June 29, 2017

Episode 97: The novel strategy of making money, and investing to do so - Amazon + Whole Foods

1 hour 3 minutes

Looks like we’ll be getting cheaper organic food what with Amazon buying Whole Foods. What exactly is the strategy at play here, though? Other than the obvious thing of doing online groceries, how is Amazon advantaged here such that others (like Wal-mart), can’t simply do this themselves. We go over these questions and how they related to M&A in general. Plus recommendations and some podcast meta talk.

Mid-roll

This episode is sponsored by Casper, who’s looking for some good senior SREs. If you’re into building out and managing infrastructure that keeps code running and makes sure you can sleep soundly at night, check out the job listing, apply, and be sure to mention that you heard about it on Software Defined Talk. According to Glassdoor reviews, it’s a damn fine place to work. You can also just email [email protected] and browse all their openings at casper.com/jobs.

LOOK, MA! I PUT IN DATES! DevOpsDays Minneapolis, July 25 to 26th: get 20% off registration with the code SDT (Thanks, Bridget!).

SpringDays - Atlanta (July 18th to 19th)

Matt will be at:

DevSecOps at RSA Conf APJ

Sydney Chef Meetup August 1st

Auckland AWS User Community August 3rd

Brisbane Azure User Group October 11

Podcast meta-talk

Podcasts.app to be able to track what you listen to.

Just paying for podcasts.

$220m+ estimated TAM.

We have a Casper ad!

Amazon Buys Whole Foods

This was not covered in the Mary Meeker slide-fest.

Coté’s notebook on the topic.

Stratechery on WF Acquisition

Exponent Podcast

What exactly are the barriers to entry here for other grocery stores.

The business: online, and just the grocery store on it’s own...plus the 460+ physical stores for other goods?

Barriers to entry, Amazon buyers (Whole Foods looks good now?), culture clash?, HEB love, private label

BONUS LINKS! Not covered in episode.

Gartner Magic Quadrant for IAAS is Here!

Larry D.

Once again, what a change from way back when:

CRN

The Register

Johnny Leadgen can get a copy.

On Oracle: “Gartner warns potential customers to be cautious of high-pressure sales tactics.”

How Microsoft Is Shifting Focus to Open Source

Link

“Chef is used to manage thousands of nodes internally across Azure, Office 365 and Bing.”

Amazon Eyeing Slack?

Link

“Buying Slack would help Seattle-based Amazon bolster its enterprise services as it seeks to compete with rivals like Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google.”

Walmart Buys Bonobo

I’ve got a Bonobo suit I really like.

They had ModCloth and some others. Their M&A strategy has really shifted of late.

Walmart Sez Get Off the AWS

Finally a reason for multi-cloud

BigCo’s gonna bully that supply-chain.

What’s Wrong with Jenkins?

Jenkins is the Nagios of CI/CD

“No toolchain is perfect, but you can achieve software delivery perfection (or something close to it, at least) when you implement the right culture.” Tools don’t substitute culture.

Oracle’s Swinging For the Fences (and missing)

Link

“He was also unwilling for Specsavers to become a guinea pig for Oracle's cloud.”

Ubuntu Mobile Post Mortem

Not much strategy…

Serverless and the Death of DevOps

Link

Spoiler: “DevOps is the ultimate reactive, or event-driven, tech use case. It’s not going anywhere”

State of DevOps 2017 Report

Johnny Leadgen to the rescue!

Commercial Open Source Software Companies

Link

A bit of sourcing on the numbers would be valuable

Glad Chef’s not on the list, wouldn’t want to comment on the numbers

Cloud Foundry Summit

A whole mess of videos! 121 of them.

Heptio Out of Stealth Mode with K8s Management Tool

TheNewStack covere

Official page

File under “It didn’t already do that. I see.”

Not sure this qualifies as “coming out of stealth”, everyone knows they work on open source K8s. I’m not seeing a monetization strategy yet beyond support & training. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but they raised $8.5 for their A-round

BMC Software Exploring Merging with CA

STOP THE PRESSES! TERRIBLE MEETS TERRIBLE?

So far, no confirmation, but:

“While the two companies were once dominant in the systems management industry, the analyst notes that CA and BMC have 7.5% and 8% share respectively as of FY16 which combined would put them on a near even footing with IBM, the largest vendor, at 15%.”

“There are also many other vendors in the market including MSFT (7%) and NOW (5%) so anti trust concerns should not be an issue.”

High Level Kubernetes Overview

Link

“Basically Kubernetes is a distributed system that runs programs (well, containers) on computers. You tell it what to run, and it schedules it onto your machines.”

Episode 97: The novel strategy of making money, and investing to do so - Amazon + Whole Foods

1 hour 3 minutes

Mid-roll

LOOK, MA! I PUT IN DATES! DevOpsDays Minneapolis, July 25 to 26th: get 20% off registration with the code SDT (Thanks, Bridget!).

SpringDays - Atlanta (July 18th to 19th)

Matt will be at:

DevSecOps at RSA Conf APJ

Sydney Chef Meetup August 1st

Auckland AWS User Community August 3rd

Brisbane Azure User Group October 11

Podcast meta-talk

Podcasts.app to be able to track what you listen to.

Just paying for podcasts.

$220m+ estimated TAM.

We have a Casper ad!

Amazon Buys Whole Foods

This was not covered in the Mary Meeker slide-fest.

Coté’s notebook on the topic.

Stratechery on WF Acquisition

Exponent Podcast

What exactly are the barriers to entry here for other grocery stores.

The business: online, and just the grocery store on it’s own...plus the 460+ physical stores for other goods?

Barriers to entry, Amazon buyers (Whole Foods looks good now?), culture clash?, HEB love, private label

BONUS LINKS! Not covered in episode.

Gartner Magic Quadrant for IAAS is Here!

Larry D.

Once again, what a change from way back when:

CRN

The Register

Johnny Leadgen can get a copy.

On Oracle: “Gartner warns potential customers to be cautious of high-pressure sales tactics.”

How Microsoft Is Shifting Focus to Open Source

Link

“Chef is used to manage thousands of nodes internally across Azure, Office 365 and Bing.”

Amazon Eyeing Slack?

Link

“Buying Slack would help Seattle-based Amazon bolster its enterprise services as it seeks to compete with rivals like Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google.”

Walmart Buys Bonobo

I’ve got a Bonobo suit I really like.

They had ModCloth and some others. Their M&A strategy has really shifted of late.

Walmart Sez Get Off the AWS

Finally a reason for multi-cloud

BigCo’s gonna bully that supply-chain.

What’s Wrong with Jenkins?

Jenkins is the Nagios of CI/CD

“No toolchain is perfect, but you can achieve software delivery perfection (or something close to it, at least) when you implement the right culture.” Tools don’t substitute culture.

Oracle’s Swinging For the Fences (and missing)

Link

“He was also unwilling for Specsavers to become a guinea pig for Oracle's cloud.”

Ubuntu Mobile Post Mortem

Not much strategy…

Serverless and the Death of DevOps

Link

Spoiler: “DevOps is the ultimate reactive, or event-driven, tech use case. It’s not going anywhere”

State of DevOps 2017 Report

Johnny Leadgen to the rescue!

Commercial Open Source Software Companies

Link

A bit of sourcing on the numbers would be valuable

Glad Chef’s not on the list, wouldn’t want to comment on the numbers

Cloud Foundry Summit

A whole mess of videos! 121 of them.

Heptio Out of Stealth Mode with K8s Management Tool

TheNewStack covere

Official page

File under “It didn’t already do that. I see.”

BMC Software Exploring Merging with CA

STOP THE PRESSES! TERRIBLE MEETS TERRIBLE?

So far, no confirmation, but:

“There are also many other vendors in the market including MSFT (7%) and NOW (5%) so anti trust concerns should not be an issue.”

High Level Kubernetes Overview

Link

“Basically Kubernetes is a distributed system that runs programs (well, containers) on computers. You tell it what to run, and it schedules it onto your machines.”