Episode 221: How to turn $2bn into $5bn

Coté probably messed up his math on the Thoma Bravo profit from Compuware. Maybe it's more like $5bn. But, obviously, he's just farting around with incomplete information. He apologies and will sit in the corner for awhile. For entertainment only!

With the virus shutting down conferences and keeping people in the home office, we discuss the value of in-person conferences and how remote ones might could be better. Also, GKE’s kubernetes cluster pricing (and Amazon’s drop to match the price) gives us an anchoring point for pricing running a cluster. Coupled with the recent CNCF survey you could make an interesting stew. Finally, Coté tries to run some numbers to figure out how much Thoma Bravo profited from taking Compuware private. (Also, he always mispronounces it as Thom-oh Bravo.)

Hey! If you want to understand VMware’s new strategy and portfolio around application development, tune into the March 10th webinar on the topic: register now!

Mood Board:

• The Hello Boss episode.
• You mean I gave my kids a lecture all for nothing?
• Shit the living room door.
• Espresso macchiato.
• Blue bonnet coffee.
• What am I missing out on?
• Sitting, trapped in your head.
• I’m hoping we realize no one needs to be working.
• Why blockchain is important for corn
• Containers and the mainframes,
• Too unqualified to speculate?
• This post-conference era
• You can’t do your dishes in the office
• Those poor developers: having to pay for things!
• $879/year per cluster helps someone keep their job.
• It’s always Monte Carlo simulations with you
• So adult.
• I’m trying Matt Ray.
• We IPO’d because we were running out of money, what a time to be alive.
• This week’s white guys talking about white guys.

Relevant to your interests

• How Marc Benioff’s Vision for Salesforce’s Future Triggered Executive Shuffle
• VMware exceeds $10B in sales in FY 2020
• Cisco begins new round of layoffs
• How much money do SREs make?
• Coronavirus 2020 tech conference cancellations list
  • Google and Microsoft just canceled two conferences ahead of their major ones
  • HP Enterprise suspends nearly all events
  • Important OpenShift Commons Gathering Amsterdam 2020 Update: Shifts to Digital Conference – Red Hat OpenShift Blog
  • Google cancels its biggest annual event over coronavirus fears
• BMC to Acquire Compuware
  • Baron’s has a bunch of numbers:
  • https://www.barrons.com/articles/bmc-backed-by-kkr-is-buying-compuware-in-biggest-deal-yet-51583264075
  • Probably sold for about $2bn.
  • Selling about $650m of Dynatrace stock.
  • Got several $100m’s in dividends from DT.
  • Still owns 52% of DT ($9.294bn valuation, so $4.83bn asset in equity).
  • Original purchase price: $2.5bn
  • 2 + 0.65 + 0.150 + 9.294 = $12.09bn cash out, plus $4.83bn equity - $16.92bn profit on $2.5bn…?!
  • Undated Forrester chart showing increasing mainframe spend.
• Agile software development is dead. Deal with it.
• Coronavirus Updates: Epidemic Slows in China but Spreads Globally - Check out the Ali app angle
• Apple to pay up to $500 million to settle lawsuit over slow iPhones
• Google makes Hangouts Meet features free in the wake of coronavirus
• CNCF survey
  • No lead-gen on the PDF! CLASSY.
  • Demographics:
    • “September and October 2019 and received 1,337 responses.”
    • 30% of respondents from orgs with 5,000+ employees.
    • ??? “The top job functions were software architect (41%), DevOps manager (39%), and back-end developer (24%)”
    • Most respondents from “Software,” “Technology,” and “Financial Services” - all the bleeding edge.
  • Amazon is #1, Google probably #2.
  • CI/CD (loosely applied) is at 40% to 50% - which is close Coté’s ongoing estimates (and, considering that most of the respondents are from tech and banks, if we’re cynical, probably less for the other industries).
  • The jump in production is really quick, maybe (Page 5, “Use of Containers since 2016”? It took about 4 years for prod use to be broadly done (in Dec 17, prod reached 75% which matches test)
  • Most figures like these (e.g., number of containers in production) would be a lot more interesting/useful if they were broken out by company size. E.g., larger companies probably use more containers in production, tech and banks probably have put containers in production earlier, also telcos - T-Mobile alone has 34,000 containers in production (probably even more by now).
  • Similarly, how many clusters are in production would be interesting to see by organization size.
  • Challenges are sort of interesting, as always.
    • I don’t like “culture” as a broad category. That usually just means “people don’t do what I think they should do [and instead have their own ideas of what’s best].”
    • However: obviously “security”…”complexity” is another broad category - and, boy, long-time SDT sponsors must love “monitoring” as a money-pot to go after!
  • Side-note: so, “servishmesh” means a registry to look-up how to connect to other pods/components in your kubes (like, JNDI); getting the actual network connection to that other component; securing the network connection; load balancing (this term is getting way over-blown, I think?); and then doing the layer whatever networking to account for dynamically assigned IP addresses and stuff in kubernetes. Maybe, like microservices stuff like circuit breakers, or is that too far?
  • Not that many people use their own serverless framework (10%), but 34% of those who do use knative.
  • The “why you use kubernetes” chart (pg. 11) didn’t force people to rank enough: pretty much everyone agrees that All The Value-Props are great.
  • Helm wins for packaging.
  • I don’t know enough about auto-scaling to say much, but it looks like most people don’t do auto-scaling unless it’s for purely stateless apps, which makes sense. The drop-off after that (queues, batch-jobs, stateless, and DB) seems to indicate that auto-scaling other stuff is difficult, untrusted.
  • “nginx kept its lead this year as the top Kubernetes ingress provider (62%), followed again by HAProxy (22%)” - F5 got a good control-point on the kubernetes market for $670 million, plus the entire rest of the nginx business.
  • “40% of respondents get their info from Twitter” - humanity had a good run!

Non Sense

• Public Enemy Fires Flavor Flav After Bernie Sanders Rally Spat
• SETI@home Search for Alien Life Project Shuts Down After 21 Years ## Sponsors

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Conferences, et. al.

• KubeCon EU in Amsterdam, July/August, use code KCEUSDP15 for 15% off.
  • VMware/Tanzu lurnin' workshop
• DevOpsDays Austin 2020 May 4th and 5th.
• ChefConf 2020 in Seattle June 1-4.
• DevOpsDays Minneapolis, August 4 - 5, 2020 use code SDT for 10% off registration.
• THAT Conference August 3 - 6 in Wisconsin Dells®.

SDT news & hype

• Join us in Slack.
• Send your postal address to stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com and we will send you free laptop stickers!
• Follow us on Twitter, Instagram or LinkedIn
• 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.
• Use the code SDT to get $20 off Coté’s book, Digital WTF, so $5 total.

Recommendations

• Brandon: Dark Towers
  • Press Box Pod - Strain pun headline segment
  • Tasty Meats Paul’s Instagram
• Matt: SelfControl.app
  • Humble Bundle Cybersecurity 2020
• Coté: First 30% of the first Jack Reacher book, The Killing Floor. Also, see other books Matt Yglesias is reading.

Cover art from Marcingietorigie in wikicommons.