Episode 99: Private cloud is the Reuben sandwich of clouds, or, Shafer’s Theory of (Private) Cloud

Microsoft will ship it’s private cloud stack, Azure Stack, in September. Will this work? Will people buy it? What could you even put in that cloud? You can feel that pull people have towards private cloud, so we’re looking forward to what happens. On a related topic, by our reckoning, kubernetes to small to have already fallen. Also: the elusive Baltimore accent, Oracle and containers, and recommendations.

Meta, follow-up, etc.

• Where does Matt Ray find all these stories?
• Patreon for this thing - 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.
• SDT Slack
• “Not all ‘guys.’”

Mid-roll

• This episode is sponsored by Casper, who’s looking for some good senior SREs. If you’re into building out and managing infrastructure that keeps code running and makes sure you can sleep soundly at night, check out the job listing, apply, and be sure to mention that you heard about it on Software Defined Talk. According to Glassdoor reviews, it’s a damn fine place to work. You can also just email jobs@casper.com and browse all their openings at casper.com/jobs.
• Also, get $50 off mattresses with the code: horraymattray

End-roll

• DevOpsDays Minneapolis, July 25 to 26th: get 20% off registration with the code SDT (Thanks, Bridget!).
• SpringOne Platform registration open, Dec 4th to 5th. Use the code S1P200_Cote for $200 off registration.
• SpringDays - Atlanta (July 18th to 19th)
• The Register’s conference in London (May 2018) has it’s CFP open - submit something!
• Matt:
  • July 20th - DevOps Sydney
  • July 25th - DevSecOps at RSA Conf APJ
  • August 1st - Sydney Chef Meetup
  • August 3rd - Auckland AWS User Community
  • October 11th - Brisbane Azure User Group

Up there in New England

• What is the Baltimore accent?
• Watching The Keepers, and it’s reminding me of John Water movies, but I can’t figure out the patterns of the accent.
• Season three of The Wire has samples.

Oracle Enters the OCI-runtime with Railcar - Oracle, the dark-horse of The Container Wars

• Link
• Rust! Also Smith and Sidecar
• Oracle requires joint copyright assignment though…

Azure Stack, coming in September

• Charges by consumption - how MIPS-y! “Compute charges start at .8 cents per virtual CPU per hour and go up from there, while storage starts at .6 cents per GB per hour. Those charges will be included in customers’ invoices for their overall use of Microsoft’s public cloud platform.”
• Hardware via partners: “The exact pricing for Azure Stack hardware, including support contracts, will be up to each individual manufacturer. Microsoft is working with Dell EMC, Lenovo, HPE, Cisco, and Huawei to make the hardware available, and the first machines should be available in September.”
• IDC estimates private cloud HW at $34bn or so runrate (based on 3Q2016 estimates), with 8% q/q growth. So, not too shabby there. This doesn’t include software, Microsoft’s take.
• Scott Guthrie: “We talked to lots of customers who said, please don’t do that [allow so much customization that it's hard to debug problems]. The model we came up with instead was to work with a large spectrum of hardware providers, HP, Dell, Lenovo, Cisco and Huawei. Those are the five largest server manufacturers in the world. They will have systems that start with three nodes, not massive big purchases, that you can unbox and plug in. And have a fully working cloud in a day or two. Regardless of whom you call, we own the whole solution.”
• Pivotal Cloud Foundry will run on it
• Microsoft has a rocky road of delivering on private cloud. But, I’d wager the get it this time.
• We discussed this on the most recent Pivotal Conversations, along with other delightful ephemera.

K8s Days May Be Numbered

• Matt Asay strikes again!
• Funny how OpenStack is now a cautionary tale. See Coté’s weasly, non-position on OpenStack in his May Register column.
• I thought Cote’ was going to write this one up? (see below)
• “Whitepaper review” a la The Weeds!
  • You have to be careful how you read that 451 survey.
  • On Asay’s 71%, Coté wrote: On that note, it’s easy to misread the widely quoted finding of “[n]early three-quarters (71 percent) of respondents indicated they are using Kubernetes” as meaning only Kubernetes. Actually, people are using many of them at once. The report clarifies this: “The fact that almost 75% of organizations reported using Kubernetes while the same group also reported significant use of other container management and orchestration software is evidence of a mixed market.”
  • Read: they’re trying everything. Nothing has won yet. Proving Asay’s point, but also defanging his link-bait lead.
  • “It seem far-fetched that Kubernetes could be heading for a fall” - there is no fall to be had because ascension hasn’t yet begin.
  • The core base of 201 people are organizations already using containers, so it doesn’t include organizations not using containers.
  • In a broader survey (where, presumably, not every enterprise was already using containers), of 300+ enterprises, production container use was: 19% in initial production, 8% were in broad production implementation.
  • This isn’t to say there hasn’t been huge growth in this space, but it’s the huge growth of small numbers.
  • This survey (though sponsored by CoreOS - I’m always suspicious of sponsored surveys, having worked on them myself!) is definitely worth paying attention to (as well as ongoing 451 and Gartner work here). Just make sure you read it right and don’t get too excited.
  • See Coté’s Notebook for more.
• (Related: I’ve been thinking we should do special, “paid members only” [in Patreon?] “whitepaper review” episodes. Because, let’s be honest: only people who liked us enough to pay would be interested in that.)
• Alright, now some vendor-sports:
  • So, can a vendor be successful if they “chase” the standards? Do you need to be in OpenWhisk, and OCI shit to operate in this space? Do you need to be Java EE compliant?
  • There may be no money in OSS, but maybe it’s the kingmaker, to steal O’Grady’s line.

BONUS LINKS! Not covered in show. Could Facebook run on AWS?

• Lots of fun speculation with sizes of services and numbers of servers.
• From now on, this is the only content to send to people asking about running private cloud.
• “In the real world it clearly wouldn’t make sense for Facebook to migrate over to AWS.“
• First of all...
• As John Willis would say, “I wanna be Ashlee Vance when I grow up.” Look at that guy: he’s kickin’ it no undershirt with the button-up style. Writes for Bloomberg, and only let’s just enough sass through in his tone to keep his broad, concise appeal but still have style that harkens back to his Register days.
  • And he wrote that Elon Musk book. CASH MONEY!
  • Second: “serverless is someone else’s server” manifest in 3D
  • Third, a lot of people ask me, “Coté, how do I get a job like yours?” Writing a lot of posts like this is one answer.

Thriving in a “Post AWS World”

• Link
• “Why You Can Have the Advantages and Still Not Win”
• Touches on some of the previous conversations of anti-trust, how do you operate with a Goliath in your market?

Distributions are Becoming Irrelevant

• Link
• “The distribution users are, for most of the biggest projects, sysadmins.”
• Nice history of how developers and distros have long been at odds.
• Coté: I recall reading this. Did I get the summary right?
• gems show that people will subvert the gate-keeper of being in the distro, thus, there is no power of a distro: people will just assemble whatever they want. Docker x10’s this.
• Linux distro people fight too much and are, sort of, bags of dicks that are making the evolution of distros slow and further irrelevant. Hey, guys, “can’t we all just get along?”

Future of Serverless?

• Link - that’s a helluva headline..
• Who can take on Lambda? OpenWhisk on K8s?

IBM Backing off OpenStack?

• “Seemingly unable to innovate, IBM allegedly retreats from its OpenStack plans”
• Lots of BlueBoxers coming back on the market

DevOps Insights from RightRelevance

• Wut?
• Echo chambers exist, but some folks and events cut through “flocks”
• IBM/Compuware stuff feels anomalous to me

OpenBSD with Randomized Kernels

• When you really care about security…

Recommendations

• Brandon: Oasis Supersonic
• Matt Ray: Veep. Also: Visualization of sorting algorithms, it’s hypnotic
• Coté: thigh and leg chicken, BONELESS!, at CostCo. Enterprise Architecture as Strategy book - old (2006), but really, the topic doesn’t seemed to have change much, despite DevOps &shit.