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

Alternate Titles

• I've seen this hot-dog before.
• I’ve been doing this since dickity-4
• I’m sticking with the Mary Meeker slides, you nerds go figure it out

Mid-roll

• Pivotal Cloud-native workshop in DC, June 7th.
• LOOK, MA! I PUT IN DATES! DevOpsDays Minneapolis, July 25 to 26th: get 20% off registration with the code SDT (Thanks, Bridget!).
• Coté: CF Summit June 13 to 15, 2017.
  • 20% off registration code: cfsv17cote
• Coté: Want 2 days of Spring knowledge? Check out SpringDays
  • SpringDays.io
  • Get half-off with the code SpringDays_HalfOff
  • Chicago (May 30th to 31st)
  • New York (June 20th to 21st)
  • Atlanta (July 18th to 19th)

Hot-dog guy in Japan

• Zoom in on that little fellow.

Internet Trends 2017

• 300 plus slides of charts
• Computes!
• Coté’s notebook, summary of summary:
  • Google and Facebook make a lot of ad money.
  • The Kids like using smart phones, the olds like using traditional telephones. One of them will die sooner.
  • Voice, image recognition, etc.
  • China is pretty much a mature market, and it’s huge.
  • India has potential, but doing business there is hard and you need more Internet in a pocket rollout.
  • The public/private cloud debate is still far from over.
  • But, AWS, Microsoft, and Google have pretty much won.
  • Bonus: there’s surprisingly little funding and exits this year.
• Would Amazon sell some private clouds?

Isotoner and Hephaestus - All the new container orchestration poop

• Coté: Catching up on all this week's container poop & as always, my first reaction is “oh, I thought the existing stuff did all that already..so."
• Managed service for Tectonic as a Service - so, keeping your Kubernates cluster software updated? Presumably enforcing config, etc?
  • However, not all done, still working on the complete solution.
  • But, there’s an etcd thing ‘As a first step, Tectonic 1.6.4 will offer the distributed etcd key-value data store as a fully managed cloud service. “It’s the logical one to offer first because it is everything else gets built on it,” Polvi explained. The data store “guarantees that data is in a consistent state for very specific operations,” he said, referring to how etcd can be essential for operations such as database migrations.’
  • Another etcd description: “etcd is a clustered database that prizes consistency above partition tolerance… Interestingly, at Google, chubby is most frequently accessed using an abstracted File interface that works across local files, object stores, etc. The highly consistent nature, however, provides for strict ordering of writes and allows clients to do atomic updates of a set of values.
  • So, you need locks for - dun-dun-dun! - transactions! Queue JP lecturing me in 2002.
• Then there’s Istio:
  • Istio?!
  • Whao! Check out the exec-pitch: “ Istio gives CIOs a powerful tool to enforce security, policy and compliance requirements across the enterprise.” And Google: “Through the Open Service Broker model CIOs can define a catalog of services which may be used within their enterprise and auditing tools to enforce compliance.”
    • I love their idea of what a CIO does.
  • “An open platform to connect, manage, and secure microservices“
  • SDN++ overlay for container orchestrators from Google, IBM & Lyft - once you control the network with the “data plane,” you add in the “control plane” which allows you to control the flow and shit of the actual microservices.
  • Tackling the “new problems emerge due to the sheer number of services that exist in a larger system. Problems that had to be solved once for a monolith, like security, load balancing, monitoring, and rate limiting need to be handled for each service.”
  • And, you know, all the agnostic, multi-cloud, open stuff.
  • Thankfully, they didn’t use a bunch of garbage, nonsense names for things.
  • Let’s look at the docs (BTW, can you kids start just putting out PDFs instead of only these auto-generated from markdown web pages?):
    • First of all, these are good docs.
    • Monkey-patching for the container era: “You add Istio support to services by deploying a special sidecar proxy throughout your environment that intercepts all network communication between microservices, configured and managed using Istio’s control plane functionality.”
    • The future! Where we all shall live! “Istio currently only supports service deployment on Kubernetes, though other environments will be supported in future versions.”
    • Problems being solved, aka, “ways you must be this tall to ride the microservices ride”: “Its requirements can include discovery, load balancing, failure recovery, metrics, and monitoring, and often more complex operational requirements such as A/B testing, canary releases, rate limiting, access control, and end-to-end authentication.”
    • Also: Traffic Management, Observability, Policy Enforcement, Service Identity and Security.
    • Does it have the part where it reboots/fixes failed services for you?
    • So:
      • you monkey-patch all this shit in (er, sorry, “sidecar”),
      • which controls the network with SDN shit,
      • Istio-Manager + Envoy does all your load-balancing/circuit breaker/canary/AB shit, service discovery/registry, service versioning (i.e., running n+1 different versions of code - always a pretty cool feature), configuring “routes,” what connects to what,
      • I don’t think it provides a service registry/discover service? Maybe just a waffer thin API (“a platform-agnostic service discovery interface”)?
      • Question: what does this look like in your code?
        • The thing 12 factor-style passes a configuration into your actual code. Here, you’re adding a bunch of name/value pairs (which can be nested) and also translating them to the name/value pairs that your code is expecting...on an HTTP call? Executing a command in your container? As ENV vars?
        • And then, I think you finally get ahold of the network to reply back with some HTML, JSON, or some sort of HTTP request by .,
• So, big questions, aka, Coté mental breakdown that only Matt Ray can cure:
  • Er...so this all really is a replacement for the VMware stack, right? And OpenStack? Or do you still need those. What the fuck is all this stuff? It just installs the Docker image on a server? And then handles multi-zone replication, and making sure config drift is handles (bringing up failed nodes, too)?
  • So, it’s just cheaper and more transparent than VMware?
  • What’s the set of shit one needs? Ubuntu, Moby Engine (?), Moby command line tools, etcd? Actuality kubernetes code? What’s Swarm do? And then there’s monitoring, which according to Whiskey Charity, is all shit, right?
  • Where’ my fucking chart on this shit?
  • Please write two page memo for the BoD by 2pm today.
• Meanwhile: Oracle’s cool with it, “WTF is a microservice”, compared to SOA/ESB and RESTful, and James Governor tries to explain it all.

BONUS LINKS! Not covered in episode.

Rackspace Buys Enterprise Apps Management TriCore

• Link
• New CEO and biggest acquisition, I thought they were quieting down with the PE

Red Hat buys Codenvy

• Codenvy sets up your developer environments, and has team stuff.
• Red Hat is really after the developer market.
• TaskTop has a good chance of being acquired in this climate.
• Pour one out from BMC/StreamStep.
• Notes from Carl Lehmann report at 451:
  • In-browser IDE and devtool chain(?) for OpenShift.io, based on Eclipse Che
  • “Founded in 2013, San Francisco-based Codenvy raised $10m in January of that year, and used a portion of its funds to buy its initial codebase from eXo Platform, which had developed the eXo Cloud IDE in-browser coding suite to support its social and collaboration applications.”
  • “The company's suite works with developer tools like subversion and git, CloudBees, Jenkins, Docker, MongoDB, Cloud Foundry, Maven and ant, as well as PaaS and IaaS offerings such as Heroku, Google AppEngine, Red Hat OpenShift and AWS.”
  • Check out the Dell Sputnik call-out: “Rivals to Codenvy include cloud-based development suites Eclipse Orion (open source), Cloud9 IDE and Nitrous.IO. There are other 'cloud IDEs,' including Codeanywhere, CodeRun Studio, Neutron Drive and ShiftEdit. On the developer environment configuration front, Pivotal created and open-sourced a developer and OS X laptop configuration tool called Workstation, and now Sprout. Dell's Project Sputnik is seeking to address similar build environment standup productivity challenges.”

Uber back in Austin

• Is that a thing?

Amazon Hiring Old Folks (Like Me)

• Anecdotes are the singular of data?

More Tech Against Texas’ Discriminatory Laws

• Lords of Tech sign a thing
• “In addition to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Apple CEO Tim Cook, the letter was signed by Amazon CEO Jeff Wilke, IBM Chairman Ginni Rometty, Microsoft Corp. President Brad Smith and Google CEO Sundar Pichai. The leaders of Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Cisco, Silicon Labs, Celanese Corp., GSD&M, Salesforce and Gearbox Software also signed the letter.”
• “Peeing is not political” - recap of the history of the bathroom bill. Still doesn’t really address “is there actually a problem here, backed up with citations.” Without such coverage, it’s hard to understand (and therefore figure out and react to) the hillbilly’s side on this beyond: "It's just common sense and common decency — we don't want men in women's, ladies' rooms." It also highlights the huge, social divide between “city folk” and the hillbillies.
• A lot more from TheNewStack.

ChefConf Retrospective

• ICYMI

Competing in Public Cloud is Crazy Expensive

• Link
• Tracks the CAPEX spend over the years for MS, Google and Amazon

A Year of Google & Apple Maps

• Link
• Comprehensive drill-down into the mapping changes made by Google and the smaller moves by Apple.
• Probably not content for conversation, but whoa.

FAA Flight Delay Tracking

• Check the map, fool

Recommendations

• Brandon: Beauty of A Bad Idea — with Walker & Company's Tristan
• Matt:
  • Arrested DevOps #84 Old Geeks Yell At Cloud With Andrew Clay Shafer & Bryan Cantrill Epic rants. Also, Bryan Cantrill sounds like Bob Odenkirk
  • Enjoying Westworld and everything Brandon recommended months ago
• Coté: Butternut-squash hash.

Sponsored By:

• Pivotal: Pivotal Cloud-Native Strategy Workshop, in DC, June 7th. Promo Code: FREE
• DevOpsDays: DevOpsDays MSP: get 20% off registration with the code SDT. Promo Code: SDT

Mid-roll

• Coté: CF Summit - June 13 to 15th, 2017 - 20% off registration code: cfsv17cote. Also: DrunkAndRetired reboot, hopefully.
• Matt:
  • AWS Summit Sydney next week
  • DevOps Days Tokyo April 25th
  • Hands on Habitat Tokyo April 26th
  • Chef Meetup - Singapore April 29th
  • ChefConf May 22-24 ChefConf 2017 Teaser, early-bird pricing through March 31st
• Brandon
  • Try Contextual Sync
  • New Meetup - Microservices Austin.

EBay Replaces native OpenStack Container Manager with Kubernetes-based one

• Still OpenStack though
• Link
  • "It elected to roll its own Kubernetes-based solution for container management in OpenStack rather than try to improve Magnum."
  • ¯_(ツ)_/¯
  • "It's not clear if Tess.io can or will be released as open source" - what's the point of open sourcing something if a vendor isn't going to make it more accessible for consumption? Do they really expect anyone else to use something built for Ebay by Ebay and find use? Rip out Magnum in OpenStack and toss it in there? I'm always skeptical about adoption when I hear about non-software companies open sourcing a big project. -Matt
    • There can only be one Netflix.
    • A software company that just happens to be an auction company.
      

What's the deal with OSS now?

• Companies open sourcing software for the sake of open sourcing it...but not for a revenue reason.
• Is open source about tactically creating standards?

Pivotal can deploy k8 with BOSH, thus manage it and such

• Blog post on it, in alpha.

Rackspace Replacing Docker-based CaaS Carina with Kubernetes

• Get Carina
• EOL

IBM InterConnect

• BlueMix Container Services
  • And a vulnerability scanner!
  • How do IBM and others (ie. Oracle) regain mindshare with a "me-too" approach?
• Will Smith?!?
  • Peyton Manning previously. Remember Bill Clinton at DellWorld?
  • Coté's Analyst-hack: Watch keynotes from your hotel room.

containerd & rkt donated to the CNCF

• Something was contributed
• More...
• Boring part of the stack commoditized & foundationed
• "Container-D or Contai-Nerd" is the real question
• "contaiNERD" - GET IT?!?!!

Oracle Eyeing Accenture

• From The Register
• Everybody wants to be IBM Global Services
• Coté'd tl;dr: financial aside (which I don't know), probably makes sense. While we might bemoan EDS and GBS downsizing, there's endless money in the "solution" sales (tech + meatware). And - I'm sure the deal decks are saying - with SaaS penetration at 20-30%, there's a shit-ton of churn in IT in the next 10-20 years, all requiring services. Most importantly, the G2000 and governments will want to hire "trusted" brands, like Accenture, to help them. On the other hand, maybe that goofy Accenture touch screen in ORD will now be a way to touch-screen up Oracle wares: God help us.
• HP EDS, IBM GBS, Dell Services (Perot), etc.
• "Accenture has a market cap of $77.5bn, and shareholders will expect a premium offer."
• HPE Services and CSC, it's a thing.

BONUS LINKS! Not covered in show.

Chef Survey 2017 Results

• Analysis, Infographic
• Reads really well if you imagine bullet points as spinning newspaper headlines:
  • "Workloads are increasing faster than headcount"
• More:
  • "61% are automating infrastructure, 30% are automating compliance, and only 27% are automating container management."
  • "Of those users, 73% wait to assess compliance after development work has begun and new features have been implemented. 59% assess compliance once code is already running in production, possibly resulting in additional rework as change is re-architected to meet Information Security standards."
    • On the one hand, this is a bummer.
    • On the other hand: "hey, you 59% lot: you call yourself auditors?"

Setting the Record Straight: containers vs. Zones vs. Jails vs. VMs

• "Containers on the other hand are not real things"
• Down in the weeds on containers vs. everything else

SoundCloud

• I don't understand it

Newsletters!

• Monitoring Love.
• Last Week in AWS.

Recommendations

• Coté:
  • Google SRE book, and the Google SRE/CRE podcast with Coté and Andrew Sahfer.
  • Also: The Economist Espresso app.
  • Anti-recommendation, the "Southern Carbonara Recipe" at the Le Méridien Dallas By The Galleria by the Galleria. It's like a cheesecake with spaghetti and fried chicken tenders.
• Brandon:
  • Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
  • Homo Deus
  • Ezra Klein interview with Yuval Harari.

• Matt:

  • New Spoon album Hot Thoughts
  • Radiolab Presents: More Perfect, a Brandon retro-recommendation.
  • Floppy Drive Orchestra: Beat It
  • Fighting Johnny Leadgen and Mailinator

  Cover-art from You Had One Job.

Sponsored By:

• Pivotal: Cloud Foundry Summit is the premier event for enterprise app developers. Want to focus on innovation and streamline your development pipeline? Summit 2017 will make you an expert in microservices and continuous delivery in your language or framework of choice. Fast-track yourself and your business with the quickest way to deliver apps. Promo Code: cfsv17cote
• Chef: ChefConf 2017 - ChefCon is coming up, May 22nd to 24th in Austin, Texas. Early bird pricing through March 31st.
• Chef: AWS User Group Sydney - AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate, Matt Ray giving a talk there.
• DevOpsDays: DevOps Days Tokyo April 25th - Matt will be there.
• Chef: Hands on with Habitat - Tokyo - Chef recently announced a new open source framework for application automation, Habitat. We are embarking on a tour of cities around the world to provide you with hands-on experience with the project. The workshops are free to attend – we’d love for you to join us.
• Chef: Chef Meetup - Singapore April 29th - The team from Chef is on the road helping people learn about Chef for Windows & Habitat. We will be in Singapore for a Hands-on with Chef and Hands-on with Habitat workshop. We would love to catch-up with you to hear about your continuous automation efforts while we are in town, too.
• IBM: An open source, real-time, continuous data sync service for web, IoT, and mobile.
• Buckets of Fun: Microservices Austin Meetup - This is a technical meetup ( technical referring to content ( recruiters don't waste your time ) ); in an ideal world each meeting will have code involved. Whether that be on the development side or operations side depends on the subject matter. But my "hope" is that every meetup produces some positive outcome. Whether that being a person choosing to present has a feedback loop outside of their bias coworkers or just having general feedback.