Wunderkammer
Containers are mostly just for large enterprises
Here, you see a shift in intentions to use containers, a pretty large one: less people are planning to use them. To me, containers are mostly useful for custom written software, not business application workloads.
So, several years ago, containers_seemed_like a cheaper VMware strategy where you just generically throw your apps in and reduce costs.
But, that doesn’t really work. Apps have to be container friendly, plus, you know, you have to manage your new container orchestration thing – figure out kubernetes. Even that has only been a thing (an option a generic IT team would know about and find viable enough to consider) for about the past year.
(I mean, maybe, if you soften the idea that kubernetes is a platform for building platforms and just think of it as a platform for running apps, that is, a platform. I don’t know what the fuck is going on in that definitional-wrangling space.)
These companies, I’d theorize, then, had the wrong assumptions, investigated container usage, and realized it wasn’t what they were expecting.
Containers are for running custom written software. If you don’t want to do that, they’re probably not useful to you.
As an important side-note, let’s assume use here means penetration, which is to say, respondents use at least one, or as few as, container. That means overall usage could be a tiny percentage of their total workloads – or big. We have no way of know how_many_containers they use. Not a big deal if you’re interested, as here, in y/y trends, that is, growth. That’s what investors want to see.
Equally important and enlightening here, as always, is to look at the demographics:
I don’t know what the the n is, the total number of respondents. There’s a good chunk that of what I’d fall “enterprise”: 10,000+ employees, and lots from finance. Let’s say around half? Spending wise, education usually doesn’t spend much (or write that much custom software?), and “Technology” typically less. Tech companies usually don’t buy shit and DIY it choosing to spend on their own people instead of vendors – they are, after all,_technology_companies, they think.
Also, it’s worth weighting this all by how few insurance and retail companies are in the respondent base: they have tons of custom written software, the stuff you’d put in containers.
So, you’ve really got two very different surveys and conclusions going on here, split by two different markets: those who write and run their own software (mostly large organizations) and those who don’t (mostly smaller organizations).
You see the general conclusion in the footnote: 10,000+ people companies (who have a good chance of writing and running their own software) already use containers and plan on using more.
Anyhow, half of respondents are small and mid-sized companies, plus those tech companies that don’t spend. So, spending wise, selling containers is probably mostly a large enterprise play cause that’s where they get used and paid for. They rest of the companies, likely, want SaaS and security.
Check out the rest of the report. It covers much, much more that the container neck of the woods.
Software Defined Talk #171
- Title: Tradies, plus, your Quarterly Linux Update
- Description: SUSE is independent again, so we discuss what’s up with it and its uses. Open source, when mixed with business, is back once again: Coté craves some intellectual closer. Also, Google announced some big game platform thing. So. Chips?
- Get it!
Pivotal Conversations: CF Summit NA 2019
A loopy episode with Dormain on open source foundations, CF Summit, and other rando stuff.
Monolithic Transformation
The past, I don’t know, 5 years of my research into what large organizations do to get better at software. Get a free PDF from Pivotal.
This week’s Links
Why the eight-hour workday doesn’t work
The ideal work-to-break ratio was 52 minutes of work, followed by 17 minutes of rest.
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Money Stuff: $10,000 for reading the fine print
The conventional approach to form contracts is (1) no one reads them but (2) the company pretends that everyone reads them and makes an informed decision to accept their terms. If you’re the company sending out the contracts, it seems kind of risky to undermine that convention.
The Gig Economy is Actually Pretty Tiny
According to the data, in May 2017, just 1 percent of workers were “gig economy workers whose tasks were electronically mediated,” or sourced through technology platforms like Uber, Upwork or TaskRabbit.
Moreover, in the workforce as a whole, 89.9 percent of people had a standard work arrangement as their main job, slightly up from 89.1 percent in 2005. Put another way, “nonstandard work arrangements,” such as independent contractors, amounted to less than 11 percent of jobs in 2017, the analysis says.
How to Run an Effective Networking Dinner
After the initial kibitzing, I recommend standing up and doing a small toast (if it’s a dinner meeting) and introduce a “topic.” For boards this can be an issue you’ve been debating as a management team that you don’t plan to cover off at the board meeting or you can even go a little bit more fun and introduce a “get to know you” topic if the group is newer.
Why Wells Fargo Wants to ‘Repave’ Its Platform Every Day
Wells Fargo, explains how the company is combating advanced persistent threats, as well as an onslaught of CVEs, by repaving its entire platform multiple times per week — with a goal of doing so every day by the end of 2019.
Q&A on the Book Evidence-Based Management
The most important issue in organizational data quality is whether you have the data you need to test whether your beliefs about the organization are really true. So if I believe my organization has a reliable backoffice in terms of transactions, do I have the data that show how many errors are made a day or a month for a given volume of transactions.? Counts tell us almost nothing; we need rates, like errors/daily volume. If I am relying on my impressions, I am talking to myself.
Facebook’s local news project frustrated – by lack of local newspapers
The definition of not enough:
The company deems a community unsuitable for Today In if it cannot find a single day in a month with at least five news items available to share.
And:
Some 1,800 newspapers have closed in the US over the last 15 years, according to the University of North Carolina. Newsroom employment has declined by 45% as the industry struggles with a broken business model partly caused by the success of companies on the internet – including Facebook.
The Best Digital Transformers Choose When to Choose
There’s a cost to all this choice: it delays decision making, causes distress, and it leads to post-decision regret.
MOOvement: A track & trace system for cows
There’s a lot going on here. Mostly an excellent example of how software can be core to brand-new businesses.
Notes:
- There’s a whole website!
- $15/cow/year. (Not sure the network stuff is included… indeed, it’s not.)
- Product overview with some value props in this blog entry.
- 2017 background, with the original idea, translated from Dutch: “The Moovement team has developed an idea to better manage herds of livestock. This is done by following cows via a chip. By inserting a chip in one of the stomachs, the animal can be followed via GPS. In this way, the owner must get a better picture of where his livestock is located and read out information about, for example, body temperature and moisture percentage. In areas with extensive grazing areas, such as Australia, South and North America, the management of cattle is often a costly affair. By being able to follow an animal during its entire production cycle, farmers must gain more insight into costs and management, the inventors say. The jury decided to give this project more time to further develop the idea.”
- Their CEO thanks people who helped, including Pivotal.
Europe and America must work to stop their relationship unravelling
Yet, through its many ups and downs, the relationship has proved resilient. Trade flows between the eu and the United States remain the world’s biggest, worth more than $3bn a day. Shared democratic values, though wobbly in places, are a force for freedom. And, underpinning everything, the alliance provides stability in the face of a variety of threats, from terrorism to an aggressive Russia, that have given the alliance a new salience.
At the heart of this security partnership is nato. By reaching its 70th birthday the alliance stands out as a survivor—in the past five centuries the average lifespan for collective-defence alliances is just 15 years. Even as European leaders wonder how long they can rely on America, the relationship on the ground is thriving. As our special report this week explains, this is thanks to nato’s ability to change. No one imagined that the alliance’s Article 5 mutual-defence pledge would be invoked for the first, and so far only, time in response to a terrorist attack on America, in September 2001, or that Estonians, Latvians and Poles would be among nato members to suffer casualties in Afghanistan. Since 2014 the allies have responded vigorously to Russia’s annexation of Ukraine. They have increased defence spending, moved multinational battlegroups into the Baltic states and Poland, set ambitious targets for military readiness and conducted their biggest exercises since the cold war.
Week 12, elf sweep loop texture build piano east content Yanni
One thing I’ve learned, writing books and then talking to people about those books and others, is that people read for wildly different reasons. I don’t only mean they read different books for different reasons – “I like mysteries, because they keep my brain occupied”; “I like fantasy novels, because they offer me a world that is fundamentally ordered and legible” – but also that they read the same books for different reasons. Wildly different. I mean sure, there is always the shared foundation of processing sentences on the page, rendering them into a kind of waking dream; but beyond that, there is sometimes zero overlap between the objectives and pleasures of different kinds of readers. The more I’ve been convinced of that, the more I’ve come to love it. It’s weird and challenging and exciting.
Elizabeth Holmes and her firm Theranos show why we must stop fetishising entrepreneurs
As well as capturing enduring gender anxieties, the Theranos story is also a reflection of the technological zeitgeist. Gibney believes Holmes was so successful because of Silicon Valley’s “fetishisation of the entrepreneur”. Holmes’s entire persona, after all, seems to have been an exercise in myth-making. She dropped out of college, like Mark Zuckerberg. She borrowed Steve Jobs’s trademark black turtleneck and bizarre eating habits. She faked a deep baritone to make herself more authoritative. If you were to come up with a piece of performance art reflecting our expectations of “tech geniuses”, you could not have done a better job than Holmes. What an incredibly scary thought.
BMC Touches Clouds with Job Scheduler
The new support for cloud platform as a service (PaaS) functions — including Lambda, step functions, and batch on AWS and logic apps and functions on Azure — gives organizations the capability to orchestrate workflows on the cloud. But, importantly, it also allows customers to integrate these cloud functions with applications running in private clouds and hybrid architectures, the company says.
“Where it can go wrong is where we use YAML to describe behavior.”
Actually doing the thing instead of just describing the thing you want: the bane of all programming.
Are security concerns over Huawei a boon for its European rivals?
Between 2015 and 2018 Huawei’s share rose from 24% to 28%; Nokia’s dipped from 20% to 17% and Ericsson’s from 15% to 13%. An escalation in the war on Huawei might prompt Beijing to retaliate by kicking Western firms out of China.
That would be a blow to the Nordic duo. China accounted for 10% of Ericsson’s 211bn krona ($24.2bn) in global sales last year. The company runs two research and development sites in China. Nokia derives a similar share of revenues from the Chinese mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Extra sales in Europe in the event of a Huawei ban would not offset losses in China, argues Pierre Ferragu of New Street Research, not least because the Chinese will launch 5g a year or two earlier.
More important, worries Börje Ekholm, chief executive of Ericsson, a ban on Huawei would slow down the launch of 5g in Europe
What executives actually want to hear
I get asked to talk with “executives” more and more. That’s part of why Pivotal moved me over to Europe. People make lots of claims about what executives want to hear, the conversations you can have with them as a vendor. They don’t have time. You have have to be concise. They don’t want to hear the details. They just want to advance their careers.
None of those are really my style, even part of my core epistemes. When I have a good conversation with anyone, it’s because we’re both curious about something we don’t know. The goal is to understand it, sort of hold it out on a meat-selfie-stick and look at it from all angles. This find that most people, especially people in management positions charged with translating corporate strategy to cash enjoy this. Some don’t, of course.
Anyhow, I’ve been writing down some common themes and “unknowns” for IT executives:
- Innovation - use IT to help change how the current business functions and create new businesses. Rental car companies want to streamline the car pick-up process, governments want to go from analog and phone driven fulfillment to software, insurers want to help ranchers better track and protect the insured cows. Innovation is now a vacious term, but when an organization can reliably create and run well designed software, innovation can actually mean something real, revenue producing, and strategic.
- Keep making money - organizations already have existing, revenue producing businesses, often decades old. The IT supporting those businesses has worked for all that time - and still works! While many people derisively refer to this as “keeping the lights on,” it’s very difficult to work in the dark. Ensuring that the company can keep making money from their existing IT assets is vital - those lights need to stay on.
- Restoring trust in IT’s capabilities - organizations expect little from IT and rarely trust them with critical business functions, like innovating. After decades of cost cutting, outsourcing, and managing IT like a series of projects instead of a continuous stream of innovation. The IT organization has to rebuild itself from top to bottom - how it runs infrastructure, how it developer and runs software, and the culture of IT. Once that trust is built, the business needs to re-set its expectations of what IT can do, reinviting IT back into everyday business.
What happens next is the fun part: how to executives reprogram their organization to do the above?
That’s my take on “to talk with executives,” then: learning what they’re doing, even validating my assumptions like the above. This is, or course, filled in with all sorts of before/after performance anecdotes (“proof points” and “cases”). Those are just conversational accelerants, though. They’re the things that move the narrative forward by keeping the reader engaged, so to speak, by keeping you interested (my self as well).
Anyhow. Even all this is a theory on my part, something to be validated. As I have more of these conversations, we’ll see what happens.
What’s going on here? I try to start back up my email newsletter from time to time. The easiest thing seems to be a generated list of links with some slight original content. We’ll see what happens!