Episode 118: Bad chips, garbage home IoT, & cloud spending

Sure, there’s something wrong with all those chips, but what exactly is it? More importantly, how would you exploit it and protect yourself from it. This week, we talk about All The Great Chip Problems. And we also discuss some recent IT spending and forecasts, including survey results going over public versus private cloud deployments. There’s also some home automation (IoT!) talk, namely, Coté needs to find the problem this great solution solves.

Pre-roll SDT news & hype

• Canceled: Jan 16th, first Live Recording in Austin Texas - guest co-host Tasty Meats Paul.
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Wemo IoT

• All the devices - plugs, dimmers, HomeKit bridge (HomeKit is kinda garbage).
• There’s plenty of IFTTT applets that do Wemo things, but…are they useful?

Those chip problems - what would you use them for?

• What’s this mean?
• Another Y2K? The world didn’t seem to end, so are we good?
• The Register coverage, lots of gobbly-gook.
• TPM estimates cost to IT departments to deal with it.
• Suspicious stock sale, or maybe he just needed a new winter home.
• What are people doing with exploits?

More IT spending in 2018, public cloud use growing

• 451 and IDC have some cloud forecast numbers out.
  • Ent. software growth.
  • Trad’l IT shrinking, but not too fast 451 days private cloud still the winner, but barely.

• 451 tracks by survey with plans to put workloads across the different types of infrastructure:
  

• PaaS in not included (see a recent round-up of PaaS market-sizings, tho), but for 2019: public cloud totals ~37% (or 46.3% if you included hosted), private cloud 53.6%

• IDC’s tracks hardware spend:
  

• Meanwhile, an analyst says Azure had a gain on AWS in Q4: “Amazon Web Services had 62 percent market share in the quarter, down from 68 percent a year earlier, KeyBanc's Brent Bracelin and other analysts wrote in a note on Thursday. Microsoft Azure jumped from 16 percent to 20 percent, and Google's share increased from 10 percent to 12 percent, they said.”

• Also, more spending forecasts from Gartner:
  

• The move to SaaS continuing: “Organizations are expected to increase spending on enterprise application software in 2018, with more of the budget shifting to software as a service (SaaS). The growing availability of SaaS-based solutions is encouraging new adoption and spending across many subcategories, such as financial management systems (FMS), human capital management (HCM) and analytic applications.”

• Really, doesn’t that make the most sense for where to spend most of your priority? Clears out the under-brush. Perhaps there should be a split between “innovation” (customer IT) and “keep the lights on.” I often think bi-modal got lost in that distinction.

• Hey, that sounds like Big Data! ‘"Looking at some of the key areas driving spending over the next few years, Gartner forecasts $2.9 trillion in new business value opportunities attributable to AI by 2021, as well as the ability to recover 6.2 billion hours of worker productivity," said Mr. Lovelock. "That business value is attributable to using AI to, for example, drive efficiency gains, create insights that personalize the customer experience, entice engagement and commerce, and aid in expanding revenue-generating opportunities as part of new business models driven by the insights from data."’

• 451’s surveys show more IT spending too: “fully 50% of the 872 respondents said their company is giving a ‘green light’ for IT spending. That was the highest reading since 2007, and 13 basis points higher than the average survey response for the month of November for the previous five years”

The exciting world of monitoringobservability

• With Loggly, SolarWinds scoops up another log service: “With the acquisition of Loggly, SolarWinds obtains an asset that was slow in getting started but has hit a patch of growth recently. As of September, we believe the company was on track to finish 2017 with roughly $10m in billings, up from mid-single digits in 2016. Founded in 2009 with a mission of offering a SaaS-based, easy-to-use logging product with helpful visualizations built using advanced analytics, Loggly had raised $47m in venture capital, including a $11.5m series D round in June 2016.” They estimate ~3,000 paying customers.
• Microsoft gets serious about monitoring, pulling together it’s different things Nancy at 451 reports: “Microsoft's vision is to deliver tools that can offer a holistic view of services to application architects looking to optimize their software; performance information and debugging capabilities for DevOps and ops pros; insight into KPIs for executives; and information about customer usage to product owners. Microsoft doesn't yet have a cohesive offering for all of the above, but it has the pieces to enable it and has begun delivering on some integrations across products.”
• You may recall that Datadog acquired Logmatic.io back in the Fall.

Relevant to your interests

• Annual Letter from Planet Earth, Scott Galloway: a pretty good moral tent-pole for tech.
• Feel like a little kid in the container world? Welcome to the club: “industry adoption more accurately reflected in 451 Research's survey data that pegs adoption at 27 per cent. Of those 27 per cent of enterprises that have container religion, just 52 per cent are running containers in production, according to the same survey. In other words, a mere 13.5 per cent (or so) of enterprises are running containers in production.”
• Finally, an explanation of that Cisco/Google partnership: “CloudCenter is key to the hybrid cloud partnership that Cisco and Google recently announced, where CloudCenter will be used to integrate Google Cloud Platform services with on-premises datacenters. The integrated offering includes Cisco's Hyperflex hyperconverged infrastructure and Nexus 9k networking. Cisco is also leveraging its networking (CSR) and security (Stealthwatch Cloud) portfolio to ensure a consistent environment across the hybrid cloud. Google's Kubernetes container runtime uses Apigee to consume and manage APIs, as well as Google's range of cloud services, including machine learning and visual recognition. The open source Istio service management platform is key to the offering, supported in CloudCenter, providing traffic management, observability, policy enforcement and service identity and security for microservices. There will also be integrations to AppDynamics. Solution engineering efforts are underway, and Cisco and Google are working on predefined statements of work that can be executed by both companies' direct sales teams and by the partner channels. The joint offering will be fully supported by the Cisco Technical Assistance Center. The Cisco-Google partnership on hybrid cloud is non-exclusive, but Google is working closely with Cisco on the joint engineering work around open hybrid cloud.”
• Taking Stock of Cloud Application Platforms: basically, he expects it to all go kubernetes. See also this developer-oriented comparison of Pivotal Cloud Foundry and kubernetes.
• IBM combining GBS and GTS. This means consulting/outsourcing and hosting, right? Lots of staff shifting and lay-offs, as The Register reported.
• Dropbox to IPO - “doing over $1B in annualized sales and are cash flow positive,” well with some added nuance: “[i]t’s also been profitable, excluding interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. “ $10bn valuation, they say.
• Speaking of: 20 years of big-ass VC exits.
• Watch out for the Weka, by Ned Barraud, kid's book.

Conferences, et. al.

• Coté talking at DevOpsDays Charlotte, Feb 22nd to 23rd.
• May 15th to 18th, 2018 - Coté talking EA at Continuous Lifecycle London.

Recommendations

• Matt:
  • I Contain Multitudes.
  • Goruck Echo Backpack.
• Brandon: Wind River.
• Coté: OluKai Moloa Slipper - it says “slipper,” but I feel like it could be an everyday, even EBC shoe. Bit bulbous like those 90s Cadillac boats.