

Software Defined Talk
Software Defined Talk LLC
Get ready for a weekly dose of all things Enterprise Software and Cloud Computing! Join us as we dive into topics including Kubernetes, DevOps, Serverless, Security and Coding. Plus, we’ll keep you entertained with plenty of off-topic banter and nonsense. Don’t worry if you miss the latest industry conference - we’ve got you covered with recaps of all the latest news from AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).
Episodes
Mentioned books

Dec 15, 2018 • 59min
Episode 159: "Cloud native is pretty simple. You just need to know Kubernetes, Prometheus, Fluentd, Jaeger, Envoy, Core DNS, Linkerd, Rook, Vitess, Etcd and Raft."
This week we recap all the news and announcements from the KubeCon Keynotes and discuss the repercussions of Australia’s new encryption-busting law. Plus, Brandon offers his review of “The Illustrated Children’s Guide to Kubernetes“ and Phippy.
Relevant to your interests
Australia's Encryption-Busting Law Could Impact Global Privacy
Red Hat fiddles with OpenShift Dedicated and lures customers with price cuts
Docker's top deck stands by Swarm in face of Kubernetes storm
The 15-Year Odyssey Behind VMware's Ascent To Corporate Greatness
IBM Sells Software for Once
The First Open, Multi-cloud Serverless Platform for the Enterprise Is Here. Try out Pivotal Function Service Today!
Facing up to the need for regulation - Microsoft recognises Big Brother potential
VMware Extends Istio into the 'NSX Service Mesh' for Microservices
2018: The Biggest Year for Open Source Software Ever! (Part Deux)
DocuSign beats Wall Street expectations, reveals executive and board shuffle
The Etcd Database Joins the Cloud Native Computing Foundation
Kubernetes is not a development platform
Oracle Cloud Native Framework Promises 'Bi-Directional' Cloud Portability
Dell votes to buy back VMware tracking stock and go public again
Knative Meshes Kubernetes with Serverless Workloads
What makes a company a 'tech company,' and is the title worth the responsibility?
Everything that was announced at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon
Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A – Chick-fil-A Tech Blog – Medium
CNCF to Host etcd - Cloud Native Computing Foundation
Christopher Luciano on Kubernetes & Istio, Software Defined Interviews.
Matt Ray’s tweet goes viral (soft of)
Warrant Canary via Wikipedia
Nonsense
Costco is selling Macs
Sponsors
Datadog
Sign up for a free trial today at www.datadog.com/softwaredefinedtalk
Techmeme Ride Home
Search your podcast app for RIDE HOME and subscribe to the Techmeme Ride Home podcast.
Conferences, et. al.
2019, a city near you: The 2019 SpringTours are posted. Coté will be speaking at many of these, hopefully all the ones in EMEA. They’re free and all about programming and DevOps things. Free lunch and stickers!
Get a Free SDT T-Shirt
Write an iTunes Review on the SDT iTunes Page.
Send an email to stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com and include the following: T-Shirt Size, Preferred Color (Light Blue, Gray, Black) and Postal address. First come, first serve. while supplies last! Can only ship T-Shirts within the United States
SDT news & hype
Join us in Slack.
Follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook or LinkedIn
Send your postal address to stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com and we will send you a sticker.
Listen to the Software Defined Interviews Podcast. Check out the back catalog
Brandon built the Quick Concall iPhone App and he wants you to buy it for $0.99.
Recommendations
Brandon: Bear Brook Podcast
Matt: My new favorite episode of 99% Invisible: Devolutionary Design.
Sponsored By:Datadog Free Trial: This episode is sponsored by Datadog, a monitoring platform for cloud-scale infrastructure and applications. Built by engineers, for engineers, Datadog provides visibility into more than 200 technologies, including AWS, Chef, and Docker, with built-in metric dashboards and automated alerts. With end-to-end request tracing, Datadog provides visibility into your applications and their underlying infrastructure—all in one place. Sign up for a free trial today!Techmeme Ride Home: For 15 years, Techmeme.com has been the tech world's favorite news source. The Ride Home is a daily summary of all of Techmeme's headlines in podcast form.Search your podcast app for RIDE HOME and subscribe to the Techmeme Ride Home podcast.

Dec 8, 2018 • 59min
Episode 158: Istio is only a check box away
Istio comes to GKE, Kubernetes needs to be patched, Microsoft & Docker announce a standard and what is going on at Faceback. We talk about all this and give you some tips for your next QBR.
Relevant to your interests
Kubernetes' first major security hole discovered.
The Story of the First Kubernetes Critical CVE.
Google Integrates Istio Service Mesh into Kubernetes Service.
Nearly 250 Pages of Devastating Internal Facebook Documents Posted Online By UK Parliament.
Microsoft and Docker team up to make packaging and running cloud-native applications easier
Defining “field CTO”: The Pivotal CTO Team Offers You Strategic Advisors. James Urquhart Just Made That Team Even Better.
Announcing Open Source of WPF, Windows Forms, and WinUI at Microsoft Connect(); 2018 - Windows Developer Blog
Microsoft is building a Chromium-powered web browser that will replace Edge on Windows 10
China’s Alibaba Takes On Amazon in European Cloud
## Nonsense
The Economist’s books of the year.
Lime and Bird worth $10B+ each or 5x to 10x more than their last valuations.
## Sponsored by DataDog
This episode is sponsored by Datadog. Sign up for a free trial today at https://www.datadog.com/softwaredefinedtalk and tell them your friends at Software Defined Talk sent you.
Conferences, et. al.
Dec 12th and 13th, Toronto - SpringTour Toronto, Coté MC’ing doing open spaces. He won’t be at the Paris one, Dec 4th and 5th which is stupid planning on his part.
2019, a city near you: The 2019 SpringTours are posted. Coté will be speaking at many of these, hopefully all the ones in EMEA. They’re free and all about programming and DevOps things. Free lunch and stickers!
## Get a Free SDT T-Shirt
Write an iTunes review of SDT and get a free SDT T-Shirt.
Write an iTunes Review on the SDT iTunes Page.
Send an email to stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com and include the following: T-Shirt Size, Preferred Color (Light Blue, Gray, Black) and Postal address. First come, first serve. while supplies last! Can only ship T-Shirts within the United States
## SDT news & hype
Join us in Slack.
Follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook or LinkedIn
Send your postal address to stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com and we will send you a sticker.
Listen to the Software Defined Interviews Podcast. Check out the back catalog
Brandon built the Quick Concall iPhone App and he wants you to buy it for $0.99.
## Recommendations
Brandon: Ralph Breaks the Internet and Slate Reviews Ticket to Ride.
Matt: My new favorite episode of 99% Invisible: Devolutionary Design.
Coté: since Christmas is near, and Sinterklaas has come and gone, Apple Watch 4 (no LTE in NL), I recommend revisiting the best Christmas video ever. (I gotta get me some of them sunglasses!)
Photo CreditSponsored By:Datadog Free Trial: This episode is sponsored by Datadog, a monitoring platform for cloud-scale infrastructure and applications. Built by engineers, for engineers, Datadog provides visibility into more than 200 technologies, including AWS, Chef, and Docker, with built-in metric dashboards and automated alerts. With end-to-end request tracing, Datadog provides visibility into your applications and their underlying infrastructure—all in one place. Sign up for a free trial today!

Nov 30, 2018 • 1h 17min
Episode 157: Brandon takes a victory lap & Australia muthafuckers!
It’s AWS re:Invent. We talk about the “everything” of it, private cloud, and some RC cars. Also, what exactly is a “field CTO”?
AWS Announcements
AWS Launches, Previews, and Pre-Announcements at re:Invent 2018
Analytics
AWS Lake Formation: Build a secure data lake in days
Amazon Managed Streaming for Kafka (MSK): Fully managed, highly available, and secure Apache Kafka service
Blockchain
Amazon Managed Blockchain: Create and manage scalable blockchain networks
Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB): Fully managed ledger database
Compute
Amazon EC2 A1 Instances: Optimized for scale-out workloads
Amazon EC2 C5n Instances: Up to 100 Gbps network bandwidth
Amazon EC2 P3dn Instances: Optimized for distributed ML training
AWS Outposts – a new dimension to AWS Cloud (Hybrid Cloud with VMware), Run AWS infrastructure on-premises
This is VMware?
Database
Amazon RDS on VMware: Automate on-premises database management
Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB): Fully managed ledger database
Amazon Timestream: Fully managed time series database
Internet of Things
AWS IoT Events: IoT event detection and response
AWS IoT SiteWise: IoT data collector and interpreter
AWS IoT Things Graph: Easily connect devices and web services
AWS Partner Device Catalog: Curated catalog of AWS-compatible IoT hardware
Lambda
New languages (Ruby, C++, Rust), more coming Erlang, Elixir, Cobol, N|Solid, PHP
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-for-aws-lambda-use-any-programming-language-and-share-common-components/
Announcements are still happening
Machine Learning
Amazon Elastic Inference: Deep learning inference acceleration
Amazon Forecast: Increase forecast accuracy using machine learning
Amazon Personalize: Build real-time recommendations into your applications
Amazon Textract: Extract text and data from documents
AWS Inferentia: Machine learning inference chip
Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth – Build Highly Accurate Datasets
Amazon SageMaker RL – Managed Reinforcement Learning with Amazon SageMaker
AWS DeepRacer – Go Hands-On with Reinforcement Learning at re:Invent, Autonomous 1/18th scale race car, driven by ML
Machine Learning algorithms and model packages now available in AWS Marketplace
Management & Governance
AWS App Mesh: Monitor and control microservices
AWS Cloud Map: Service discovery for cloud resources
AWS Control Tower: Set up and govern a secure, compliant multi-account environment
AWS License Manager: Track, manage and control license usage
Media Services
AWS Elemental MediaConnect: Reliable and secure live video transport
Migration & Transfer
AWS DataSync: Simple, fast, online data transfer
AWS Transfer for SFTP: Fully managed SFTP service
Mobile
AWS Amplify: Build and deploy mobile and web applications
Networking & Content Delivery
AWS Global Accelerator: Improve application availability and performance
AWS Transit Gateway: Easily scale VPC and account connections
Robotics
AWS RoboMaker: Develop, test, and deploy robotics applications
Satellite
AWS Ground Station: Fully managed ground station as a service
Security, Identity, & Compliance
AWS Security Hub: Unified security and compliance center
Storage
Amazon FSx for Lustre: Fully managed compute-intensive file system
Amazon FSx for Windows File Server: Fully managed Windows native file system
Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering: Save with auto-tiering storage
S3 Glacier Deep Archive
Lydia says AWS deals are huge.
Relevant to your interests
No room this week.
Sponsored by Solarwinds
Over 275,000 customers worldwide and 499 of the Fortune 500 trust and rely on SolarWinds for their monitoring software. To learn more or try the company’s DevOps products for free, visit http://solarwinds.com/devops.
Conferences, et. al.
Dec 12th and 13th, Toronto - SpringTour Toronto, Coté MC’ing doing open spaces. He won’t be at the Paris one, Dec 4th and 5th which is stupid planning on his part.
2019, a city near you: The 2019 SpringTours are posted. Coté will be speaking at many of these, hopefully all the ones in EMEA. They’re free and all about programming and DevOps things. Free lunch and stickers!
Get a Free SDT T-Shirt
Write an iTunes review of SDT and get a free SDT T-Shirt.
Write an iTunes Review on the SDT iTunes Page.
Send an email to stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com and include the following: T-Shirt Size, Preferred Color (Light Blue, Gray, Black) and Postal address. First come, first serve. while supplies last! Can only ship T-Shirts within the United States
SDT news & hype
Join us in Slack.
Follow us on Twitter, Instagram or LinkedIn
Send your postal address to stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com and we will send you a sticker.
Listen to the Software Defined Interviews Podcast. Check out the back catalog
Brandon built the Quick Concall iPhone App and he wants you to buy it for $0.99.
Recommendations
Brandon: Ticket to Ride Board Game
Matt: Speaking of trains, I took the train from Canberra to Sydney. Fantastic!
Coté: Patriot season 2. It’s pretty good. And: HP Color LaserJet Pro M254dw.
Sponsored By:SolarWinds: This episode is sponsored by SolarWinds AppOptics. To learn more or try it free for 14 days visit http://appoptics.com/sdt.

Nov 21, 2018 • 1h 12min
Episode 156: People: Google doesn’t get ‘enterprise’ and should have people who’re more enterprise focused. GOOG: Look, we just hired an enterprise focused person. People: OMG! Why did just hire an enterprise person?
See title.
Google Cloud
Diane Greene steps down as Google's cloud chief
Google looks to former Oracle exec Thomas Kurian to move cloud business along
Longer CNBC piece on the switch.
Ray Wang: “Enterprise customers need a different level of care, and Google hasn't been able to deliver to date. So the resources available to Diane may not have always been allocated in the right place, but the resource is there and he has to sit down and see what partners and customer are saying.”
More: ‘This might take the form of a growth of the sales or go-to-market teams at Google Cloud, but essentially "enterprises need consistency and roadmaps to adjust as they go," Wang said, and Google Cloud needs to do better at delivering that if it wants to take a bigger chunk of the public cloud market over the crucial coming years. "Google has the opportunity, but the window is closing, so there is 18 months to two years to right the ship," he said.’
History: built middleware business in the 2000s, Fusion ERP apps integration, cloud business.
The Corporate Culture Survival Guide.
Relevant to your interests
Coté’s stump speech recordings.
CX is nothing if you don’t change your business - same for digital transformation, e.g., maybe stuff here.
Uber getting more legal.
“Economic Recession Could Drive Serverless Standardization, Consolidation.”
Oracle to acquire Talari Networks.
BlackBerry agrees to acquire Cylance for $1.4 billion.
Major SMS security lapse is a reminder to use authenticator apps instead.
AWS rolls out new security feature to prevent accidental S3 data leaks.
Users "Starting to Reach for Torches and Pitchforks" amid Fresh Azure and Office 365 Lockout.
Tim Cook defends using Google as primary search engine on Apple devices.
Charles Phillips billboards.
Nonsense
Mark Zuckerburg wants you to use Android
Sponsored by Solarwinds
This episode is sponsored by SolarWinds® and this week, SolarWinds wants you to know about their tools designed for DevOps: Pingdom®, AppOptics™, Papertrail™, and Loggly®.
Today’s recognized pillars of observability combine metrics, traces, and logs to enable DevOps teams to monitor system and application performance. But, these capabilities provide only limited insights into application performance because they ignore the user’s experience—a critical measure of application performance.
Understanding if a system is slow or unavailable from an end user’s perspective is crucial in today’s digital world, even if the metrics are good and there are no alerts.
Altogether, the combined functionality of Pingdom, AppOptics, Papertrail, and Loggly brings together real user monitoring, synthetic user monitoring, web and application performance metrics, distributed tracing, event aggregation, and log management to help proactively identify bottlenecks and accelerate troubleshooting.
By bringing user experience, metrics, traces, and logs together with an easy-to-use, complementary toolkit, DevOps teams gain unmatched visibility into their cloud environment, so they can seamlessly follow an alert or issue from one product into another to resolve issues quickly and get back to focusing on the more proactive elements of their job.
Over 275,000 customers worldwide and 499 of the Fortune 500 trust and rely on SolarWinds for their monitoring software. To learn more or try the company’s DevOps products for free, visit http://solarwinds.com/devops.
Going to AWS re:Invent? Visit SolarWinds at booth 608 to see their products designed for DevOps first-hand.
Conferences, et. al.
Dec 12th and 13th, Toronto - SpringTour Toronto, Coté MC’ing doing open spaces. He won’t be at the Paris one, Dec 4th and 5th which is stupid planning on his part.
2019, a city near you: The 2019 SpringTours are posted. Coté will be speaking at many of these, hopefully all the ones in EMEA. They’re free and all about programming and DevOps things. Free lunch and stickers!
Get a Free SDT T-Shirt
Write an iTunes review of SDT and get a free SDT T-Shirt.
Write an ITunes Review on the SDT iTunes Page.
Send an email to stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com and include the following: T-Shirt Size, Preferred Color (Light Blue, Gray, Black) and Postal address. First come, first serve. while supplies last!
Listener Feedback
Brian from Austin got T-shirt because he wrote an iTunes Review!
SDT news & hype
Join us in Slack.
Follow us on Twitter, Instagram or LinkedIn
Send your postal address to stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com and we will send you a sticker.
Listen to the Software Defined Interviews Podcast. Check out the back catalog
Brandon built the Quick Concall iPhone App and he wants you to buy it for $0.99.
Recommendations
Brandon: Homecoming.
Coté: UK Registered Traveler, bread.
Sponsored By:SolarWinds: This episode is sponsored by SolarWinds AppOptics. To learn more or try it free for 14 days visit http://appoptics.com/sdt.

Nov 15, 2018 • 1h 22min
Episode 155: Existing investments & business innovation fuel
Hybrid cloud and kubernetes with Cisco, and the latest beard analysis from the OpenStack community, and some spontaneous ERP and ethics of Facebook meandering - all this week in our power episode!
Relevant to your interests
Cisco Introduces First Hybrid Kubernetes Platform Support For Amazon EKS
“The Cisco Hybrid Solution for Kubernetes on AWS enables configuration of the Kubernetes-based Cisco Container Platform optimized for ease of deploying applications on Kubernetes across either Cisco-based on-premises infrastructure or the Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (Amazon EKS).”
I’m pretty sure this means Active Directory now works with k8s:
The style, diction, and tone of this piece is some classic power-marketing, e.g., “first,” “only,” “Enterprises have been forced to make a tradeoff in these choices that they would rather avoid.” Also, notice the “I HAVE BEEN TELLING YOU THIS” side-notes here and there.
Cisco’s site on it, and press release.
Developer value-propin’, from the Cisco PR quote: “Now, developers can use existing investments to build new cloud-scale applications that fuel business innovation.” And, elsewhere: “Public clouds provide developers with platforms for rapidly developing and deploying applications, yet most enterprises have their own data centers that house important workloads. That’s why hybrid cloud is a requirement for most enterprises.”
Well, at least their straight-up on pricing: “Pricing for software-only subscriptions will start at approximately $65,000 per year for a typical entry-level configuration. On AWS, customers pay $0.20 per hour for each Amazon EKS cluster that they create in addition to the AWS resources (e.g. Amazon EC2 instances or Amazon Elastic Block Store volumes) they create to run Kubernetes worker nodes.”
SAP snaps up Qualtrics for $8B days before its expected IPO, will keep Seattle office: “Qualtrics offers software-as-a-service that companies use to measure and manage their reputations with current and prospective customers as well as a similar service for internal use managing employees.”
Report: Vista Equity Partners poised to pay $1.9 billion in private-equity deal for Apptio
Report: Amazon picks New York and Northern Virginia for HQ2
Google went down after traffic was routed through China and Russia
Amazon Announces New York and Virginia as HQ2 Picks
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez slams Amazon’s imminent arrival in Queens
OpenStack Expands With New Projects, Canonical’s CEO Is Not Thrilled
Red Hat Squeezes OpenStack, OpenShift Closer Together
OpenStack expands focus beyond the IaaS cloud
The Foundation keeps on the plan of expanding its portfolio.
Red Hat blends Kubernetes into Red Hat OpenStack Platform 14
Coder: $4.5M Series Seed Announcement – Coder – Medium
Sponsored by DataDog
This episode is sponsored by Datadog and this week Datadog wants you to know about Watchdog.
Watchdog automatically detects performance problems in your applications without any manual setup or configuration. By continuously examining application performance data, it identifies anomalies, like a sudden spike in hit rate, that could otherwise have remained invisible. Once an anomaly is detected, Watchdog provides you with all the relevant information you need to get to the root cause faster, such as stack traces, error messages, and related issues from the same timeframe.
Sign up for a free trial today at https://www.datadog.com/softwaredefinedtalk and tell them your friends at Software Defined Talk sent you.
Nonsense
Stamps set for largest-ever price increase in January 2019
The Poddys
Conferences, et. al.
Nov 20th, London: Dell Tech Forum UK - Coté speaking with the pro-Pivotal knob on 11.
Dec 6th, Warsaw - Meetup in Warsaw, Coté talking about enterprise architects, 3rd round,
Dec 8th, Lublin Poland - J-Santa.
Dec 12th and 13th, Toronto - SpringTour Toronto, Coté MC’ing doing open spaces. He won’t be at the Paris one, Dec 4th and 5th which is stupid planning on his part.
2019, a city near you: The 2019 SpringTours are posted. Coté will be speaking at many of these, hopefully all the ones in EMEA. They’re free and all about programming and DevOps things. Free lunch and stickers!
## Get a Free SDT T-Shirt
Write an iTunes review of SDT and get a free SDT T-Shirt. We can only send ship T-Shirts within the Continental United States. Sorry International listeners. Here is what you need to do:
Write an ITunes Review on the SDT iTunes Page.
Send an email to stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com and include the following:
Your T-Shirt Size
Preferred Color (Light Blue, Gray, Black)
Username you used to write the iTunes review
Postal address
First come, first serve. while supplies last!
Advertise your company on Software Defined Talk
Listener Feedback
Ryan from Slack proposes that true borders of the South are dictated by where Sweet Tea is served.
Yogi Rampuria found Coté by the sound of his voice and asked for 20 stickers.
## SDT news & hype
Join us in Slack.
Send your postal address to stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com and we will send you a sticker.
Listen to this week’s Software Defined Interviews Podcast with Zane Rockenbaugh
Software Defined Talk Members Only Podcast now for free!
Brandon built the Quick Concall iPhone App and he wants you to buy it for $0.99.
Recommendations
Brandon:
Reply All: The Snapchat Thief
Introducing CYBER: A Hacking Podcast by Motherboard.
Chaos Monkeys.
Coté: I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Nietzsche.
Sponsored By:Datadog Free Trial: This episode is sponsored by Datadog, a monitoring platform for cloud-scale infrastructure and applications. Built by engineers, for engineers, Datadog provides visibility into more than 200 technologies, including AWS, Chef, and Docker, with built-in metric dashboards and automated alerts. With end-to-end request tracing, Datadog provides visibility into your applications and their underlying infrastructure—all in one place. Sign up for a free trial today!

Nov 11, 2018 • 1h 4min
Episode 154: Singapore Sanka & tech idears
More consolidation in the kubernetes community, plus the X Windowing System and Canonical. Related: “I’m not waiting for an answer, I’m just going to go on.”
Sponsored by SolarWinds
This episode is sponsored by SolarWinds and this week SolarWinds wants you to know about their DevOps tool: AppOptics.
Today, there is a divide between application and infrastructure health metrics—and the lack of unified dashboards, alerting, and management. With SolarWinds AppOptics you get a bird’s-eye view across all your resources on a single pane of glass—but can also drill quickly into the details.
AppOptics includes built-in integrations for over 150 cloud-first applications, instant visibility into server and infrastructure performance, robust custom metrics dashboards, and automated APM request tracing. It’s SaaS-hosted, easy to manage, and budget friendly.
Over 275,000 customers trust SolarWinds for the performance data they need, and AppOptics lets developers and operations get back to doing what they love: delighting users.
Learn more or try it free for 14 days, just go to appoptics.com/sdt
Are you going to AWS re:Invent? Make sure to visit SolarWinds at booth 608 to see AppOptics first-hand and learn about the complete DevOps suite of products, providing unmatched visibility across user experience, metrics, traces, and logs.
Relevant to your interests
Oracle Expanding New Cloud Platform to 13 Regions by 2019
Jeff Bezos says he's choosing HQ2 location with his heart
IBM acquires Red Hat, but what does that mean?
CA/Broadcom selling off Veracode:
Buying a lot, selling a little
Broadcom Completes CA Technologies Acquisition, Sells Veracode to Private Equity Firm.
New Lower-Cost, AMD-Powered M5a and R5a EC2 Instances
VMware buys Heptio
VMware acquires Heptio, the startup founded by 2 co-founders of Kubernetes
Pivotal’s take: We’re Looking Forward to Welcoming Heptio to the Family! This is Why Our Customers Will be the Big Winners.
RedMonk’s O’Grady:
What Heptio actually does: “the company chose a unique path of not quite product company, and not quite full service company, but borrowing elements of both. This fit the market need in many cases, but posed significant challenges from a marketing and messaging standpoint, as the market understands product companies and service companies but is less comfortable with descriptions that don’t entirely fit into either bucket.”
“None of [the open source tools developers love(d) so much] concerned VMware particularly, because as its early developer attention waned its popularity within the operations side of the house – and central IT in particular – boomed. Which has been good for the company generally as central IT has historically been less concerned both about software being open source and being free than developers, which has led to VMware becoming an enterprise datacenter standard which in turn led to its current $60.7B market cap – a valuation roughly double that of Red Hat’s, for context.”
Related: El Reg decoder ring.
Heptio's Episode of Exegesis podcast.
Nonsense
World Plug Types - what a shit-show.
“Hajime Sorayama robot art.”
Conferences, et. al.
Nov 3rd to Nov 12th - SpringOne Tour - Singapore Nov 12th.
Nov 14th to 16th - Devoxx Belgium, Antwerp. Coté’s presenting on enterprise architecture.
Dec 6th - Meetup in Warsaw, Coté talking about enterprise architects, 3rd round.
Dec 12th and 13th - SpringTour Toronto, Coté. MAYBE NOT!
Get a Free SDT T-Shirt
Write an iTunes review of SDT and get a free SDT T-Shirt. We can only send ship T-Shirts within the Continental United States. Sorry International listeners. Here is what you need to do:
Write an ITunes Review on the SDT iTunes Page.
Send an email to stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com and include the following:
Your T-Shirt Size
Preferred Color (Light Blue, Gray, Black)
Username you used to write the iTunes review
Postal address
First come, first serve. while supplies last!
Listener Feedback
Jay from Ohio wrote in to get six stickers for his DevOps team. He tells us “I usually listen at 1.75x speed, and accidentally put you guys on at 1.0x and Coté's semi-coherent monologues turned into the drunk uncle that I wish I had. I highly recommend slowing the podcast down a bit for a good laugh” Also, wrote an iTunes review!
Gut full of floss - Craig from Slack tell us that cotton candy is known as Fairy Floss in Australia.
Listener Recommendations
Nathan from Slack recommends the Humble Book Bundle: DevOps by O'Reilly (does one italicize a bundle of books?). Pay what you want for awesome ebooks and support charity!
SDT news & hype
Join us in Slack.
Send your postal address to stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com and we will send you a sticker.
Listen to this week’s Software Defined Interviews Podcast with Zane Rockenbaugh
Software Defined Talk Members Only Podcast now for free!
Heptio's Episode
Brandon built the Quick Concall iPhone App and he wants you to buy it for $0.99.
Recommendations
Matt: Libraries (again)/Humble Bundle.
Brandon: Nest.
Coté: Mercury Reader, heir to Readablity (a little flakey, but fine).
Sponsored By:SolarWinds: This episode is sponsored by SolarWinds AppOptics. To learn more or try it free for 14 days visit http://appoptics.com/sdt.

Nov 1, 2018 • 1h 25min
Episode 153: “I have no idea, but I’ll go on,” or IBM buying Red Hat
IBM is buying Red Hat. Topic acquired.
Sponsored by DataDog
This episode is sponsored by Datadog and this week Datadog wants you to know about Watchdog.
Watchdog automatically detects performance problems in your applications without any manual setup or configuration. By continuously examining application performance data, it identifies anomalies, like a sudden spike in hit rate, that could otherwise have remained invisible. Once an anomaly is detected, Watchdog provides you with all the relevant information you need to get to the root cause faster, such as stack traces, error messages, and related issues from the same timeframe.
Sign up for a free trial today at https://www.datadog.com/softwaredefinedtalk and tell them your friends at Software Defined Talk sent you.
IBM and Red Hat Acquisition
IBM Nears Deal to Acquire Software Maker Red Hat
IBM To Acquire Red Hat, Completely Changing The Cloud Landscape And Becoming World's #1 Hybrid Cloud Provider
Banks could reap as much as $115 million for orchestrating the IBM-Red Hat deal
Cloud Wars Forcing Irrational Open Source Takeovers
Red Hat and IBM: Elephants Can Dance
Armed with Red Hat, IBM launches a cloud war against Amazon, Microsoft and Google | ZDNet
Analysis: Red Hat’s continued independence is key to success of IBM’s $34B acquisition
IBM Acquires Red Hat — What This Means for Open Source
Statement on the IBM acquisition of Red Hat from Ubuntu
Big Blue Puts on a Red Hat: IBM Acquires Red Hat
Big Blue’s takeover of Red Hat could produce an über-cloud
Blockbuster IBM-Red Hat Deal Draws Support – and Concerns for the ‘Spirit of Linux’
“I like the ones where you prepare.” (Coté ed.)
Look, Red Hat and IBM are Pivotal competitors, good ones: we wish them success in this complex integration, it’s good they’re finally trying to fix their cloud portfolio, we’re hiring, etc., etc.. Let’s take it for mature-granted that we’d prefer enterprises be Pivotal customers than IBM/Red Hat customers. Now, let’s put that aside.
This is an exquisite slide from their deck:
Easily the best corporate deck slide of 2018.
First, this is a bold, good move. Acquiring Red Hat has always been a hill too high and it’s kind of mind-blowing that someone actually did it. The valuation here is sort of besides the point of anything impressive. In contrast, the GitHub valuation was impressive because GitHub is a one product company (please don’t email me about “community” as a separate product - sure thing, I agree). Red Hat is kind of everything IBM has missing…except public cloud.
To be, I guess, contrarian and annoyingly not Pivotal-biased, I think it’ll be hard for IBM to fuck this up.
On that last point, Ben Thompson: “The company has spent the years since then claiming it is committed to catching up in the public cloud, but the truth is that Palmisano sealed the company’s cloud fate when he failed to invest a decade ago; indeed, one of the most important takeaways from the Red Hat acquisition is the admission that IBM’s public cloud efforts are effectively dead.”
In other word, IBM is too late to catch-up to public cloud co.’s, it’d need to spend lots of capex to get close.
Related, sick nerd burn: “Meanwhile, [IBM’s] aforementioned commitment to the cloud has mostly been an accounting fiction derived from re-classifying existing businesses”
Fixing IBM’s cloud business. What was wrong in the first place?
Things Red Hat has: RHEL revenue, JBoss developer presence, product/developer know-how, support know-how, OSS good-will, OpenShift as a k8s distribution:
RHEL & IBM has a foot-print in most all enterprise stacks, but not public cloud(?)
IBM knows how to eek out OS revenue, so does Red Hat.
JBoss + WebSphere. At some point, IBM had a huge developer community. They likely do among enterprise developers (but even there, it’s been fading). Red Hat has developers - I assume. People do like kubernetes.
The know-how and good will are interesting - added to IBM’s OSS equivalent (they still have that?) you have, potentially, the biggest OSS people around…? I’m not sure which standards bodies this allows them more control over, no which projects. Google and Microsoft are contenders here too.
“Lock-in”:
From the press release: “research shows that 80 percent of business workloads have yet to move to the cloud, held back by the proprietary nature of today’s cloud market.” (No citation provided. I will assume it’s from the Anonymous Galactic Research Board Whose IP Licensing Policy Prohibits Your From Citing Us By Name Because We Prefer to Peacefully Float In Space Like Those Rasta Dudes in William Gibson Books But The Good Early Ones Not The Weird In The Present Ones Except For the Blue Color of Bigend’s Suit Which Was Actually Pretty Cool - But Cuban Parkour Ninja Cults? Boy.)
See also: Turns out Pareto was some kind of every single study ever genius. Shut it down, boys, turns out every survey result ends up in an 80/20 split.
As ever, this topic vexes me. I take lock-in to mean:
I don’t want to keep paying this rent-seeker, aka, “maintenance contracts - AMIRIGHT?.” I’m just interested in paying less. If you gave me a closed source offering that was free, I’d be just as happy.
I don’t want to get trapped in an aging stack that isn’t evolving (e.g., I want to use node.js on UNIVACs, or something), so I need “the freedom to leave” to get the benefits of new technologies.
I like having the source code for transparency, to make my own forks, and/or because rainbows and sandals.
Like, seriously, what options do you have to move to?
DIY stack - you’re going to take the IBM/Red Hat stack and run it all on your own, merging in new releases and patches, even forking and evolving it yourself. Will all the IBM stuff be available? What if you run on VMware or Azure or Softlayer? How do you rebuild that entire stack? So you just want to rebuild a little bit of it? If you throw OpenStack with KVM in there, plus whatever SDN and storage stuff you could get in open source, throw in some OSS network routing…you could get away with the only proprietary thing being chips and other rando hardware things. You’ll need some bare-metel BIOS/firmware update things.
Begged question: how far (and up!) the stack do you want to be un-proprietary? Only use OSS Android on jail-broken phones? No iPhones, clearly, and toss out Safari, macOS, and Windows - maybe you can cruise in with some HTML5 stuff through Firefox and Chrome on the desktop and mobile, then on some Eclipse for GUIs?
AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, AzureStack, Pivotal ready stack with VMware - perhaps you could take the thin k8s and PaaS layer from the Red Hat IBM stack and move it to those clouds? Will that work? Is it better, economically and innovation roadmap-ally than just sticking with IBM/Red Hat
Alibaba and the other non-Western clouds. Same.
MSPs like Rackspace. Maybe - the Rackspace people could just run whatever you want. See concerns of #1, plus the premium paid for “fanatical.” Maybe Rackspace has some SRE magic that allows them to do what you’d be doing at 80% of the cost, or something.
I don’t understand this reasoning. How is IBM + Red Hat lack of “proprietary nature”? If I’m running an IBM/RedHat stack, can I just move off all my workloads over night, paying nothing to move and then run my workloads, like, perfectly? If I’m running on that stack, and then I want to move to Google Cloud, does that work? Where-else would I go? Can I just take my pods and throw them onto Azure?
Also, if any of these are practically true - it’s a shitty business for IBM/Red Hat to be in, at least a huge risk for them to carry. Any time a customer cashes in on freedom to leave, that’s lost revenue to IBM/Red Hat.
My point is: I wish we’d stop talking about lock-in and focus on more practical matters, namely, does the technology work, does it work in a good ecosystem/community (I can find and make it work with other stuff), does it evolve/innovate at a pace I like, and am I happy with the initial and ongoing costs. If the answer to all of those is yes, I don’t think people care about OSS versus closed. But what do I know, I don’t know such stuff, I just do slides.
What really matters is getting the two sales forces to sell each other’s stuff, esp. accelerating OpenShift. The IBM sales force has to sell moving away from their traditional offerings (WebSphere, 3 tier, etc.) and instead sell modernizing to OpenShift. That’s fine, but a lot to ask. Also, the comp. plans might get dicey. Part of the point of modernizing is to reduce costs, implying a lower up-front deal-size and smaller ongoing deal-size. So, you’re asking the IBM rep to sell cheaper products, potentially. And if you’re not, see lock-in screed above on pricing. There’s not much upside to sales people here, aside from maybe holding onto an eroding market, but that’s years out, sales people are short-term focused by design. Red Hat sales people might fare better because they’re used to that deal size and can sell more; however, IBM sales people will resist these Red Hat people getting into their account and snatching their paper. All of this is not a killer, but likely the bulk of work that needs to be nailed to synergize maximally (my favorite type of synergizing).
Brandon’s winners/looses, also O’Grady’s.
Cloud Earnings
Amazon says AWS revenue jumped 46 percent in third quarter
Microsoft’s commercial cloud revenue jumped 47 percent in its fiscal Q1, but Azure growth slows
Google Cloud Revenue Boosts Alphabet’s Earnings - SDxCentral
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Oracle Open World 2018: CEO Mark Hurd says SAP ERP customers will defect
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Conferences, et. al.
Nov 3rd to Nov 12th - SpringOne Tour - all over the earth! Coté will be MC’ing Beijing Nov 3rd, Seoul Nov 8th, Tokyo Nov 6th, and Singapore Nov 12th.
Nov 14th to 16th - Devoxx Belgium, Antwerp. Coté’s presenting on enterprise architecture.
Dec 12th and 13th - SpringTour Toronto, Coté.
Listener Feedback
Jon from the UK said he got a new work laptop and needed some new stickers so we sent him some.
SDT news & hype
Join us in Slack.
Send your postal address to stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com and we will send you a sticker.
Brandon built the Quick Concall iPhone App and he wants you to buy it for $0.99.
Recommendations
Matt: The Dark Forest.
Brandon:
Frontline: The Facebook Dilemma
The Daily 10/31 — The Business of Internet Outrage
Coté: Trick-or-treating in Amsterdam. Notablity still good.
Sponsored By:Datadog Free Trial: This episode is sponsored by Datadog, a monitoring platform for cloud-scale infrastructure and applications. Built by engineers, for engineers, Datadog provides visibility into more than 200 technologies, including AWS, Chef, and Docker, with built-in metric dashboards and automated alerts. With end-to-end request tracing, Datadog provides visibility into your applications and their underlying infrastructure—all in one place. Sign up for a free trial today!

Oct 24, 2018 • 1h 12min
Episode 152: Who put robots in my clouds? Oracle OpenWorld
There’s all sorts of cloud stuff coming out of Oracle OpenWorld this week, so Brando and Coté talk about the mouth-feel of the news. Related, Amazon’s attempts to get off Oracle in Ohio, iCloud dropping out, and JEDI problems.
Sponsored by SolarWinds
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Learn more or try it free for 14 days, just go to appoptics.com/sdt
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DTA goes cold on blockchain
I think the DevOps people are into talking about “product now”…?
Ellison makes convincing pitch on automation and security for Oracle Cloud 2.0...but can’t resist trashing AWS
Kurt’s summary of Oracle cloud stuff, pretty good.
Coté: Look, I don’t really know their portfolio well. It’s hard to follow cause it doesn’t show up in all my feeds like, well, everything else. I’m intrigued by their emphasis on performance and (to a lesser extent) cost. They really hit up the performance characteristics - I’m not sure they mention ease of use or “outcomes” very much.
The focus on security is bizarre. Not because they shouldn’t have these things, but because these things are, well, what they should have. Cloud vendors don’t go around chest thumping about how secure they are in the same way that bakers don’t go around chest thumping about how their food is edible.
Performance pitching has always been Oracle’s thing (as those of us who used to read printed trade rags know). It’s sort of indicative of easier sales: it’s all numbers in a spreadsheet, then you sort a column and it tells you which vendor to pick.
Then there’s Oracle commentary on Amazon of how hard it is to move off Oracle, just barely wrapping itself in the mantle of “because our stuff works better,” when at the core it seems like the worst case of lock-in rent-seeking:
‘Oracle Chairman and co-founder Larry Ellison isn't buying it. On the company's earnings call in December, Ellison said Amazon "is not moving off of Oracle." He reiterated his point at an August event, saying, "I don't think they can do it.
‘They've had 10 years to get off Oracle, and they're still on Oracle," he said. "And it's not going to be easy for them to use their own technology. It's not going to be cost-effective. I mean, it's really, really hard.’
☞ This kind of talk is why we all love to hear “Larry” (as everyone calls him) talk. He’s like the Steve Banon of the IT industry.
They should start demo’ing at DevOpsDays and O’Reilly conferences more.
Topic: when pitching to “the community” is irrelevant, or, “CIOs don’t go to your shit conferences, nerds.”
Now, to put me further out on on the ledge of not knowing Oracle well, they sell a shit-ton of ERP software. They could likely have a larger, positive impact on global productivity by making that ERP software better, no matter how good it is. In the coverage I’ve read, there’s little talk about how they’re revolutionizing ERP stuff - how “machine learning” is improving that. Can it figure out how to file expenses for me? Optimize a supply chain (what ever the fuck that means), etc.? For example, Oracle has the potential to turn all that Watson talk intro practical, everyday applications of “AI.” IBM doesn’t have an ERP suite (they just have re-selling and packaging other people’s stuff injected with Watson thingies - again, whatever the fuck that means) - but Oracle does, plus the foot-print of people using it. I’m sure there’s plenty of money in databases…but their potential to improve their customer’s life is probably more in apps.
Diginomica had some ERP coverage: Park Hotels going from analog to digital in accounting, and an excellent example from Red Cross work on improving outcomes. And then back to our regularly scheduled price/performance talk.
Kurt has some good, dry lines:
Burn-town: “[Oracle’s] Cloud 2.0 looks more like Cloud 0.5” compare to: “My project look like science fair, your project look like section 8.”
Amazon's move off Oracle caused Prime Day outage in big Ohio warehouse, internal report says
“The outage, which lasted for hours on Prime Day, resulted in over 15,000 delayed packages and roughly $90,000 in wasted labor costs, according to the report. Those costs don't include all the lost hours spent by engineers troubleshooting and fixing the errors or any potential lost sales.”
I assume Amazon has saved much more than that by moving off Oracle.
Meanwhile, downtime effects us all: Apple iCloud down for (gasp!) hours!
Topic: how much uptime do we really need? Cf. SRE last mile problems.
US congress-critters question prime directive of Pentagon's $10bn JEDI cloud contract
State of Wisconsin shares lessons learned on rolling out Oracle Exadata and how to reduce license costs
HashiCorp updates its infrastructure automation suite for hybrid clouds
An Alternative History of Silicon Valley Disruption
Rockstar Games, crunch, and the great shame of the video games biz
Apple’s iCloud services suffered an extended outage
Digital transformation of the week: “Eligible Travelers insurance customers will get a discount on their home insurance policies if they buy a smart home kit.”
Not everyone likes open spaces: “7 is the magic number of team members for decision-making effectiveness. Once you reach that number, each additional member reduces effectiveness by 10%.”
Cloud Foundry Cult: “The users we spoke with didn't just see it as a PaaS – it was the underlying philosophy of application delivery and management upon which future developments would be based. The Foundation claims Cloud Foundry saves, on average, 10 weeks of development time and $100,000 per app development cycle. In fact, in its own survey, 92% of users cite cross-platform flexibility as important. If these panelists are gaining such benefits, it's easy to understand why they are so enamored with it.”
300 VMs per admin is the magic number:
“Private clouds owned and self-managed by enterprises can be cheaper than public cloud. The magic number to beat is about $25 per VM-month at 100% utilization. If the cost of the whole stack comes in under this number, then even with the addition of labor to manage that private cloud, it should be cheaper than public cloud. Obviously, with better labor efficiency, unit costs versus public cloud are lowered further, and the relative value of benefits increases. Enterprises unable to achieve a labor efficiency of 300 VMs per engineer are unlikely to beat public cloud on price.
”Partially managed clouds have good economics. If an enterprise is able to manage just the datacenter element of a private cloud at a ratio of at least 400 VMs per engineer, that cloud may cost less to operate than fully managed alternatives. We believe enterprises could easily beat this ratio.”
Related: “Of that, private cloud spending [on hardware] reached $4.6 billion, an increase of 28.2 percent year over year. That's a significant increase, but not as great as the jump in spending on public cloud IT infrastructure, which was $10.9 billion, a 58.9 percent year-over-year growth.”
Conferences, et. al.
Oct 27th - Matt on a panel at Rakuten Technology Conference 2018
Oct 31st - Coté speaking at New Relic’s FutureStack Amsterdam.
Nov 3rd to Nov 12th - SpringOne Tour - all over the earth! Coté will be MC’ing Beijing Nov 3rd, Seoul Nov 8th, Tokyo Nov 6th, and Singapore Nov 12th.
Nov 14th to 16th - Devoxx Belgium, Antwerp. Coté’s presenting on enterprise architecture.
Dec 12th and 13th - SpringTour Toronto, Coté.
Listener Feedback
John from Australia wrote in to tell us he bought a T-Shirt and now needs stickers.
SDT news & hype
Join us in Slack.
Send your postal address to stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com and we will send you a sticker.
Brandon built the Quick Concall iPhone App and he wants you to buy it for $0.99.
Recommendations
Brandon: Making a Murder Season 2.
Coté: Staying in the same hotel when you go to a city. Consider the Lobster. Anti-recommendation: Logitech Slim case from iPad Pro with keyboard. The Apple one with a pen holder is probably better?
Sponsored By:SolarWinds: This episode is sponsored by SolarWinds AppOptics. To learn more or try it free for 14 days visit http://appoptics.com/sdt.

Oct 18, 2018 • 1h 13min
Episode 151: Who vivisected Mr Peanut?
Whether you’re in the Malaysian cement industry or not, there’s something for you in this episode: serverless vs. FaaS, Docker’s funding, Crossing the Chasm revisited, and GitHub actions.
Sponsored by Datadog
This episode is sponsored by Datadog and this week Datadog wants you to know about Trace Search & Analytics.
Trace Search & Analytics allows you to explore, graph, and correlate application performance data using high-cardinality attributes. You can search and filter request traces using key business and application attributes, such as user IDs, host names, or product SKUs, so you can quickly pinpoint where performance issues are originating and who's being affected. Tight integration with data from logs and infrastructure metrics also lets you correlate these specific trace events to the performance of the underlying infrastructure so you can resolve the problem quickly.
Sign up for a free trial today at https://www.datadog.com/softwaredefinedtalk.
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Cloud, enterprise software to drive 2019 IT spending, says Gartner
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Conferences, et. al.
Oct 22nd - Cloud Native tour in Milan, Italy. Coté and friends: a half day, a summit on Spring, DevOps, and cloud native programming. Free.
Oct 27th - Matt on a panel at Rakuten Technology Conference 2018
Oct 31st - Coté speaking at New Relic’s FutureStack Amsterdam.
Nov 3rd to Nov 12th - SpringOne Tour - all over the earth! Coté will be MC’ing Beijing Nov 3rd, Seoul Nov 8th, Tokyo Nov 6th, and Singapore Nov 12th.
Nov 14th to 16th - Devoxx Belgium, Antwerp. Coté’s presenting on enterprise architecture.
Dec 12th and 13th - SpringTour Toronto, Coté.
Listener Feedback
Simon form the UK tells us he is a long time listener and even bought an SDT t-shirt 🙂 So we sent him a sticker.
SDT news & hype
Join us in Slack.
Send your postal address to stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com and we will send you a sticker.
Brandon built the Quick Concall iPhone App and he wants you to buy it for $0.99.
Recommendations
Matt: Another Jay on Earth.
Brandon: Slow Burn Podcast.
Coté: Albert Heijn Mint & Ginger water: “The ideal thirst quencher with lemon and ginger. Refreshing on a summer day or during a busy working day.”
Sponsored By:Datadog Free Trial: This episode is sponsored by Datadog, a monitoring platform for cloud-scale infrastructure and applications. Built by engineers, for engineers, Datadog provides visibility into more than 200 technologies, including AWS, Chef, and Docker, with built-in metric dashboards and automated alerts. With end-to-end request tracing, Datadog provides visibility into your applications and their underlying infrastructure—all in one place. Sign up for a free trial today!

Oct 11, 2018 • 1h 16min
The dogs under the desk people, plus, Elastic, Cloudera/Hortonworks, and hotel loyalty programs and breakfast buffets
Changing the “culture” at a large company is impossibly hard, few get through it. And, it’s little wonder, you’re usually asking them to do completely irrational things. In the context of Google shutting down Google+ and a small write-up of Blockbuster failure fairy tales, we spend time discussion the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” problem of digital transformation. We then talk about Elastic search and their recent IPO, and follow-up with some better commentary on Cloudera and Hortonworks merging - better than we did last week. Hotel breakfast buffet strategies and the Chase Sapphire series of cards. Oh, and before that Matt and Coté spend a good 10 to 15 minutes talking about hotel breakfast buffet strategies.
Also, it’s episode #150 - yay us! Our first episode was on May 27th, 2014, where Coté’s lamp played a prominent role, and we did video.
Relevant to your interests
Chase Sapphire Reserve, and others in the Sapphire line. AAdvantage Executive card.
SpringOne Platform videos are all up.
Coté went to Puppetizer 2018 Amsterdam. They’re really into being “a portfolio company” now. Lots of stacks presented; much discussion on managing Puppet itself. A very well run event. See also Register coverage of their SF event.
Google is shutting down Google+ following massive data exposure - “90 percent of Google+ user sessions last for less than five seconds.”
be like google prd mgmt desertion
effect other enterprise props?
legacy services
OpenOffice watch - ‘Back in 2015, Red Hat developer Christian Schaller called OpenOffice "all but dead."’
Austin Ernest says make sure you don’t cargo cult The SRE.
The Demise of Blockbuster, and Other Failure Fairy Tales - Strategy is hard, execution at the middle-management later is harder. Put yet another way, company executives have a lot less power than you’d think. Related: WTF is “culture”?
This week in IPOs: Elastic has a party, Solarwinds figuring one out.
Elastic: “The stock closed at $70 per share, representing a 94.4 percent rise.” Close of market on Oct. 10th: $62.50 per share.
451 on Elastic revenue, Scott Denne: “The developer of open source search software for IT log analysis, security analytics and other applications nearly doubled its top line in its fiscal year (ending April 30) to $160m, up from $88m a year earlier, while increasing the share of subscription revenue in its mix.”
More: “Judging by Elastic’s offering, the [Q3] dry spell had little impact on investor appetites, setting up a favorable environment for Anaplan and SolarWinds as both look to price this month.”
451 on Elastic’s product, Nancy Gohring: “One of the most important messages that emerged from ElasticOn is that Elastic is positioning its software to serve as a platform for collecting and analyzing a wide array of machine data that can be used in a variety of use cases. With its recently announced APM UI and the forthcoming Infra UI, as well as the Canvas visualization capabilities, SQL-like querying and advancing machine-learning techniques, the Elastic Stack will be usable as a centralized platform for collecting and analyzing logs, events and metrics by constituents within a business including IT ops, security, executive leadership, product management and others.”
So, Elastic is…an OSS (presumably) cheaper Splunk, but for general search not just IT? Or, wait, it is just IT stuff?
Solarwinds: Coté hasn’t been able to parse out the Solarwinds deal. The big question is/will be, “so, did it make sense to go private, or could that have done whatever they’re doing by staying public?”
Serverless and FaaS, survey shows confusion: “Despite attempts to educate the market, we still believe the word “serverless” connotes many different things, especially for the 79 percent of organizations that plan to adopt serverless architecture but have not planned to use FaaS in the next 18 months.”
Coté’s old saw that “serverless” has just come to mean “doing programming on-top of cloud shit.” This is what Pivotal usually means when they say “cloud native,” versus the container kids who mean just “kubernetes,” at broadest, “containers.”
Cloudera/Hortonworks follow-up:
TPM: “Cloudera has raked in $1.28 billion in revenues in the past six and a half years, while Hortonworks only brought in $808 million. Add in the venture capital of $1.31 billion in venture capital, plus $225 million that Cloudera raised in early 2017 for its IPO and the $100 million that Hortonworks raised in late 2014 from its IPO, and the total pile of cash that has come to the pair is $3.69 billion. Hortonworks still has $86 million of cash and Cloudera still has $440.1 million. But over that same time period, Cloudera has booked cumulative losses of $1.19 billion and Hortonworks has cumulative losses of $979 million, for a total of $2.16 billion. Both separately and together, these companies are burning the wood a lot faster than they can cut it.”
TPM’s TAM summary, as suggested by the two companies: “The core market that Hadoop is chasing is comprised of three different segments, according to Cloudera-Hortonworks, and will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 21 percent between 2017 and 2022, from $12.7 billion to $32.3 billion. Within that, cognitive and artificial intelligence workloads represent a $14.3 billion opportunity in 2022, $4.9 billion for advanced and predictive analytics software, and $13.2 billion for dynamic data management systems (what we would call modern storage). In addition to that, the Hadoop platform is also chasing relational and non-relational database management systems and data warehouses, which is another $51 billion opportunity in 2022, for a total TAM of $83 billion. Even a small slice of this, which is what Hadoop currently gets today, could be billions of dollars by then.”
Forrester on TAM penetration, Noel Yuhanna: “We estimate that [just] 7% of organizations have completely migrated their traditional data warehouses to big data platforms. “ That’s 93% more left, assuming 20% capture for a leader, (shoddy percentage math follows)17 to 18%, I guess?
Meanwhile, also from Forrester: “While 74% of global data and analytics decision makers tell us they will have invested in a big data lake by the end of 2017, we find that many of these are being kept on life support by the technology management shops that drove them.”
Also, Forrester on HARK (Hadoop & Spark), Noel Yuhanna & Mike Gualtieri: “Distributed computing software and services that are rooted in open source Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark to store, process, and analyze data to find and use insights to improve customer experiences, create timely business intelligence, optimize business processes, and make decision making smarter and faster.” Like traditional analytics, but bigger and with more ML?
451 (Matt Aslett & James Curtis): “Although there are cross-selling opportunities and the two companies share an underlying open source foundation, there are also significant areas of product overlap and competing functionality, as well as a history of animosity to overcome.”
Tamped down TAM: “Another way of looking at this is that the Hadoop market hasn't expanded enough to support the growth targets of two independent publicly traded companies, especially with the cloud providers to contend with.”
Cloudera is the winner: “While the deal is being described by the companies as a merger, make no mistake that Cloudera is acquiring Hortonworks. After the transaction closes, Cloudera shareholders will own approximately 60% of the combined company, which will do business as Cloudera, with Hortonworks shareholders owning approximately 40%.”
Products, Hortnworks: “Its primary product is the Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP), which consists of core Hadoop and some 20+ open source projects. But in August 2015, the company purchased Onyara, which was based on the Apache NiFi technology, and designed to enable users to collect, process and distribute data.”
Products, Cloudera: “To date, Cloudera offers several products and while Hortonworks has adopted a pure 100% open source approach. Cloudera has a hybrid strategy, mixing open source with its proprietary tooling. The company's core offering is the Cloudera Enterprise Data Hub (CDH) – specifically targeted products are provided for data warehousing, operational database, and data science and engineering. Its cloud offering is Altus, a PaaS available on AWS and Azure.”
451 in another report (Agatha Poon), on Cloudera, June 2018: “At present, data analytics tools and offerings are driving regional opportunities with enterprises slowly but clearly moving out from legacy data warehouse platform to a new generation of data analytics platform, which is highly distributed and open standards based, Cloudera says. For machine learning and advanced data analytics, the company believes that data scientists will be the main users and strategic partners to boost future uptake. While data scientists can make use of algorithms to train the model into production data clusters, it could be a time-consuming and complex endeavor. With that in mind, Cloudera has stepped up its game by acquiring applied machine learning research startup Fast Forward Labs in late 2017, deepening its expertise in applying machine learning to practical business problems. The bigger Cloudera says it is committed to researching new techniques to resolve real-world business problems, building codes as well as providing customers with machine learning advisory services leveraging Fast Forward Labs' domain expertise.”
Cloudera strategy: “Cloudera's proposition remains largely unchanged: lead machine learning in the enterprise, disrupt the data warehouse market for analytical and operational data workloads, capitalize on cloud adoption and drive innovation for simplification while mitigating data security risk. With cloud being an agent for digital transformation, the company has publicly announced its intent to lead with cloud innovation as part of the future growth strategy at the company level.”
Conferences, et. al.
Oct 16th - DevOpsDays Paris - Coté at a table. Pivotal will have a raffle!
Oct 17th - JDriven Managers summit - near Amsterdam - Coté talking.
Oct 22nd - Cloud Native tour in Milan, Italy. Coté and friends: a half day, a summit on Spring, DevOps, and cloud native programming. Free.
Oct 31st - Coté speaking at New Relic’s FutureStack Amsterdam.
Nov 3rd to Nov 12th - SpringOne Tour - all over the earth! Coté will be MC’ing Beijing Nov 3rd, Seoul Nov 8th, Tokyo Nov 6th, and Singapore Nov 12th.
Nov 14th to 16th - Devoxx Belgium, Antwerp. Coté’s presenting on enterprise architecture.
Dec 12th and 13th - SpringTour Toronto, Coté.
Nonsense
Costco sought to provide a streaming service to customers.
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Brandon built the Quick Concall iPhone App and he wants you to buy it for $0.99.
Recommendations
Brandon: Dr. Foster on Neflix
Matt: Slint documentary Breadcrumb Trail.
Coté: micro.blog, where Coté now has cote.coffee hooked up with some Instagram and Pinboard IFTTT wingdings. Drafts 5 seems fine. Coté needs help figuring out WTF “culture” is from a practical angle.


