Chinese.

Rescuing Open Source from Failed Startups

Pivotal news - build pipelines

Meta, follow-up, etc.

  • Patreon - like anyone who starts these things, I have no idea WTF it is, if it’s a good idea, or if I should be ashamed. Need some product/market fit.
  • Check out the Software Defined Talk Members Only White-Paper Exiguous podcast over there.
  • Join us all in the SDT Slack.

Mid-roll

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