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I used to think of industry analysts as 100% worthless to the broader technology world. After meeting Chris Gardner from Forrester, some of the good folks from RedMonk, and working with Red Hat’s Analyst Relations team, I’ve warmed up to Analysts a little. They serve an important function that a lot of us forget: Tactical efficiency does not replace strategic efficacy We as technologists spend a lot of our time tackling the next problem put in front of us. These problems are tactical challenges that need to be addressed. We are in the habit of blocking and tackling. We often forget we are working as part of a team in a more extensive system. We are moving towards a grander strategic vision. Analysts serve as a data point in a much larger world around us. They’re, for lack of a better term, intelligence assets. ...

Just when you thought a toxic, old, white guy with lousy hygiene was going to dominate the news this week, in walks Seth Vargo. On Thursday, Seth Vargo, a former Chef employee, learned something he wasn’t comfortable with about code he’d written. Seth discovered Chef had an active contract with the US Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (yes, that one). Seth then did something rather extraordinary. He yanked his code (including chef-sugar) from GitHub and RubyGems. This resulted in many production systems going offline across the globe. We could see some metrics about impact in a lawsuit at some point. When DM’ing Seth early Friday AM he told me, “It’s almost certain that Chef is going to sue.” ...

A slightly shorter version of this article was featured in DevOps’ish 144: Your 39 bps matters, happy little hybrid clouds, Kubernetes with a side of service mesh, HA SQLite, and more This week I read about a study of 17 languages that suggests humans, “no matter how fast or slowly languages are spoken, they tend to send information at about the same rate: 39 bits per second, about twice the speed of Morse code.” The study points out that some languages are clearly “faster” than others but, a steady average rate of 39.15 bits per second (bps) kept coming up. This study fascinated me since I talk to people as part of my work. My mind jumped to being on stage somewhere and spewing 1s and 0s out at a measly 17.6 kilobytes per hour. That is such a low data rate. It’s relatively equal to this random file I found on GitHub. At 39 bps, Kubernetes 1.15.3 would take about 1 day, 1 hour, and 14 minutes to download it’s whopping 443 KB of container orchestration code. ...

This Monday (2019-08-19) will be my first day as Principal Technical Marketing Manager on the Cloud Platforms team at Red Hat. What does that mean? OpenShift (a lot of OpenShift), Kubernetes, containers, Operators, and all the associated bits will be my day job. Helping folks help themselves with technology is still and always will be the name of my game. But, working full time in the Kubernetes or cloud native ecosystem was a 2020 goal. Crossing off 2020 goals in 2019. #winning ...

This article is based on the introduction to DevOps’ish on 2019-07-28. Some parts are duplicated but this is a much deeper dive than I could do in the newsletter (and these 1500 words barely do the topic justice). Also, yes, I work for Red Hat. No, these views do not represent theirs. Please take a moment to read my disclaimer. Above all things, I’m an American, and this issue transcends business. Let’s talk about JEDI. Not the lightsaber wielding type; it’s US Department of Defense’s Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI). JEDI is a $10 billion, single-award, indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contract for the largest department in the United States’ government’s cloud business. The process started in late 2017 and has had all sorts of twists and turns. The competition for the contract had come down to two suitable companies: Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. But, Oracle has been pitching a Larry Ellison sized fit over the process. Specifically, Oracle has protested JEDI’s selection process since last November. ...