“Managed Pivotal Cloud Foundry is Rackspace’s first step into the managed platform space, as we move up the stack to solutions that customers want our help with,” wrote Brannon Lacey, vice president of applications and platforms at Rackspace, in today’s announcement. “It is a solution that helps customers get up and running on Pivotal Cloud Foundry quickly and stay up and running, with operational support and proactive monitoring. This way, in-house teams can focus on innovation and getting out to market quickly while Rackspace handles the backend.

Pivotal is at the epicenter of how enormous companies rediscover the art of software development. Source: Michael Dell Says Public Cloud is Important But It’s Not Everything

www.youtube.com/watch A recent rendition of one of my standard talks at the Austin DevOps Meetup. See the slides as well.

Application types: “The first result is that the airline will migrate to the IBM Cloud some of its critical applications, including the main website, its customer-facing mobile app and its global network of check-in kiosks. Other workloads and tools, such as the company’s Cargo customer website, also will be moved to the IBM Cloud.” Managed data-centers/cloud: “The airline will be able to utilize the global footprint of IBM Cloud, which consists of more than 50 data centers in 17 countries, in addition to a wide range of application development capabilities.

[O]ne well-publicized case in that vein, they said, was Home Depot directly working with Pivotal Software to introduce Pivotal Cloud Foundry to Google Cloud Platform. The home improvement retailer wanted to continue to use the popular development environment in the public cloud, but avoid giving business to Amazon's largest profit-generating division. A Pivotal spokesperson told CRN that Home Depot, like other Fortune 500 retail customers using Pivotal Cloud Foundry for app development, prefer Google Cloud Platform or Microsoft Azure above AWS.

This month’s column is on finding and vetting consultants. Check out the piece!

New types of software and delivery mechanisms (SaaS, mobile) mean new problems and scale: “We were so used to dealing with tens of servers and suddenly it was hundreds and thousands of servers,” which in turn created more work for the development teams. More: “The digital expansion of business equals more work and firefighting,” Cox said. Less time spent doing dumb-shit: employees used to spend the eight hours of the park closed every night, manually updating each server.

Eventually every advisor will be a robo-advisor, which means there will be convergence. Without some marketshare numbers, it’s tough to tell if the banking startups are making a dent against incumbent banks. Josh Brown suggests that banks are quick to catch-up and have nullified any lead that companies like Weathfront could have made: It wasn’t long before the weaker B2C robo-advisors folded, the middling players were acquired and the incumbents launched their own competing platforms.

Compensation is much cheaper if you can convince people to take an arbitrary number of lottery tickets in a lottery of unknown value instead of cash. Cash and known value is king. Something about discounted cashflows and such. Link

Good pointing out of needing some law and ethics to catch up to the Internet: The Internet brought us hyperconnectedness, but we’re really not ready to cope. We don’t have institutions and firewalls in place to prevent abuse of the system. The law can’t keep up, and doesn’t have the teeth in place anyway. Link