2019 Learnings, 2020 Expectations

A former co-worker and now friend has a tagline, “Every day is a school day.” I remind myself of this fact almost every time I learn something new. 2019 was the hardest year of my life. I’d like to share some things I picked up on this most recent journey around the sun we call 2019. I’ll make some predictions about 2020 in the process too. Kubernetes Last year, I said I thought Kubernetes would get easier. That didn’t happen. It’s not any easier to use Kubernetes. But, to be honest, I’m not sure if Kubernetes itself will ever get easier, it’ll be us getting more used to using it and building tools around it. I still think vendors need to focus on ease of use if they want to see their products getting adopted. But, the project in general, might not need to worry about ease of use. This seems like hair splitting, sure, but, it seems like Kubernetes did manage to penetrate every sector of tech in 2019. This is going to lend itself to a big ole ecosystem of people and orgs working on ease of use on behalf of the community. ...

January 1, 2020 · Chris Short

Use The Force, Larry: Oracle Playing Politics with Nation's Defense

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 trancends 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. ...

July 29, 2019 · Chris Short