Category: longform
Essays, articles, and other original content.
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DevOps at Disney, management lessons learned – Notebook
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…
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Core DevOps (tech) metrics, from Nicole Forsgren
Everyone always wants to know metrics. While the answer is always a solid “it depends – I mean, what are your business goals and then we can come up with some KPIs,” there’s a reoccurring set of technical metrics. Nicole lists some off: These IT performance metrics capture speed and stability of software delivery: lead…
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Trumponomics: focusing on weird things with a small staff
From The Economist a few weeks back: The real difference is that Trumponomics (unlike, say, Reaganomics) is not an economic doctrine at all. It is best seen as a set of proposals put together by businessmen courtiers for their king. Mr Trump has listened to scores of executives, but there are barely any economists in…
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Introducing microservices
There’s some good “how do I actually get my organization do all this unicorn stuff” comments in this interview with DreamWorks Animation’s Doug Sherman. Here’s one sample bit on winning people over to microservices. Instead of going into the lab for six months to work on a tool that they think will be useful, they…
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Appian and tech IPO’s for horses
Appian raised just $48m as a private company, compared with $163m for Alteryx, $220m for Okta, $259m for MuleSoft and more than $1bn for Cloudera. In fact, all four of the unicorn IPOs raised more in a single round of private-market funding than Appian did in total VC funding.Not having done an IPO-sized funding in…
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Telcos becoming cloud providers doesn’t seem to work
Since the late 2000’s, one of the cloud strategy theories was that existing telcos and network providers could become public cloud providers. Many, if not all have tried and/or trying. Thus far, it’s been a rocky road: few synergies seem to be sleeping on the ground, ready to roused up to go fight the giants,…
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HPE/Micro Focus numbers: HP(E) software revenue down $870m since 2012
In a brief write-up of HPE/Micro Focus from Paul Kunert: Shareholders will also be asked to approve a $500m return of value, approximately $2.09 per share,” the statement to the City added. Well, who doesn’t like money? That said, performance is declining: The [HPE Software?] business has shrunk in recent years, with turnover dropping from…
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Canonical refocusing on IPO’ing, momentum in cloud-native – Highlights
flic.kr/p/nJR5oK There’s a few stories out about Canonical, likely centered around some PR campaign that they’re seeking to IPO at some time, shifting the company around appropriately. Here’s some highlights from the recent spate of news around Canonical. Testing the Red Hat Theory, competing for the cloud-native stack Why care? Aside from Canonical just being…
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HSBC’s Google Cloud use
A brief note, from William Fellows at 451, on HSBC’s use of Google Cloud’s big data/analytical services: They have lot of data, that’s only growing: 6PB in 2014, 77PB in 2015 and 93PB in 2016 What they use it for: In addition to anti-money-laundering workloads (identification and reducing false positives), it is also migrating other…
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Twitter’s video deals mean it’s giving up on business model innovation
So says Ben Thompson in his newsletter today: This is why Twitter’s increased focus on securing these video deals feels like such an admission of failure: the company is basically admitting that, despite the fact it contains some of the best content — given to it for free — in the world, it simply can’t…
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Why Pivotal Serves Free Breakfast to All Employees
Free food, during a limited, half-hour window, both saves people some hassle and gets them to show up at the same time to kick off the workday. To understand why this is so important, picture Pivotal without free breakfast. Let’s start with the obvious. Most developers would sleep late if it were up to them. They’d roll…
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Red Hat OpenShift Momentum – Highlights
Brian Gracely of Red Hat (and formally an analyst who did some of the best “cloud-native”/cloud platform work early on) has a momentum post on Open Shift. Here’s my highlights: Sizing up revenue and deal-size: [Q3, FY 2017] Also of note, we closed our second OpenShift deal over $10 million and another OpenShift deal over…
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Cloud-native at Comcast, working with Pivotal – Highlights
I’m doing a podcast with Comcast in a few weeks, so I’ve been going over all their public talks on their cloud-native efforts. They’ve been working with Pivotal since around 2014 and are one of the more impressive customer cases with over a 1,000 applications now on Pivotal Cloud Foundry. Here are some highlights from the…
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Reactions to Cloudera’s IPO, prospects – Notebook
There’s lots of opinions on Cloudera’s IPO today. Here’s some that I’ve collected in my notebook. Not valued high enough? Despite the share-price being up 20% at close, some negative commentary focuses on their valuation dropping from Intel’s funding round, e.g., from Brenon at 451: The chipmaker paid up for the privilege, putting a ‘quadra unicorn’ valuation…
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The news from Docker-land, plus, the money being fought over – Notebook
With DockerCon this week, there’s no end of Docker quotables and items. Here’s my collection General momentum Once landed in an account, Docker usage grows their CEO says: There has also been expansion within customers, with organizations that start with Docker expanding their usage on average by five times within six months Way back in…
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Picking off the slow-movers: $15bn for tech PE now sloshing around at Silverlake, more to come
Silver Lake plans to announce on Tuesday that it has closed its fifth buyout fund at $15 billion, one of the biggest ever dedicated to technology deals. That exceeds the $12.5 billion fund-raising target that the firm had previously aimed for and brings the firm’s total assets and committed capital to about $39 billion. They…
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With no competition, government websites often have no incentive to be good
In contrast to agile, private-sector companies, the public sector does not face any pressure from competition. When it comes time to renew your license, there is only one place for you to do that: and, unfortunately for Americans, that’s the DMV. With no competitive forces, government agencies do not have to innovate or take bold…
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DIUx working in streamlining IT projects at the DoD
Since May 2016, DIUx has completed 21 contracts using other transaction (OT) authority and the average time is 78 days, Shah said at the New America Foundation Future of War summit in Washington. The mission of DIUx, he said, “is to do agile culture change.…We are never going to be the acquisition arm of the…
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That rumor about Oracle buying Accenture: nope!
The Register closes out it’s reporting on the rumor that Oracle was considering buying Accenture: …spokeswoman Deborah Hillinger has since denied that an acquisition will take place, claiming: “The Accenture rumour is completely untrue. Never even considered it.” Meanwhile, Dennis covers the many reasons why the deal wouldn’t make sense in the first place. The…
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Rackspace positioning around cloud and OpenStack, from the CEO
Now that they don’t have to compete with AWS, they have an extra $300m floating around in the spreadsheets: “Ultimately now it’s about how are we going to build a stronger company. If we don’t have to go spend $300 million a year in capital competing against Amazon, building computing storage and networking, where should…
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