Category Archives: IBM

Why IBM’s hybrid “no-single-way” is a good plan

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I got to spend a few days hearing IBM’s cloud plans at IBM Interconnect including a presentation, dinner and guest blogging.  Read below for links to that content.

As part of their CloudMinds group, we’re encouraged to look at the big picture of the conference and there’s a lot to take in. IBM has serious activity around machine learning, cognitive, serverless, functional languages, block chain, platform and infrastructure as a service. Frankly, that’s a confusing array of technologies.

Does this laundry list of technologies fit into a unified strategy? No, and that’s THE POINT.

Anyone who thinks they can predict a definitive right mix of technologies to solve customer problems is not paying attention to the pace of innovation. IBM is listening to their customers and hearing that needs are expanding not consolidating. In this type of market, limiting choice hurts customers.

That means that a hybrid strategy with overlapping offerings serves their customers interests.

IBM has the luxury and scale of being able to chase multiple technologies to find winners. Of course, there’s a danger of hanging on to losers too long too. So far, it looks like they are doing a good job of riding that sweet spot. Their agility here may be the only way that they can reasonably find a chink in Amazon’s cloud armour.

While the hybrid story is harder to tell, it’s the right one for this market.

Four Posts For Deeper Reading

The posts below cover a broad range of topics! Chris Ferris and I did some serious writing about collaboration and my DevOps/Hybrid post has been getting some attention. It’s all recommended reading so I’ve included some highlights.

#CloudMinds tackle the future of cognitive in Las Vegas huddle

Rob is part of the IBM CloudMinds group that meets occasionally to discuss rising cloud, infrastructure and technology challenges.

“Cognitive cannot and will not exist without trust. Humans will not trust cognitive unless we can show that our cognitive solutions understand them.”

How open communities can hurt, and help, interoperability

“The days of using open software passively from vendors are past, users need to have a voice and opinion about project governance. This post is a joint effort with Rob Hirschfeld, RackN, and Chris Ferris, IBM, based on their IBM Interconnect 2017 “Open Cloud Architecture: Think You Can Out-Innovate the Best of the Rest?” presentation.”

When DevOps and hybrid collide (2017 trend lines)

“We’ve clearly learned that DevOps automation pays back returns in agility and performance. Originally, small-batch, lean thinking was counter-intuitive. Now it’s time to make similar investments in hybrid automation so that we can leverage the most innovation available in IT today.”

Open Source Collaboration: The Power of No & Interoperability

“Users and operators can put significant pressure on project leaders and vendors to ensure that the platforms are interoperable. “

Notes from OSCON Container Podcast: Dan Berg, Phil Estes and Rob Hirschfeld

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At OSCON, I had the pleasure of doing a IBM Dojo Podcast with some deep experts in the container and data center space: Dan Berg (@DanCBerg) and Phil Estes (@estesp).

ibm-dojo-podcast-show-art-16x9-150x150We dove into a discussion around significant trends in the container space, how open technology relates to containers and looked toward the technology’s future. We also previewed next month’s DockerCon, which is set for June 19-21 in Seattle.

Highlights!  We think containers will be considered MORE SECURE next year and also have some comments about the linguistic shift from Docker to CONTAINERS.”

Here are my notes from the recording with time stamps if you want to skip ahead:

  • 00:35 – What are the trends in Containers?
    • Rob: We are still figuring out how to make them work in terms of networking & storage
    • Dan: There are still a lot of stateful work moving into containers that need storage
    • Phil: We need to use open standards to help customers navigate options
  • 2:45 – Are the changes keeping people from moving forward?
    • Phil: Not if you start with the right guidelines and architecture
    • Dan: It’s OK to pick one and keep going because you need to build expertise
    • Rob: RackN experience changed Digital Rebar to microservices was an iterative experience
  • 5:00 Dan likes that there is so much experimentation that’s forcing us to talk about how applications are engineered
  • 5:45  Rob points out that we got 5 minutes in without saying “Docker”
    • There are a lot of orchestration choices but there’s confusion between Docker and the container ecosystem.
  • 7:00 We’re at OSCON, how far has the technology come in being open?
    • Phil thinks that open container initiative (OCI) is helping bring a lot of players to the field.
    • Dan likes that IBM is experimenting in community and drive interactions between projects.
    • Rob is not sure that we need to get everyone on the same page: open source allows people to pursue their own path.
  • 10:50 We have to figure out how to compensate companies & individuals for their work
    • Dan: if you’ve got any worthwhile product, you’ve got some open source component of it.  There are various ways to profit around that.
  • 13:00 What are we going to be talking about this time next year?
    • Rob (joking) we’ll say containers are old and microkernels are great!
    • Rob wants to be talking about operations but knows that it’s never interesting
    • Phil moving containers way from root access into more secure operations
    • Dan believes that we’ll start to consider containers as more secure than what we have today.  <- Rob strongly agrees!
  • 17:20 What is the impact of Containers on Ops?  Aka DevOps
    • Dan said “Impact is HUGE!”  > Developers are going to get Ops & Capabilities for free
    • Rob brings up impact of Containers on DevOps – the discussion has really gone underground
  • 19:30 Role of Service Registration (Consul & Etcd)
    • Life cycle management of Containers has really changed (Dan)
    • Rob brings up the importance of Service Registration in container management
  • 20:30 2016.Dockercon Docket- what are you expecting?
    • Phil is speaking there on the contribute track & OCI.
    • Rob is doing the hallway track and looking to talk about the “underlay” ops and the competitive space around Docker and Container.
    • Dan will be talking to customers and watching how the community is evolving and experimenting
    • Rob & Dan will be at Open Cloud Technology Summit, June 22 in Seattle

 

Composability & Commerce: drivers for #CloudMinds Hybrid discussion

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Last night, I had the privilege of being included in an IBM think tank group called CloudMinds.  The topic for the night was accelerating hybrid cloud.cb81gdhukaetyga

During discussion, I felt that key how and why aspects of hybrid computing emerged: composability and commerce.

Composability, the discipline of creating segmenting IT into isolated parts, was considered a primary need.  Without composability, we create vertically integrated solutions that are difficult to hybrid.

Commerce, the acknowledgement that we are building technology to solve problems, was considered a way to combat the dogma that seems to creep into the platform wars.  That seems obvious, yet I believe it’s often overlooked and the group seemed to agree.

It’s also worth adding that the group strongly felt that hybrid was not a cloud discussion – it was a technology discussion.  It is a description of how to maintain an innovative and disruptive industry by embracing change.

The purpose of the think tank is to create seeds of an ongoing discussion.  We’d love to get your perspective on this too.

10 ways to make OpenStack more Start-up Friendly [even more critical in wake of recent consolidation]

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The Josh McKenty comment that OpenStack is “aggressively anti-startup” for Business Insider got me thinking and today’s news about IBM & Cisco acquiring startups Blue Box & Piston made me decide to early release this post.

2013-03-11_20-01-50_458I think there’s a general confusion about start-ups in OpenStack.  Many of the early (and now acquired) start-ups were selling OpenStack the platform.  Since OpenStack is community infrastructure, that’s a really hard place to differentiate.  Unfortunately, there’s no material install base (yet) to create an ecosystem of start-ups on top of OpenStack.

The real question is not how to make OpenStack start-up friendly, but how to create a thriving system around OpenStack like Amazon and VMware have created.

That said, here’s my list of ten ways that OpenStack could be more start-up friendly:

  1. Accept companies will have some closed tech – Many investors believe that companies need proprietary IP. An “open all things” company will have more trouble with investors.
  2. Stop scoring commits as community currency – Small companies don’t show up in the OpenStack committer economy because they are 1) small and 2) working on their product upstream ahead of OpenStack upstream code.
  3. Have start-up travel assistance – OpenStack demands a lot of travel and start-ups don’t have the funds to chase the world-wide summits and mid-cycles.
  4. Embrace open projects outside of OpenStack governance – Not all companies want or need that type of governance for their start-up code base.  That does not make them less valuable, it just makes them not ready yet.
  5. Stop anointing ecosystem projects as OpenStack projects – Projects that are allowed into OpenStack get to grab to a megaphone even if they have minimal feature sets.
  6. Be language neutral – Python is not the only language and start-ups need to make practical choices based on their objectives, staff and architecture.
  7. Have a stable base – start-ups don’t have time to troubleshoot both their own product and OpenStack.  Without core stability, it’s risky to add OpenStack as a product requirement.
  8. Focus on interoperability – Start-ups don’t have time evangelize OpenStack.  They need OpenStack to have large base of public and private installs because that creates an addressable market.
  9. Limit big companies from making big pre-announcements – Start-ups primary advantage is being a first/fast mover.  When OpenStack members make announcements of intention (generally without substance) it damages the market for start-ups.  Normally corporate announcements are just noise but they are given credibility when they appear to come from the community.
  10. Reduce the contribution tax and patch backlog – Start-ups must seek the path of least friction.  If needed OpenStack code changes require a lot of work and time then they are unlikely to look for less expensive alternatives.

While I believe these items would help start-ups, they would have negative consequences for the large corporate contributors who have fashioned OpenStack into the type of project that supports their needs.

I’d love to what items you think I’ve overlooked or incorrectly added.