Category: longform
Essays, articles, and other original content.
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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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Vanguard’s thinking on microservices
Breaking up the monolith with good, old fashioned, OO-think: Instead, Vanguard has begun a journey to break apart our monolithic legacy systems piece-by-piece by replacing them with microservices over time. With a microservices architecture, we remove the business logic and data logic from our applications and replace it with a set of re-usable modules of…
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Spending from outside of the IT department
Corporate departments outside of the IT department, globally, are forecast to spend $609bn in 2017: A new update to the Worldwide Semiannual IT Spending Guide: Line of Business from the International Data Corporation (IDC) forecasts worldwide corporate IT spending funded by non-IT business units will reach $609 billion in 2017, an increase of 5.9% over…
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Advice on introducing DevOps from Merrill Corp & SPS Commerce – Highlights
Nicely moderated by Bridget. Some of my notes and highlights: Amy talks about pace of change, sustaining it in the beginning, etc. The amount of time it took us to get going was a surprise – was longer. If you can start to show results early, it helps build up momentum. “Having enough wins, like…
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Kubernetes as the hybrid cloud magic maker
From 451’s report on Google Next: Google believes that a hybrid architecture will persist in the coming years as enterprises continue to migrate workloads to various clouds. Its hybrid cloud architecture revolves around its virtual private cloud. Google VPC is an instantiation of GCP that can dedicate compute, storage and network resources to an enterprise.…
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If compliance is so important, bake it into the platform
Can we take that governance and work with the platform team to codify, to automate that which they were doing on a per application basis – that’s, quiet frankly slowing down the delivery of the software – can we take that governance and can we have them work with the platform team to codfiy, to…
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We’re getting exactly the government IT we asked for
If there’s one complaint that I hear consistently in my studies of IT in large organizations, it’s that government IT, as traditionally practiced, is fucked. Compared to the private sector, the amount of paperwork, the role of contractors, and the seeming separation between doing a good job and working software drives all sorts of angst…
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Cloud-Native Cookbook – beyond “survival is not mandatory”
I started a new booklet project, the Cloud Native Cookbook. The premise is this: The premise of this book is to collect specific, tactical advice transitioning to a cloud-native organization. The reader is someone who “gets it” when it comes to agile, DevOps, cloud native, and All the Great Things. Their struggle is actually putting…
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Making mainframe applications more agile, Gartner – Highlights
In a report giving advice to mainframe folks looking to be more Agile, Gartner’s Dale Vecchio and Bill Swanton give some pretty good advice for anyone looking to change how they do software. Here’s some highlights from the report, entitled “Agile Development and Mainframe Legacy Systems – Something’s Got to Give” Chunking up changes: Application…
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White men to women and minorities in tech: We just DGAF
Less than 5% of white men surveyed said they considered a lack of diversity a top problem. Three-out-of-four respondents were unaware of any initiatives to make their companies or portfolios more diverse. And 40% of male respondents were sick of the media going on and on about it. Meanwhile, in political land: the more privileged…
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Sprinkling Internet on NGO’s don’t work
At first, you’re like, “oh, another piece where someone makes fun of us nerds and misunderstands our damagingly sarcastic way of saying everything that belies the privilege we all live under.” Then you’re like, “oh, this is actually a good piece.” E.g.: Human rights work attempts to prevent the abusive deployment of power against those…
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Automation at Goldman, The Computer takes out four people
Today, nearly 45 percent of trading is done electronically, according to Coalition, a U.K. firm that tracks the industry. Pay: Average compensation for staff in sales, trading, and research at the 12 largest global investment banks, of which Goldman is one, is $500,000 in salary and bonus, according to Coalition. Seventy-five percent of Wall Street…
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Growing eyeballs at Facebook, some product management tips
Some intersting history of how Facebook grew users. Of course, this the case study is for a free service, that focuses on a high volume of users. I.e.: not an enterprise sales business that charges $3m+ per user-cum-customers. Contextualizing aside, there’s some good product thinking: Better know what your product is good for: Knowing true…
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More on “grim” automation – Notebook
A few weeks back my book review of two “the robots are taking over” came out over on The New Stack. Here’s some responses, and also some highlights from a McKinsey piece on automation. Don’t call it “automation” From John Allspaw: There is much more to this topic. Nick Carr’s book, The Glass Cage, has…
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Book Review: Automation & tech ethics, book review
I reviewed two books on automation and digital transforming this month: The Wealth of Humans and Silicon Collar. These two books go well together because the first describes how automation is lowering the need for labor, leading, likely, to less jobs, while the second provides a compendium of examples of such software-driven labor change. Vinnie’s…
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Puppet and containers
When we’re talking with customers about the value that Puppet brings to them, invariably we talk about the future, and the future in their mind in some ways includes containers. There’s a lot experimentation going on. There’s a lot of Docker work being done and container work being done, Kubernetes work being done on their…
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Pivotal Cloud Foundry 1.9 out
The new version of Pivotal Cloud Foundry (“PCF” as folks like to say) is out. It has a whole slew of updates across the board. My selective highlights: Google Cloud & Azure support, so you’re all multi-cloud ready (still with OpenStack, VMware, and AWS support). Will run 250,000 containers concurrently; in addition to scaling based…
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Oracle losing legacy software sales, growing (public?) cloud sales
Once again, the key metric of new software license sales was off—falling 19% to $1.35 billion compared to last year, and missing analysts’ expectations of $1.44 billion. On the other hand: “Our cloud revenue will be larger than our new software license revenue next fiscal year, when the transition will be largely complete.” And: “Our…
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Developer Relations: More than Traveling the World and Buying People Beer
Some tactical advice, with some small survey figures: It was a small survey of 79 people, which isn’t particularly surprising since there aren’t that many developer relations roles. Some of the top skills needed to be successful in developer relations include communication, technical, and empathy. They also travel to a lot of events, 50 percent…
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