This week’s exegesis

• The Corporate Podcast, plus EBC’ing - sign-up and listen!
• Last week we looked at The Lone Wolf Analyst, by way of Ben Thompson.

This week in kubernetes

• Why did kubernetes win? (Nerds like to tinker, Google brand? Did the rest of us just need to buy more native advertising in The New Stack?)

Cisco and Google

• Not really sure what this Cisco/Google thing is. What does Cisco bring to the table?
• “Cisco's HyperFlex platform that includes management tools to enforce security and other policies as applications and services are released with greater frequency.”
• Private cloud bundling of kubernetes, Istio, all the great cloud natives.
• "This is what we hear customers ask for," Diane Greene.
• Big picture: what’s Google’s goal here? Is it really as simple as “on-ramp?”
• Even bigger picture: how did it kubernetes win?

IBM’s private cloud stack

• So, is the “Blue Mix” brand out the mix?
• IBM page: “Overview of IBM Cloud Private.” Another announcement overview.
• “Is built on the latest versions of Kubernetes and Docker” - what that mean?
• Jeffrey Burt: “IBM Cloud Private can run on a variety of infrastructures, including the vendor’s own mainframe and Power systems, its hyperconverged infrastructure that runs Nutanix software, and IBM Storage’s Spectrum Access solution. In addition, it can run on systems from Dell EMC, Lenovo, Cisco Systems and NetApp, and can be deployed by such VMware, Canonical and other OpenStack distributions as well as bare-metal systems. The private cloud platform also includes such developer services for data analytics as Db2, Db2 Warehouse, PostgreSQL and MongoDB, developer tools like Netcool, UrbanCode, and Cloud Brokerage and open-source management software such as Jenkins, Prometheus, Grafana, and ElasticSearch.”
• Chris Mellor, The Register:
  • All the great middleware now in (Docker) containers: “IBM has provided containerised versions of WebSphere Liberty and Open Liberty, MQ, and DB2, plus Microservice Builder as software bundle components. For example, Cloud Private for Application Modernization provides Cloud Private capabilities plus WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment, MQ Advanced, API Connect Professional, DB2 Direct Advanced and Urban Code Deploy.”
  • Value-prop’in! “The standout aim is to help legacy apps transition to a more cloud-native style of construction and operation so that they can run inside a public cloud-like environment on-premises – private cloud – and connect to and/or be integrated with public clouds in some fashion. The destination in IBM's view, of the evolution of legacy apps is the hybrid cloud with private cloud as a stepping stone.”
  • The white papers also mention “regulated industries” and the like.
  • Goin’ for that enterprise cloud, hey, boy.
• Also: Coté’s highlights, brief coverage from Tom Krazit at GeekWire.
• An oral history of “bursting”: from 2010 to 2017.

Congress now follows you

• Kind of a dick move to not send the CEOs.
• Holy Shit! “Revealing exactly what was smeared all over the internet during the 2016 elections would, we reckon, be like opening Pandora's box: it would allow citizens to join the dots between Kremlin-crafted lies, the gradual acceptance of those lies online, the discussion and even promotion of said lies on mainstream news networks, resulting in, presumably, dozens of clips of senators responding with indignation about made-up information. In short, everyone is going to look like a chump if it turns out everything argued over last year was based on nothing but Kremlin-devised myths and urban legends. Rumors, in other words, designed to destabilize American politics and perhaps install a preferred candidate in the White House.”
• Looks like my rep has been keeping up on Ben Thompson: ‘Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) asked: "Why should you be treated any differently to the press?" All three California outfits responded with a version of the fact that they are "platforms" and not publishers, that their content is user-created, and that they protect people's right to free speech and expression. Cornyn made it clear he was not persuaded. "They may be a distinction lost on most of us," he said.’
• Speaking of…Ben nails the analysis:
  • “Facebook served [an estimated] 276 million unique ads per quarter, and my entire point was the same as Kennedy’s: there is no way that Facebook could ever review every ad, much less investigate who is behind them, without completely ruining their revenue model.”
  • ‘What this hearing highlighted, though, is the degree to which the position of Facebook in particular has become more tenuous. The fact of the matter is that Facebook (and Google) is more powerful than any entity we have seen before. Magnifying the problem is that, over the last year, Facebook has decided to “take responsibility”, and what is that but a commitment to exercise their control over what people see?’
• Tech industry doesn’t think/care about the effects of their products
  • https://twitter.com/kumailn/status/925828976882282496

BONUS LINKS! Not covered in show

MongoIPO

• Don’t hate if you have options. ## Australasian technology update - what’s the long-term plan at Atlassian?
• "Revenue climbed 41.7% year over year to $193.8 million.”
• Things are going well down under.
• Well, they do spend as much on R&D as sales & marketing. Compare to Mongo, which is 1:2 or so.

Misc

• Using the Correct Tool for the Job written by J Asghar - Monetizing The Hot Dog - I’m sure the VC stockholders are ecstatic about this development

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 Exegesis podcast over there.
• Join us all in the SDT Slack.

Mid-roll & Conferences

• Get $50 off Casper mattresses with the code: horraymattray
• The Register’s conference, Continuous Lifecycle, in London (May 2018) has it’s CFP open, closed October 20th - submit something!
• Coté’s junk:
  • Innotech Microservices Conference, Austin, 11/16/2017.
  • SpringOne Platform registration open, Dec 4th to 5th. Use the code S1P200_Cote for $200 off registration. Coté and many others speaking.
• Matt’s on the Road!
  • November 6-7 - AgileNZ
  • November 10 - Microsoft Open Source Roadshow

Recommendations

• Matt Ray: Kevin Shields/Brian Eno collaboration, “Only Once Away My Son.”
• Brandon: Mindhunter and Netflix Skip Intro
• Coté: Programmed Inequality.

Sponsored By:

• Pivotal: Come check the success stories in cloud-native at SpringOne Platform. Full of the suits and the nerds going over how they've improved their organization's approach to software. Use the code S1P200_Cote to get $200 off registration! Promo Code: S1P200_Cote

Also, Baltimore is not in Maine. (But Coté is pretty sure it actually is.)

Mid-roll

• Coté: we're a media sponsor for DevOpsDays Baltimore, March 7th to 8th. No discount code yet, but we're getting one.
• Coté: Come see me talk at the Austin Cloud Meetup, Feb 22nd
• Matt:
  • Microsoft Ignite Australia: Chef will have a booth & a talk
  • ChefConf ChefConf 2017 Teaser
• Coté: check out Pivotal's DIY platform paper. tl;dr: for $7m/year with a two year on-ramp, you could build you own, or just buy Pivotal Cloud Foundry. Many of our customers have gone down this path and ended up not wanting to support the life of their own platform...which doesn't match the pace of innovation that the Cloud Foundry community can follow. Check out softwaredefinedtalk.com/diyplatform.

SnapChat's S-1

• The S1
• "We had 158 million Daily Active Users on average in the quarter ended December 31, 2016"
• "We have committed to spend $2 billion with Google Cloud over the next five years." - perhaps 10% of their billing.
• Also: "Snap will spend $1 billion on AWS through 2021."
• Coté Show interview with former cloud boy, JJ.

The McLaughlin Group covers Google: What's up with them!

• Robots opening doors.
• Google, Nest, and DropCam - despite rocky start, maybe it's just a slow ramp-up, they have 50% y/y growth.
• People think GCP is the shit.
• "Purity vs. pragmatism."

Corrections

• "Barra-mundi"
• Pronunciation tips

Thing to get angry about this week

• DHS considering asking foreigners for passwords
• I mean, really? A criminal is just gonna let you see their stuff? They'll just delete it, set up fake accounts, etc.
• It's not like popping the trunk for a thief and finding lock picks and guns in the boot: with digital crime tools and weapons, you can hide and subterfuge.
• And then the only people getting harmed are innocent people.
• What the fuck is wrong with these people, and more importantly the shit-for brains who voted for them? (How can we de-shit those brains for 2018?)
• Tweet about 3D chess of this meaning the government can't hack into your stuff...or can they?!?!

CNCF Buys RethinkDB's Code and Donates to the Linux Foundation

• Not just marketing, but actually "freeing" code
• Switched from AGPLv3 to ASLv2
• "Abby," head of the Cloud Foundry Foundation. See a recent discussion with her and RedMonk's James Governor on developer skills in large organizations.

$2.5 million VC for Sensu!

• Nagios replacement!!!
• Brandon has some advice.

BONUS LINKS! Not covered in episode

Microsoft does Azure Patent Indemnification

• "The system is supposed to help ease the transition to the cloud by giving companies extra peace of mind. Right now, lawsuits over intellectual property relating to open source technology in the cloud are rare" Link
• "those companies operating in a multi-cloud configuration won't be entirely covered"

Attempting to Categorize the Cloud Native Landscape

• Project in GitHub
• Cloud native Landscape diagram

Cloud Displacing Intel's Enterprise Sales

• "Tectonic shifts in the pattern of Intel's business show the devastating speed at which cloud is displacing traditional enterprise server sales" Link

Slack Enterprise Grid should make user management easier

• Link

Uber Steers Away from Trump

• "More than 200,000 customers had deleted their accounts." (Link)
• "Many employees were not satisfied with his answer. On Wednesday, Uber staff members followed up by circulating a 25-page Google document titled "Letters to Travis" to tell the chief executive how and why his willingness to engage with the administration had affected them."

Puppet adds two vice presidents, hiring from Hewlett-Packard and EMC

• "Puppet replaced nearly its entire executive team in 2016, including its chief executive and chief financial officers. It hired six vice presidents last year." (Link)

Rackspace lays off 6%

• "Since being taken private [by Apollo], Rackspace has been working to trim its annual budget by 7%, or $100 million, according to documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission." (Link)
• More figures from Barb Darrow.
• Brief 451 coverage from Al:
• "After eight years as a public company, Rackspace went private in August 2016 in $4.3bn leveraged buyout with Apollo Global Management."
• "Rackspace just announced a layoff of 6% of its 4,600 employees"
• "The company is expected to exceed $2bn in revenue and top 33% EBITDA margin for 2016."
• Meanwhile, AWS at ~$10bn for 2016 with something like 20-23% profit margin (OpInc based on 2016Q4 numbers), Azure and GCP catching up: MSFT is probably $5-6bn, depending on how you categorize it. GCP probably $3bn at most (they don't break it out)?

Other thing to get worked up about: eliminating remote work

• IBM on that colo shit
• Brandon is safe! (He lives in Austin.)
• Coté: I won't deny that working in smelling range is the best. But, the gains never feel like enough to enforce it. Plus, mega-city congestion and resulting classist systems, cf. The Wealth of Humans. It's a problem that should be solved, not embraced.

Recommendations

• Matt:
  • Manly Daily newspaper, so much unbridled snark. Link
  • RTJ on NPR.
  • I'm not sure I can pull this off.
• Coté: Ezra Klein interview with Kara Swisher. She's inspiring is several ways, not least of which in modeling a way to be politely strident and opinionated: the opposite of imposture syndrome. Also, his talk with the Hillbilly Elegy guy. I mean: most of the whole podcast, just skip the ones that look trivial and repetitive, e.g., we get it: Trump is a lunatic. (See The Weeds and "The Nate Silver podcast.")
• Brandon:
  • Skiing in Solitude, Utah.
  • The Daily podcast, from NYT.

Sponsored By:

• Chef: ChefConf 2017 - ChefCon is coming up, May 22nd to 24th in Austin, Texas. Early bird pricing through March 31st.
• Chef: Microsoft Ignite Australia, Feb 14th to Feb 17th, Gold Coast Convention & Exhibition Centre . Chef will have a booth & a talk.
• Pivotal: Why you shouldn't build your own platform, it'll cost ~$7m/year, even before chunky coconut water opex.
• DevOpsDays: March 7th to March 8th - another fantastic DevOpsDays, in Baltimore. Get 10% registration off with the promo code SDT-BALTIMORE. Promo Code: SDT-BALTIMORE
• Pivotal: Come see Coté talk about how big companies are succeeding and failing at DevOps, cloud native, and "digital transformation. Based on real life events!