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.

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.

Sometimes I am amazed by open source software... even as I contribute to it. The largest repository of public open-source projects, GitHub, has over 35MM repositories in it. Granted, some large percentage of those are private, and therefore closed-source, but even if only half of those are public, and by all accounts it is much more heavily weighted towards open, the numbers are in the tens of millions. Add in other source hosting locations like BitBucket and sourceforge, as well as privately hosted sites like GNU Labs' git.

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.