The New Stack Analysts

Alexis Lê-Quôc, CTO & Co-Founder of Datadog, sits in with The New Stack Founder Alex Williams, and co-hosts Donnie Berkholz of RedMonk and Michael Coté of 451 Research, for this episode of The New Stack Analysts podcast.

Alexis discusses the genesis of the checklist, which presents Datadog’s understanding of the AWS ecosystem and service portfolio. “We have an emphasis (in the checklist) on monitoring because that’s what we do, but even as an end user of integrated services, we find ourselves asking the same questions over and over for each new service that’s coming out,” says Alexis.

For operations, it serves as a template with which to look at these new services, and one that could also be extended to services that have yet to be announced, and to services in general.

Learn more at: https://thenewstack.io/the-new-stack-analysts-show-26-datadogs-aws-checklist-and-herding-distributed-services/

Alexis Lê-Quôc, CTO & Co-Founder of Datadog, sits in with The New Stack Founder Alex Williams, and co-hosts Donnie Berkholz of RedMonk and Michael Coté of 451 Research, for this episode of The New Stack Analysts podcast.

Alexis discusses the genesis of the checklist, which presents Datadog’s understanding of the AWS ecosystem and service portfolio. “We have an emphasis (in the checklist) on monitoring because that’s what we do, but even as an end user of integrated services, we find ourselves asking the same questions over and over for each new service that’s coming out,” says Alexis.

For operations, it serves as a template with which to look at these new services, and one that could also be extended to services that have yet to be announced, and to services in general. Michael and Donnie both welcome this pro-active approach; Donnie finds it to be especially pertinent in anticipating transience and with scalability.

“If you’re building an application, especially for deployment on a new-fangled cloud context, I think a lot of these things (in the checklist) are important things to look over,” says Michael. “I like that there’s identity on there, because that’s a part that’s often left out.”

Indeed, Alexis maintains, Datadog has endeavored from the beginning to provide a product that can interface with a many services as possible. “The level of integration we support for monitoring is mostly through what’s being used, what people are asking for,” he says.

Always willing to take the heat for convening a Friday afternoon Google hangout, The New Stack Founder Alex Williams is joined by co-hosts Donnie Berkholz of RedMonk and Michael Coté of 451 Research for this episode of The New Stack Analysts, because not only is there a podcast to record, but there is also news to discuss regarding the launch of the Cloud Foundry Foundation as a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project.

Learn more at: https://thenewstack.io/the-new-stack-analysts-show-25-the-cloud-foundry-foundation-and-managing-open-source-projects/

Always willing to take the heat for convening a Friday afternoon Google hangout, The New Stack founder Alex Williams is begrudgingly joined by co-hosts Donnie Berkholz of RedMonk and Michael Coté of 451 Research for this episode of The New Stack Analysts, because not only is there a podcast to record, but there is also news to discuss regarding the launch of Cloud Foundry Foundation as a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project.

While The New Stack has already run a piece on Cloud Foundry’s move, on this occasion Alex and Michael hear Donnie’s first-hand perspective on what this move represents. A veteran of foundation-building in connection with Gentoo Linux, Donnie prefaces his remarks by disclosing that IBM and Pivotal are clients of RedMonk.

“It used to be,” says Donnie, “that if you’re going to go open source, you’re obviously going to be a foundation.”

“We figured out that if you want to legitimize your project – if you want to get contributions from other vendors, from users – you have to send it to, for example, the Apache Foundation, the Eclipse Foundation, maybe the Linux Foundation, maybe Outercurve Foundation more recently.”

“Over the past five or six years, that perception has started to change,” says Donnie. Projects such as Node became popular among users and vendors without having any foundation connection. So do foundations still provide any value?

“They still provide the value of neutrality,” Donnie says; vendors and co-opters alike have more guarantees about governance with a foundation, versus a lack of trust in less transparent entities, and particularly in startups. Also, he says, drawing from his own experience, outsourcing the heavy lifting – time, paperwork, lawyers – to an umbrella foundation while obtaining the benefits thereof is a wise move.

Alex wonders, who holds the trademark? Later, he notes the degree to which Docker‘s problems can be attributed to trademark management.

Donnie believes that the Cloud Foundry Foundation will hold the intellectual property. “You can have confidence that there is a neutral third party in the form of the Cloud Foundry Foundation behind all of this, while you’ve got (the Linux Foundation) who’s more experienced and who’s been a good outsourcer for a number of different groups like OpenDaylight.”

Feeling as though he is “fighting the old wars” perhaps, Michael is curious about the licensing aspect, seeing how Cloud Foundry is licensed under a permissive license, whereas Linux is GPL.

Different communities respond in very different ways based on the kind of license and, more importantly, the community standards it encourages, says Donnie. “A lot of developers don’t necessarily care about the license but they buy into the ideas behind it.”

“I think it’s interesting how some of the umbrellas have started to diversify in terms of their licenses in recent years,” says Donnie, “trying to follow the way technology is changing and the way people perceive the value of foundations.”

“It’s no longer infrastructure-centric, because everyone’s living on GitHub or something like it. It’s maybe even no longer license-centric.”

So, Alex asks, should Docker establish their own foundation?

“They’re just earlier in the life-cycle than Cloud Foundry; I think they will go down a very, very similar path based on how long they’ve been around, and the kinds of vendors getting involved, and the kinds of users getting involved,” says Donnie, who expects IBM’s involvement will likely increase the pressure for tangible steps toward structure in both governance and community.

This episode of The New Stack Analysts podcast was recorded in the NEMO Science Center in Amsterdam at the conclusion of DockerCon Europe 2014. Co-host Michael Coté reflects on the conference and ponders the Docker juggernaut with The New Stack Founder Alex Williams.

“It seems like it’s moving even faster,” says Alex. Michael wonders how does one measure the success of Docker? Total number of individual contributors and partners?

“It would be interesting to come up with a good way of modeling out how you measure a company operating in the new stack space,” says Michael. “What are the key numbers for them, if not revenue? If it’s not revenue, which is always the easiest and most generic, how do you measure their success?”

Learn more at: https://thenewstack.io/the-new-stack-analysts-show-24-dockercon-europe-redux/

This episode of The New Stack Analysts podcast was recorded in the NEMO Science Center in Amsterdam at the conclusion of DockerCon Europe 2014. Co-host Michael Coté reflects on the conference and ponders the Docker juggernaut with The New Stack Founder Alex Williams.

“It seems like it’s moving even faster,” says Alex. Michael wonders how does one measure the success of Docker? Total number of individual contributors and partners?

“It would be interesting to come up with a good way of modeling out how you measure a company operating in the new stack space,” says Michael. “What are the key numbers for them, if not revenue? If it’s not revenue, which is always the easiest and most generic, how do you measure their success?”

Regarding monetization, Michael believes that Docker is doing what’s to be expected: selling software. Waiting in the wings is Docker Hub Enterprise, to meet the demand for private repositories. Michael was surprised at an apparent shift of focus toward “enabling software development, or as they said, ‘microservices,’ rather than enabling cloud.”

Alex notes that developing applications for distributed infrastructure is by definition enabling cloud. “It’s almost like they’re talking about the cloud but they’re not talking about it,” says Alex, “because it’s just assumed.”

“Docker has been pretty adept building out actual commercial tools,” says Alex. “This event was more about products than we’ve ever heard from Docker.”

Michael wonders what the point of all of this activity is. “The end result is more or less a D.I.Y. PaaS,” he says.

“It’s almost like the de-composed PaaS,” says Alex.

Michael compares it to the LAMP stack, and to a kit car, and finally to making butter coffee without a recipe. “If it’s not PaaS, it’s just middleware then,” Michael says, “it’s just a stack to run your applications on.”

Docker has opened up the new stack to the many companies who would like to program their way out of the analog world. These companies need PaaS, says Alex, but not as the vendors have constructed them. “The users are saying, ‘this is actually how we’re going to do it.'”

“There’s not an agreed-upon standard for all players in the industry. And when you have that situation, the standard is ‘whatever code is running is the most successful.’ In that instance, it’s not unexpected that people will try to come up with alternative ways of doing containers or doing container management,” says Michael.

Both Alex and Michael notice that Docker doesn’t talk about “containers” much, and they agree that Docker would like to see the “Docker” name become synonymous with “containers,” much like Xerox and Kleenex have become synonymous with their flagship products.

Alex also sees, coupled with the shrewd branding approach, a continued and wise focus on the part of Docker to build for the developer, and to be good stewards of their community.

“Docker’s focus on building out the Docker technology

forced Google to think through who they really are, and they have been working with containers for a while,” says Alex. “They’ve put some of their biggest talents behind the Google cloud efforts over the last six to twelve months.”

“I think Kubernetes is perhaps the most interesting thing we’ve seen come from Google in a long time,” Alex says, crediting Docker with influencing Google, as regards its cloud strategy.

Alex concludes as he is struck by the notion that Docker’s influence is more catalytic than ever, and that tracking these influences throughout the industry merits further research for future shows and posts on The New Stack.

I keep thinking of this important week for Docker when listening to this recording from OpenStack that we did in Paris last month at our WarmUp event.

Lke OpenStack, this week's DockerCon is a community event, Both OpenStack and DockerCon are reminders that confusion is customary in emerging technology markets and there will be efforts to divert thinking. We see that in almost any technology community. The container community is no different.

Learn more at: https://thenewstack.io/the-new-stack-analysts-show-23-docker-its-just-the-beginning/

The New Stack Founder Alex Williams hosts this episode of The New Stack Analysts from the semi-arid climes of Broomfield, Colorado during the Defrag 2014 Conference. Alex is joined by Shippable Co-founder & CEO Avi Cavale and API Evangelist Kin Lane, and co-host Michael Coté.

Before Alex turns the discussion to the topic of tech conferences in general, with particular reflection on the positive aspects of the Defrag conference, the panel looks at the relationship of application programming interfaces (APIs) to Docker, and specifically how both APIs and Docker, the very popular platform for distributed applications, are gaining considerable presence on the web, contributing to much innovation, and much staking-out of territory.

Learn more at: https://thenewstack.io/the-new-stack-analysts-show-22-apis-docker-and-containers-in-the-cloud-casino/

I keep thinking of this important week for Docker when listening to this recording from OpenStack that we did in Paris last month at our WarmUp event.

Lke OpenStack, this week's DockerCon is a community event, Both OpenStack and DockerCon are reminders that confusion is customary in emerging technology markets and there will be efforts to divert thinking. We see that in almost any technology community. The container community is no different.

The New Stack Founder Alex Williams hosts this episode of The New Stack Analysts from the semi-arid climes of Broomfield, Colorado during the Defrag 2014 Conference. Alex is joined by Shippable Co-founder & CEO Avi Cavale and API Evangelist Kin Lane, and co-host Michael Coté.

Before Alex leads the discussion toward the value and purpose of tech conferences in general, and particularly in reflection on the positive aspects of the Defrag conference, they talk application programming interfaces (APIs) and Docker. Specifically, both APIs and Docker, the very popular platform for distributed applications, are gaining considerable presence on the web, contributing to much innovation, and much staking out of territory.

Kin discusses his immersion in the realm of APIs; he's not only researching and evangelizing but he's also designing and developing APIs for a variety of sectors. Having adopted the Docker platform, he creates open souce APIs that are available for deployment, or for consumption as a service. In addition to his mission of API education, Kin works with startups and other companies to develop their business models around API utility; he's called upon by the public sector as well to assist with development and deployment of APIs. Kin also explains the scenario of a wholesale provider supplying "white label" APIs to customers, who in turn end up serving APIs that "aren't their own," and aren't running in Docker containers.

Avi describes Shippable as a "containerized application delivery platform" and he explains what has been made possible by the advent of Docker, which Avi says is bigger than just having greater density of applications per machine. "It's actually is a distribution mechanism for applications, so you can encapsulate the whole application - for ever and ever, it's immutable - inside this container," says Avi. "You can bring it to life any time you want, actually dock it onto a host."

"When you have that kind of a model, your application life cycle changes radically, because you start building the image first and then building the application on top of it, as opposed to the traditional way of building the application first and building the image toward the end." Now, says Avi, with the flexibility of Docker "everything becomes a unit of work, and then you package that as a container, and then you can clone as many as you want."

"There seem to be lots of market forces here that intersect with this Docker story and the API story," says Alex.

"Every single cloud provider is trying to create lock-in. They're building higher-order services that actually get you locked-in," says Avi, citing AWS Aurora DB. "Once you move your data in there, you cannot move the compute out from that particular cloud."

"Docker is creating a homogenenous platform across all of these clouds," says Avi. He observes that, although Amazon APIs look completely different that Digital Ocean APIs, when packaged in Docker containers they can be freely moved around, "in a matter of seconds."

"I'm not moving 1.5 GB of VM images across and having to deal with all the hardware differences between the two platforms," says Avi. "There's an opportunity where you can be in between all of these clouds and do brokering of all of these services." Under certain conditions, Avi says,"it's almost like you're running your own virtualization stack on top of a cloud provider."