Episode 87: Snap's cloud billions, Google's social, Monitoring Startups considered hard, DHS wants your passwords

Snap is looking to spend billions on AWS and Google Cloud over the next five years. We talk about what exactly that could be for, then check in with Google's social strategy and thermostat strategies; meanwhile, the America Fuck Yeah crew wants to start gathering passwords at the boarder. Also, Brandon lays out the case that an open-core monitoring startup is a hard row to hoe.

Also, Baltimore is not in Maine. (But Coté is pretty sure it actually is.)

Mid-roll

• Coté: we're a media sponsor for DevOpsDays Baltimore, March 7th to 8th. No discount code yet, but we're getting one.
• Coté: Come see me talk at the Austin Cloud Meetup, Feb 22nd
• Matt:
  • Microsoft Ignite Australia: Chef will have a booth & a talk
  • ChefConf ChefConf 2017 Teaser
• Coté: check out Pivotal's DIY platform paper. tl;dr: for $7m/year with a two year on-ramp, you could build you own, or just buy Pivotal Cloud Foundry. Many of our customers have gone down this path and ended up not wanting to support the life of their own platform...which doesn't match the pace of innovation that the Cloud Foundry community can follow. Check out softwaredefinedtalk.com/diyplatform.

SnapChat's S-1

• The S1
• "We had 158 million Daily Active Users on average in the quarter ended December 31, 2016"
• "We have committed to spend $2 billion with Google Cloud over the next five years." - perhaps 10% of their billing.
• Also: "Snap will spend $1 billion on AWS through 2021."
• Coté Show interview with former cloud boy, JJ.

The McLaughlin Group covers Google: What's up with them!

• Robots opening doors.
• Google, Nest, and DropCam - despite rocky start, maybe it's just a slow ramp-up, they have 50% y/y growth.
• People think GCP is the shit.
• "Purity vs. pragmatism."

Corrections

• "Barra-mundi"
• Pronunciation tips

Thing to get angry about this week

• DHS considering asking foreigners for passwords
• I mean, really? A criminal is just gonna let you see their stuff? They'll just delete it, set up fake accounts, etc.
• It's not like popping the trunk for a thief and finding lock picks and guns in the boot: with digital crime tools and weapons, you can hide and subterfuge.
• And then the only people getting harmed are innocent people.
• What the fuck is wrong with these people, and more importantly the shit-for brains who voted for them? (How can we de-shit those brains for 2018?)
• Tweet about 3D chess of this meaning the government can't hack into your stuff...or can they?!?!

CNCF Buys RethinkDB's Code and Donates to the Linux Foundation

• Not just marketing, but actually "freeing" code
• Switched from AGPLv3 to ASLv2
• "Abby," head of the Cloud Foundry Foundation. See a recent discussion with her and RedMonk's James Governor on developer skills in large organizations.

$2.5 million VC for Sensu!

• Nagios replacement!!!
• Brandon has some advice.

BONUS LINKS! Not covered in episode Microsoft does Azure Patent Indemnification

• "The system is supposed to help ease the transition to the cloud by giving companies extra peace of mind. Right now, lawsuits over intellectual property relating to open source technology in the cloud are rare" Link
• "those companies operating in a multi-cloud configuration won't be entirely covered"

Attempting to Categorize the Cloud Native Landscape

• Project in GitHub
• Cloud native Landscape diagram

Cloud Displacing Intel's Enterprise Sales

• "Tectonic shifts in the pattern of Intel's business show the devastating speed at which cloud is displacing traditional enterprise server sales" Link

Slack Enterprise Grid should make user management easier

• Link

Uber Steers Away from Trump

• "More than 200,000 customers had deleted their accounts." (Link)
• "Many employees were not satisfied with his answer. On Wednesday, Uber staff members followed up by circulating a 25-page Google document titled "Letters to Travis" to tell the chief executive how and why his willingness to engage with the administration had affected them."

Puppet adds two vice presidents, hiring from Hewlett-Packard and EMC

• "Puppet replaced nearly its entire executive team in 2016, including its chief executive and chief financial officers. It hired six vice presidents last year." (Link)

Rackspace lays off 6%

• "Since being taken private [by Apollo], Rackspace has been working to trim its annual budget by 7%, or $100 million, according to documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission." (Link)
• More figures from Barb Darrow.
• Brief 451 coverage from Al:
• "After eight years as a public company, Rackspace went private in August 2016 in $4.3bn leveraged buyout with Apollo Global Management."
• "Rackspace just announced a layoff of 6% of its 4,600 employees"
• "The company is expected to exceed $2bn in revenue and top 33% EBITDA margin for 2016."
• Meanwhile, AWS at ~$10bn for 2016 with something like 20-23% profit margin (OpInc based on 2016Q4 numbers), Azure and GCP catching up: MSFT is probably $5-6bn, depending on how you categorize it. GCP probably $3bn at most (they don't break it out)?

Other thing to get worked up about: eliminating remote work

• IBM on that colo shit
• Brandon is safe! (He lives in Austin.)
• Coté: I won't deny that working in smelling range is the best. But, the gains never feel like enough to enforce it. Plus, mega-city congestion and resulting classist systems, cf. The Wealth of Humans. It's a problem that should be solved, not embraced.

Recommendations

• Matt:
  • Manly Daily newspaper, so much unbridled snark. Link
  • RTJ on NPR.
  • I'm not sure I can pull this off.
• Coté: Ezra Klein interview with Kara Swisher. She's inspiring is several ways, not least of which in modeling a way to be politely strident and opinionated: the opposite of imposture syndrome. Also, his talk with the Hillbilly Elegy guy. I mean: most of the whole podcast, just skip the ones that look trivial and repetitive, e.g., we get it: Trump is a lunatic. (See The Weeds and "The Nate Silver podcast.")
• Brandon:
  • Skiing in Solitude, Utah.
  • The Daily podcast, from NYT.