How do you run a great conference? I spent the first three days of this week, Monday March 4th through Wednesday March 6th, attending and speaking at QCon London. In my case, I spoke about LinuxKit, a toolkit for composing lightweight, minimal and optimized runnable operating system images. Those who know my focus on technology operations might wonder why I gave a talk on so deeply a technical subject as composing operating system images.

Serverless? Containers? Who will win??? In the week of aws reInvent, when 45,000 or so people are descending on Las Vegas, and two weeks before the big cloud-native conference in Seattle, the question of “which is the future, serverless or containers?” seems to be the “debate du jour”. For example, take last week’s debate: I am going to posit a different position, one which, in the true spirit of compromise, leaves everyone equally unhappy:

A few weeks back, I wrote an article on my observations on KubeCon/CloudNativeCon. A number of people asked that I follow up with similar observations about DockerCon. Last week, I had the unexpected pleasure of attending DockerCon in San Francisco. I say unexpected not because I did not expect to attend, but because I did not expect it to be so pleasurable. Indeed, I fully intended to cancel my ticket, until I was asked by several colleagues to attend with them.

What is Kubernetes? According to the home page: Kubernetes is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. On that basis, Kubernetes has matured and evolved, becoming not just “an open-source system”, but the system for orchestrating containerized applications. By extension, it is the system for orchestrating any dynamic, self-healing, rapid deployment application. In October 2017, Docker threw in the towel on Docker Swarm and made Kubernetes its default (and apparently soon only) orchestration system.

Two weeks ago, I attended KubeCon/CloudNativeCon EU 2018 in Copenhagen. The sheer size of the conference was astounding. Over 4,000 people attended.. In addition to the sheer size, the professionalism of both the conference itself - audiovisual, presentation, organization and administration - and the sponsor booths was very impressive. I have always enjoyed Linux Foundation events, very warm and friendly, but a little, as they say in Yiddish, “heimish”. They contrasted with the professionally run conferences you could attend put on by other organizations.

Yesterday, I worked with a colleague to determine costing for their newly deployed kubernetes cluster on AWS (Walmart must not be a customer...). The math was mostly straightforward: Get cost of instance by size, multiply by number of instances and 720 hours per month; Add EBS block storage; Add ELBs; Add data traffic out; Add S3 storage. Repeat for each environment, and you have your answer. By far, the biggest cost line item is the first: instances.

Yesterday, I published an article asking, "Did Docker Declare War on RedHat and CoreOS?" I received several responses pointing out market-related developments. A number of people said they know that Docker did not intend to "declare war" on CoreOS and RedHat. Docker simply was developing its tools that they needed anyways and advanced their market. With the change in CEOs this week at Docker, highly unlikely they would start a war immediately before changing.

Yesterday, at DockerCon, Docker Inc announced open-sourcing its LinuxKit toolkit to build Linux operating system images. LinuxKit (the platform that has been rumoured as Moby for over a year) provides a relatively easy-to-use toolkit for building immutable operating system distributions. Normally, an operating system is a platform that you change on a regular basis. Sure, the core itself - the kernel and modules and basic tools - are changed only when you upgrade or patch your operating system.

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of meeting Pini Reznik, CTO of container consulting firm Container Solutions, in Berlin. It may appear strange that an independent consultant who spends a lot of time helping companies with development and infrastructure strategies, much of which over the last several years has involved containers, would tout another consulting firm's services. There is, however, plenty of work to do for all of us, and I am grateful for the thoughts and ideas they shared.

As readers know, I have been thinking a lot about serverless lately (along with all other forms of technology deployment and management, since it is what I do professionally). Recently, I came at it from another angle: network latency. Two weeks ago, I presented at LinuxCon/ConainerCon Berlin on "Networking (Containers) in Ultra-Low-Latency Environments," slides here. I won't go into the details - feel free to look at the slides and data, explore the code repo, reproduce the tests yourself, and contact me for help if you need to apply it to your circumstances - but I do want to highlight one of the most important takeaways.

Last week in LinuxCon/ContainerCon Berlin, I attended a presentation by Luca Bruno of CoreOS, where he described how kubernetes, the most popular container orchestration and scheduling service, and rkt integrate. As part of the presentation, Luca delved into the rkt architecture. For those unaware - there are many, which is a major part of the problem - rkt (pronounced "rocket", as in this) is CoreOS's container management implementation. Nowadays, almost everyone who thinks containers, thinks "

Containers, the management and packaging technology for applications, are useful for many reasons: Packaging is simpler and self-contained Underlying operating system distribution becomes irrelevant Performance, therefore density, and therefore cost, is much better when working without a hypervisor layer To my mind, though, one of the most important elements in any technology is how it affects culture and incentives. For example, MVC development frameworks are helpful for many reasons, but the most important is that it encourages (and sometimes forces) a cleaner way of thinking about and building software.

Serverless. Framework-as-a-Service. Function-as-a-Service. Lambda. Compute Functions. Whatever you call it, serverless is, to some degree, a natural evolution of application management. In the 90s, we had our own server rooms, managed our own servers and power and cooling and security, and deployed our software to them. In the 2000s, we used colocation providers like Equinix (many still do) to deploy our servers in our own cages or, at best, managed server providers like Rackspace.

What is the basic unit of application deployment? Two related trends have changed the answer to this question: DevOps Containers For many years, the tasks between engineer and operator were cleanly, if painfully, split: Engineer builds and delivers a package of files to deploy and run Operator deploys and runs those files in a production operating environment In the early years, the package of files consisted of a directory with a ream of paper and instructions.

I loved the Tesla shareholders meeting, for the same reason I love it when VCs write posts about "all the investments we passed on and regretted later." Bessemer Venture Partners even has a page dedicated to its "Anti-Portfolio." Fortune magazine called the Tesla meeting, "Elon Musk Confessions: All the Stupid Things Tesla Has Done." In the meeting, Musk catalogued many "stupid" mistakes (his words), although at the time they probably appeared smart, if slightly crazy (a characteristic required by every entrepreneur).

From the Cambridge Dictionary of English: iota (n.) - an extremely small amount From the Wikipedia: Internet of Things (IoT) - the network of physical objects—devices, vehicles, buildings and other items—embedded with electronics, software, sensors, and network connectivity that enables these objects to collect and exchange data. As electronics get smaller and smaller, not just wearables like an Apple Watch, but even tiny full computers like the Raspberry Pi, the "

Is hard return on investment all there is? In exploring business (and tech) projects, we have a tendency to think about the immediate, quantifiable ROI. Yet, there are times when the soft costs or other benefits outweigh any measurable ROI, and sometimes are even worth a negative ROI... in the short term. This was highlighted to me again yesterday. A colleague of mine is heading up a project to move tens of thousands of VMs from on-premise to the public cloud.

What do Docker containers have to do with Web browsers? Everything. Web browsers provide easy access to the digitized collective knowledge of the human race, political rants, serious applications and even silly kittens. However, it is important to understand why browsers became so popular, and such a success. Prior to browsers, networked applications existed. Mostly, they were client-server two-tier applications, but they were quite popular in business, and many home personal computer users had such applications.

For most of us - pretty much all of us - the way we use our operating system (OS) on our laptop is not that different from how we use it on our mobile or a system administrator uses it on a server: The operating system is installed to the local disk. Changes / upgrades are performed by installing files to the same disk and then rebooting. Software is installed and/or upgraded by installing files to the same disk.

The New York City Subway used to have ads above the seats for some trade school. The general thrust was, technicians always will be in need, because things always will break. What happens when employers no longer need to manage things that break? Ever since we have had IT, we have had servers. Ever since we have had servers, we have had systems administrators, or SysAdmins. I actually started my career as a sysadmin, recruited out of engineering school to run systems for CS First Boston.

Where will VMWare be in 5 years? For many years, VMWare was practically synonymous with virtualization. It provided multiple virtual servers on a single physical server, with a great feature set, good (for its time) management interface, and enterprise customer support. Lately, VMWare has been under threat, primarily due to 2 factors: Public Cloud: When deploying to the public cloud, customers don't just wash their hands of managing compute hardware, storage and network.

I love tech. Despite an MBA and a decade of consulting and running a start-up or two, deep down, I always will be an engineer. One of the most important lessons I learned as a young engineer 20 years ago at Morgan Stanley - courtesy of Guy Chiarello - is that the technology is only the means, not the end. Understand the finances, the market, even the politics if you want to do something with technology, even just inside a company, let alone outside.

At the Container Summit, I was speaking with a colleague at a booth, when a potential customer of his walked up and engaged in conversation. He asked an interesting question: How do I know if my software is ready for the cloud or for containerization? While an interesting discussion ensued about the company's technology, the most important points of the conversation were three key lessons: Just about any software or application can be containerized.

When at the Container Summit, I heard a great (if somewhat perverse) line from Jacob Groundwater of New Relic. I liked it so much, I tweeted it out immediately: If you want people to drive slower, don't give them an airbag; put a spike in their steering wheel! While a rather morbid image, Jacob hit on a core truth: if you make dangerous activities safer, people will do more dangerous things.