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

Why Networking is Critical to Serverless

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, …   continue reading

Can rkt+kubernetes provide a real alternative to Docker?

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 …   continue reading

DevOps in the 1990s

Last week, I had the pleasure of attending LinuxCon/ContainerCon Europe 2016 in Berlin. Besides visiting a fascinating historical capital - there is great irony, and victory, in seeing "Ben-Gurion-Strasse" - or "Ben Gurion Street" - named after the …   continue reading

Why Aren't Desktops Managed Like Containers?

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 …   continue reading

Is the Real Uber Threat to Hertz?

It has become commonplace to forecast that Uber, Lyft and other ridesharing services are a strategic threat to car manufacturers. After all, if "everyone" uses Uber, why would they bother owning cars? The problem with that argument is that it assumes …   continue reading

Amazon Pricing Should Be Customer-Centric

Today, I had a very interesting discussion with Rich Miller, a consulting colleague who has been around the block more than a few times. One of the interesting points he raised is that Amazon's AWS pricing doesn't quite work for enterprises. Let's …   continue reading

Architect Your Product Before It Holds You Back

Architecture determines capabilities. This is not new. Anyone who has planned and architected a new product, or has tried to retrofit capabilities for which a platform has not been architected, knows it first-hand. Yet, time and again, I come across …   continue reading