Notebook/wunderkammer
Further on the quest to figure out what a “cloud-native enterprise architect” is:
What’s the “business” side of enterprise architecture? And how does EA’ing start mapping to DevOps, cloud-native, and all the new stuff? In part one of this discussion, I talk with Matt Walburn about how EA’s fit into The Business.
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Most DevOps people seem to think Enterprise Architects are on annoying uncle at Thanksgiving status. I’m not sure that’s exactly the case, but what an EA can do in a cloud-native organization isn’t exactly too well known and documented yet. This week Richard Seroter and I discuss the idea of a cloud-native architect.
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Turns out of course it’s not just Developer Time To Suck that is shrinking. Operations is heading the same way. Folks at Pivotal are saying that operating systems don’t matter, as we’ve moved further up the stack. Cloud Native is a proxy for saying much the same thing. But then, something is being written right now that will supplant Kubernetes. If we’re not running our own environments in house, operations disposability become increasingly realistic. Cattle not pets, for everything.
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. Now only one person can update the whole fleet in 30 minutes.
Some guiding principals and management challenges:
Cox said that leading a change of this order of magnitude involved three crucial ingredients:
1. Collaboration: break down silos, mutual objectives.
2. Curiosity: keep experimenting.
3. Courage: candor, challenge, no blaming or witch-hunting.
But these can come with its own leadership challenges, including:
• The politics of command and control.
• How new leadership can take a company in a new direction.
• The blame bias of who versus what.
And, some good motivation:
We keep moving forward, opening up new doors, doing more things because we’re curious.
As part of CoreOS’s conference this week, 451 put out a sponsored study on container orchestration. It’s been much cited and is free, so it’s worth taking a look. Here’s my highlights and notes:
As one last piece of context, one of the more recent Gartner surveys for container usage puts usage at around 18%, with 4% of that being “significant production use”:
Of course, looks at more specialized slices of the market find higher usage.
This early in the container market, it’s good to pay close attention to surveys because the sample size will be small, selective, and most people will only have used containers for a short while. But, there’s good stuff in this survey, it’s definitely worth looking at and using.
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 do a lot more user-driven work upfront and then do (it sounds like) weekly small batches to keep the users apprised of the tools and, you’d guess, give continuous feedback:
You have to understand what people want to do in their domain. In the past, Ive gotten it wrong. Ill come up with an idea I think is sound I think its the coolest thing ever and Ill work six months in isolation with my team, and then well do this big reveal. And every time we’ve done that, its gone horribly wrong, because 1) people feel like were lecturing to them, like we know better than them. And then 2) we would typically have over-engineered it! It would be like the 747 cockpit, you know? There would be this overwhelming amount of knobs and bits and pieces that I think are great to have, but from their viewpoint, they only need to do a few things, and thats an overwhelming amount of stuff to have to sign up to be able to do. So now, Ive gotten into a habit: before I even write a single line of code, I interview everybody that potentially will use the solution that Im going to write, and I keep them in lockstep with me and my team just about every week. We keep them engaged, helping to influence the direction Im basically trying to echo out in code all of what they want. Its gone so much better, because they feel invested. They don’t feel like in six months I’m revealing this big, mysterious thing. They feel like this is just something they’ve seen through iterations. And whats empowering about that, too, is if you can get the spiritual leaders of the different departments that you’re trying to encourage to use your solution, they’ll help sell it for you.
And then a bit on their progress:
Were about 50% of the way in having some amount of production coverage powered by microservices which are deployable in cloud containers powered by technologies such as Spring and Spring Cloud.
There’s more, good cultural change stories in the interview.
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.
Why care? Aside from Canonical just being interesting – they’ve been first and/or early to many cloud technologies and containers – there’d finally be another Red Hat if they were public.
Most of the open source thought-lords agree that “there can never be another Red Hat,” so, we’ll see if the Ubuntu folks can pull it off. Or, at the very least, how an pure open source company wangles it out otherwise.
That said, SUSE (part of HPE/Micro Focus) has built an interesting business around Linux, OpenStack, and related stuff. Ever since disentangling from Novell, SUSE has had impressive growth (usually something around 20 and 25% a year in revenue). All is which to, the Red Hat model actually is being used successfully by SUSE, which, arguably, just suffered from negative synergies (or, for those who don’t like big words, “shit the bed”) when it was owned by Novell.
As I’m perhaps too fond of contextualizing, it’s also good to remember that Red Hat is still “just” a $2.5bn company, by revenue. Revenue was $1.5bn in 2014, so, still, very impressive growth; but, that’s been a long, 24 year journey.
All these “Linux vendors,”like pretty much everyone else in the infrastructure software market, are battling for control over the new platform, that stack of cloud-y software that is defining “cloud-native,” using containers, and trying to enable the process/mindset/culture of DevOps. This is all in response to responding to enterprises’ growing desire to be more strategic with IT.
From Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols:
Shuttleworth said “in the last year, Ubuntu cloud growth had been 70 percent on the private cloud and 90 percent on the public cloud.” In particular, “Ubuntu has been gaining more customers on the big five public clouds.”
And:
Its OpenStack cloud division has been profitable, said Shuttleworth, since 2015
Al Sadowski has an extensive report on Canonical, mentioning:
[Canonical] now has more than 700 paying customers and sees a $1bn business for its OS, applications and IT operations software. Time will tell if this goal is realized.
And:
Canonical claims some 700 customers paying for its support services on top of Ubuntu and other offerings (double the 350 it had three years ago), and to have achieved more than $100m in bookings in its last financial year…. [Overall, it’s] not yet a profitable business (although its Ubuntu unit is). We estimate GAAP revenue of about $95m.
On focusing the portfolio, shoring it up for better finances for an IPO:
we had to cut out those parts that couldn’t meet an investors’ needs. The immediate work is get all parts of the company profitable.
To that end, as Alexander J. Martin reports:
More than 80 workers at Ubuntu-maker Canonical are facing the chop as founder Mark Shuttleworth takes back the role of chief executive officer…. 31 or more staffers have already left the Linux distro biz ahead of Shuttleworth’s rise, with at least 26 others now on formal notice and uncertainty surrounding the remainder
Back to Al on the Job to Be done, building and supporting those new cloud-native platforms:
Rather than offering ways to support legacy applications, the company has placed bets on its Ubuntu operating system for cloud-native applications, OpenStack IaaS for infrastructure management, and Docker and Kubernetes container software.
And, it seems to be working:
Supporting public cloud providers has been a success story for Canonical – year-over-year revenue grew 91% in this area…. Per Canonical, 70% of the guest OS images on AWS and 80% of the Linux images on Microsoft Azure are Ubuntu. Its bare-metal offering, MaaS (Metal as a Service), is now used on 80,000 physical servers.
On OpenStack in particular:
Canonical claims to be building 4,000 OpenStack deployments a month at some 180 vendors…. It claims multiple seven-figure deals (through partners) for its BootStrap managed OpenStack-as-a-service offering, and that the average deal size for OpenStack is trending upward.
The Vaughan-Nichols piece outlines Shuttleworth’s IPO plans:
Still, there is “no timeline for the IPO.” First, Shuttleworth wants all parts of the slimmed down Canonical to be profitable. Then “we will take a round of investment.” After that, Canonical will go public.
However, Al’s report says:
It is not seeking additional funding at this time.
Probably both are true, and the answer as Shuttleworth says is “well, in a few years once we get the company to be profitable.
Thus far, it seems like the large banks are fending off digital disruption, perhaps embracing some of it on their own. The Economist takes a look:
There’s a whole slurry of myths about Cloud Foundry. With the platform updating so quickly, many of the issues behind these myths have long been addressed, and many were just false from the get-go. Coté and Richard talk about a recent post dismissing common myths. We also discuss recent news from the infrastructure software world and go over a bunch of upcoming events that Pivotal will be at.
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It’s another survey about business/IT alignment. Who knows how accurate these leadgen PDFs are, but why not? This one is of “646 CIOs and other IT leaders and 200 line of business leaders.” Some summaries from Minda Zetlin:
When LOB leaders were asked about the role their companies’ CIOs play, 41 percent said the CIO is a strategic advisor who identifies business needs and opportunities and proposes technology to address them. Another 22 percent said the CIO is a consultant who provides advice about technology and service providers when asked.
But 10 percent said their CIO was a “roadblock” who raises so many obstacles and objections to new technology that projects are difficult to complete. And another 9 percent said the CIO was a “rogue player,” with IT making technology decisions on its own, and creating visibility and transparency challenges.
Meanwhile, 36 percent of LOB leaders and 31 percent of IT leaders believe other departments “see IT as an obstacle.” And 58 percent of IT leaders but only 13 percent of LOB leaders agreed with the statement, “IT gets scapegoated by other departments when they miss their own goals.”
This seems better than the usual (kind of out of date) scare chart I used use, from a multi-year Cutter survey:
There’s still, as ever, plenty of room to improve business/IT alignment.
Speaking of that, also in that IDG/CIO Magazine survey, there’s a weird mismatch between the perception of The Business and IT about what IT does:
Meanwhile, Vinnie quotes a Gartner survey of 388 CEOs:
- Almost twice as many CEOs are intent on building up in-house technology and digital capabilities as those plan on outsourcing it (57 percent and 29 percent, respectively).
- Forty-seven percent of CEOs are directed by their board of directors to make rapid progress in digital business transformation, and 56 percent said that their digital improvements have already delivered profits.
- 33 percent of CEOs measure digital revenue.
Point being: The Business wants IT to matter and be core to how their organizations evolve. They want programmable businesses. Here’s some examples from another summary of that Gartner survey:
Although a significant number of CEOs still mention eCommerce, more of them align new IT infrastructure investments to advanced commercial activities – such as digital product and service innovation, exploring the Internet of Things (IoT), or adopting digital platforms and associated supplier ecosystems.
According to the Gartner assessment, some CEOs have already advanced their digital business agenda – 20 percent of CEOs are now taking a digital-first approach to business development. “This might mean, for example, creating the first version of a new business process or in the form of a mobile app,” said Mr. Raskino.
Furthermore, 22 percent are applying digital business technologies to their traditional processes. That’s where the product, service and business models are being changed, and the new digital capabilities that support those are becoming core competencies.
There’s demand there, the final result of “the consumerization of enterprise IT,” as we used to crow about. IT needs to catch-up on its abilities to do more than “just keep the lights” on or there’ll be a donkey apocalypse out there.
You seem people like Comcast doing this catching-up, very rapidly. The good news is that the software and hardware is easy. It’s the meatware that’s the problem.
