Episode 104: “When I go to the grocery store, I just buy the bananas” - Amazon/Whole Goods, J(2)EE, building your own kubernetes stack

Come Monday, we’ll see what full-on “digital transformation” looks like when Amazon fully owns Whole Foods. Also, Oracle is looking to move JEE to a foundation, closing out a long era of Java stewardship: how will “open source” like this work in a mature market? We also discuss the trend of private equity buying tech firms and GitHib’s write-up of building their own platform with kubernetes and series of small bash scripts.

Traveling to China

• Coté is a terrible work-trip tourist.
• AA 263, DFW to PEK, seat 19K. Exit row seat is good, but the front part of the airplane looked good too (rows 8 to 13?).
• Pack some breakfast tacos.
• This VPN situation is a mess, rather, I didn’t prepare correctly. Sometimes Cloak works, sometimes it doesn’t. LTE seems better than hotel wifi, but the speeds are high.

Amazon Whole Foods update

• All done on Monday, August 28th. See NY Times article as well.
• John Mackey interview.
• Cheaper private label (I think they were top three or five sold in US).
• Return items in Amazon lockers.
• Cheaper groceries is cool, but for us, the interesting/instructive things to watch will be how Whole Foods goes full on digital transformation (or, even more eyebrow raising, does not!).
• Will they move everything to AWS?
• true Omni-channel and digital madness.
• Alexa: ”You look fat in that t-shirt, Michael, would you like me to order you some organic kale smoothies from Whole Foods?”
• Also, the potential for a culture clash seems high.
• As a side-effect, expect grocers to be trying out new computer stuff more, and observe their experience. How will the razor thin margin set cope with Amazon who’s been consistently rewarded for loosing money?
• Walmart and Google Hub thing, Andrew on the AI winter.

The Undying J(2)EE

• Oracle looking to open source it, move it to a foundation.
• This worked out relativly OK for Java proper. It was hella weird, though, and I’m not sure the OSS version ever gained traction: maybe for, like, whatever Google, AWS, and Azure’s JRE is.
• Using this as a competitive ¯_(ツ)_/¯ is dicey, most people who compete here do open core themselves…so you can’t really say it’s bad; and if Oracle’s goal is to move it away from Oracle, you can’t say that Oracle is mismanaging it, etc.
• John Waters’ round-up of opinions, pretty predictable.
• Steve Yegge’s Kotlin Writeup, The RedMonk Programming Language Rankings: June 2017.

Kubernetes at GitHub

• Just a few bash scripts, eh? Here, hold my beer.
• Real world discussion about moving one of their most popular services to Kubernetes. Sounds like the real deal, but there are a few bumps in the road. # PE to do 25% of tech M&A
• At least the analysis confirms this notion.
• That said, the underlying numbers are weird: “Between direct acquisitions and deals done by portfolio companies, PE firms are on pace to purchase roughly 900 tech companies in 2017.”
• Who exactly are these 900 tech companies?
• Speaking of, a PE firm bought ThoughtWorks.
• ICO stuff, Coté is confused.

BONUS LINKS! Not covered in show. Alibaba Dwarfs Amazon

• That’s a lot of revenue growth.
• Not on the cloud computing side yet, but definitely on the retail side.
• Coté: what’s the deal with Alipay being so hard to setup for Yankees? They really, really want a bankcard. Also, I don’t speak Chinese.

Rescuing Open Source from Failed Startups

• bet365 buying and open sourcing Basho stuff.
• “It is our intention to open source all of Basho's products and all of the source code that they have been working on."Hi
• See previously RethinkDB by the CNCF

Pivotal news - build pipelines

• Concourse is out, see also CRN coverage.

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

Mid-roll

• Get $50 off Casper mattresses with the code: horraymattray
• NEW DISCOUNT! DevOpsDays Nashville, $25 off with the code 2017NashDevOpsDays - Coté will be keynoting - October 17th and 18th, 2017.
• NEW DISCOUNT! DevOpsDays Kansas City, September 21st and 22nd.
  • Use the code SDT2017 when you register.
  • PLUS we have one free ticket to give away. So, we need to figure out how to do that.
• Coté speaking at DevOps Riga, also will be at DevOpsDays London and Devoxx Belgium.
• Coté will also be at Devoxx Belgium, Nov 6th and 10th, in Antwerp. The train station there is nutty-balls awesome, y’all.
• The Register’s conference, Continuous Lifecycle, in London (May 2018) has it’s CFP open, closed October 20th - submit something!
• SpringOne Platform registration open, Dec 4th to 5th. Use the code S1P200_Cote for $200 off registration.
• Matt’s on the Road!
  • August 30th - AWS Australian Public Sector Summit
  • September 15-16 - DevOpsDays Bangalore
  • September 20 - Azure Sydney Meetup
  • October 3-4 - DevOpsDays New Zealand
  • October 11th - Brisbane Azure User Group
  • November 6-7 - AgileNZ
• Andrew will be at DevOpsDays Singapore (so will Matt) October 25-26, and a few other places. He doesn’t want to make platinum.

Recommendations

• Brandon: TRUECar.
• Matt Ray: Baby Driver.
• Coté: Taco Deli. Michael Christmas, not too shabby.