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.

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.

Earlier this week, a really smart architect and I were evaluating various methods for managing software code changes, bug fixes, releases and major features. We both were in agreement with the primary direction, a popular one in nimble companies. Have a primary "trunk" or "master" branch; Any commits to "master" automatically get built and tested and ready for production (and possibly deployed); Any changes occur on "feature branches", temporary parallels streams of development that eventually - hopefully sooner rather than later - merge into "

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).

What do Heinz Ketchup, QR codes and adult Web sites have in common? Apparently, everything. QR codes are those two-dimensional barcodes you often see on ads or consumer products. Just like regular barcodes encode numeric information, QR codes encode full text. They often are used to reference Web addresses, or URLs. For example, the following QR code, when scanned with a mobile phone app, will link to this site:

As Ecclesiastes said, "there is nothing new under the sun." Last week, we explored how much of the innovation in the tech business is just retooling existing processes, while much innovation exists in the technology itself, which enables those businesses. It turns out, even in technology itself, sometimes the newest and most innovative item really is nothing new under the Sun (capitalization intended). Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, before the growth of Linux, commodity servers and Google, we used to buy a lot of very expensive computer hardware.

"The purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer." - Peter Drucker No matter how many times we say it, we forget it. We get caught up in operations, or competition, or marketshare, or share price. Yet a business, like a life, has a purpose: to create and keep a customer. I might add, "to keep that customer profitably satisfied." Earlier this month, a very well known Apple developer, one of the "

Years ago, a young man, let's call him D, with whom I had once gone to summer camp followed his dream and opened a meat restaurant. They had great big burgers, flaming wings, fresh onion rings and fries, a meat-lovers dream. Not only did I enjoy going there, but when a group of friends helped me move apartments before I got married, I took them there for a "thank-you" dinner.