The Docker forking hoopla is providing an interesting example, in realtime, of how open communities figure out monetization. #RealTalk: Open communities are not immune to C.R.E.A.M. One of the most important decisions an open source community makes is where and how it will make money. I always liked Eclipse’s take because they’re mega clear on this topic; the ASF plays this goofy game where they try really hard to pretend they don’t need to answer the question, which itself is an answer, resulting in only the occasional quagmire; Linux has a weird situation where RedHat figured out This One Cool Trick to circumvent the anti-commercial leanings of the GPL; MySQL has a weird dual licensing model that I still don’t fully grasp the strategic implications of; RIP Sun.

tl;dr Recently, I’ve been in conversations where people throw some doubt on DRY. In the cloud native, microservices mode of operating where independent teams are chugging along, mostly decoupled from other teams, duplicating code and functionality tends to come more naturally, even necessarily. And the benefits of DRY (reuse and reducing bugs/inconstancy from multiple implementation of the same thing), theoretically, no longer are more valuable than the effort put into DRYing off.

This post is pretty old and possibly out of date. There’s an updated version of it in my book, Monolithic Transformation. In contrast to the way traditional organizations operate, cloud native enterprises are typically comprised of self-motivated and directed teams. This reduces the amount of time it takes to make decisions, deploy code, and see if the results helped move the needle. More than just focusing on speed of decision making and execution, building up these intrinsically motivatedteams helps spark creativity, fueling innovative thinking.

The recording for my talk at DevOpsDaysDays Chicago is up. As I mention in the opening, it has some material from my previous talks but is also pretty updated with new tips and tricks, as it were. Here’s the slides if you like that sort of thing. (And, here’s the clown zombie, from Day of the Dead.)

“[T]ake a shot when the secret word ‘dearth’ is mentioned.” What is DevOps? Industry Experts Explain | SolarWinds

Why Must I Use Cloud Foundry’s Bosh? I just Learned Chef/Puppet!

Randy Shoup on Microservices, the Reality of Conway’s Law, and Evolutionary Architecture

A few weeks back I was on a panel for a Solarwinds conference (done all online, in Solarwinds style, of course). Check out the recording a above (or just a 1 minute excerpt if you don’t have time). There’s also an article covering the discussion. For some reason we started talking a lot about QA, which was odd, but turned out to be interesting. The audience for this was made up of Solarwinds custoners who are not exactly the types in charge of managing custom written software (my primary criteria for “should you care about DevOps), but from the live-chat there were some…and a pretty broad interest in the topic, in addition to complaining about Windows patching and n00bz users.

It’s mostly links this week, with a big add video ad for my pal below: Get your lurn on [player.vimeo.com/video/121… Do you want to bone up on your product management skills? Check out this two day workshop from Craftman PM. I used to work with Prabhakar and he’s anything but boring when it comes to opinions around product. Check out more details, and if you use the code COTE when registering, you’ll get $250 off!

I was asked to talk to do an internal, “brown-bag” style talk at a company this week. I chose to do a slightly more technical-oriented version of the talk I tend to give, commentary and pointers on moving your orginization over to relying on more and more custom written software to run your business. Here, I give a brief business context and then throw out three areas to start focusing on if you’re interested in cloud, DevOps, and all this nonsense.