How all these unprofitable companies sustaining high valuations: bending reality today has three elements: a vision, fast growth, and financing. But: A few firms other than Amazon have defied the odds. Over the past 20 years Las Vegas Sands, a casino firm, Royal Caribbean, a cruise-line company, and Micron Technology, a chip-maker, each lost $1bn or more for two consecutive years and went on to prosper. But the chances of success are slim.

Between 1990 and 2010 the rate of economic convergence across American states slowed to less than half what it had been between 1880 and 1980. It has since fallen close to zero. Rich cities started pulling away from less well-off counterparts (see chart 1). According to the Brookings Institution, a think-tank, in the decade to 2015 productivity growth in American metropolitan areas was highest in the top 10% and the bottom 20% (where, by definition, the baseline was low).

The enterprise collaboration software vendor said it earned 12 cents a share, three cents ahead of the consensus estimate. Revenue climbed 41.7% year over year to $193.8 million, also above the $185.8 million analysts had forecasted. You know what they say: developers don’t pay for anything. Someone either needs to acquire Atlassian, it has to start acquiring companies, or if the private cloud thing becomes cemented, they need to work with the public cloud three to build out the private cloud toolchain.

Oracle reports its PaaS and IaaS revenue together, which makes understanding its IaaS growth difficult. FY16 to FY17 revenue increased from $0.9bn to $1.4bn, equivalent to 60% YoY growth. The company claims to have added 14,000 IaaS and PaaS customers to OCI since its inception, almost all of them existing customers of its licensed software. Oracle’s overall revenue in 2016 was $37bn, so IaaS and PaaS still represent a small slice of the pie.

The company targets very large users, with 60% of its customers being MSPs, followed by enterprises at about 30%, and the rest coming from government agencies. It doesn't report the number of direct customers, but its website boasts 47,000 organizations as users, many of them employing ScienceLogic via service providers. Average annual contract value for direct customers is $125,000. Source: ScienceLogic targets new use case aimed at frustrated CMDB users

Dave Bartoletti, an analyst with IT consultancy Forrester, said it’s clear that Kubernetes has won at the orchestration layer. “There’s too much mindshare around it,” he said in a phone interview with The Register. “There are too many developers who just want this.” Pretty much everyone has the sentiment that kubernetes has won. More details from Joseph Tsidulko at CRN: While some components of Enterprise Edition previously could be made to work with Kubernetes, the crucial control plane for managing the lifecycle of containerized applications was incompatible.

Ian Andrews explains and whiteboards out how all the cloud-native infrastructure fits together: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DHCqRJIIpI Go to 7m21s if you want to skip right to the diagraming.

It happens to be the case that CF — because it’s an app platform and wants to let the user focus on their code — provides a way to convert code in to containers inside the platform without having to start messing around with Dockerfiles and the like. And this functionality even does some cool things for you like keeping your container OS automatically patched so you don’t have to build CI pipelines to monitor your base images and rebuild stuff.

I have an extra piece in The Register this month. I was asked to frame the history of software product theory between the Cluetrain, Andrew Clay Shafer’s agile infrastructure talk, DevOps, and the “we’re a software company now” trope.

You probably still want to know who actually built a given container and what’s running in it. Source: Google, IBM and others launch an open source API for keeping tabs on software supply chains