Agile, On-Demand and Commitment Cloud Prices

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 …   continue reading

It's About the Carbon, Not the Silicon

Earlier today, I had the pleasure of speaking with Stuart Hasking, a colleague from my financial services IT days, and currently a strategic consultant at TESM. We were discussing the challenges in making changes in a technology environment, when he …   continue reading

The Narcotic Of Professional Services

In the technology world, selling new products is hard. Selling to enterprises is even harder. Small companies were (relatively) easy. They took a little bit of handholding to get your SaaS/software/hardware configured "just right" for them, but most …   continue reading

Tech War or Diplomacy?

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 …   continue reading

Did Docker Declare War on RedHat and CoreOS?

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 …   continue reading

You Cannot Buy Your Culture Into Nimbleness

I find it interesting when the same conversation happens with two different people in the span of just a few days. In the past week, I had almost the exact same conversation twice, with two different people at two different companies, about culture …   continue reading

Getting A Header On Recruiting Engineers

As every successful CEO (and VP) will tell you, recruiting great people is their top priority. Sure, they need revenue, and deliverables, and to manage funds, and a million other things. But great people are how you get these things done. In a …   continue reading

I Have Given You a Service, If You Can Keep it

In my world of technology operations, two major themes recur again and again (redundantly): Incentives Litmus Tests I have written about incentives extensively on this blog. In short, as the saying goes, "you get what you measure." Don't expect …   continue reading

Amazon: Speed and Ease vs Vendor Lock-In

A few weeks ago, Amazon Web Services held its annual AWS re:Invent conference. Unsurprisingly, they announced, yet again, a slew of new services, all meant to ease adoption and management of technology services. Yet, something felt a little amiss: …   continue reading

On to Nano-Services

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 …   continue reading