Adam Wray, CEO of Basho discusses Riak from Ricon, the distributed systems conference.

Cloudsoft Founder and CTO Jesse Proudman's view of the cloud services market.

Adrian Cockcroft of Battery Ventures presented at Docker this morning about the adoption of microservices and the role Docker is playing in this new way to build apps. Driving the growth are the growing number of companies that are rebuilding and adopting microservices and DevOps practices. It is testament to the enormous amount of new business and innovation happening in this space.

Drones — how we are fascinated by these flying robots. And Skynet, the self-aware artificial intelligence system in the Terminator movie series represents a metaphor for this age of automation, and the real fear and fascination that we have with systems that will free us or make us slaves to their commands.

Skynet is also the orignal name for Chris Matthieu's company, Octoblu, which is developing a machime to machine drone network or mesh of IoT networks that share a common API or communications protocol. At Defrag earlier this month, Matthieu discussed how using Octoblu, devices can discover, query, and message other devices on the network his company has developed.

Matthieu is developing what he describes as an unstoppable learning mesh network that speaks many protocols where disparate devices communicate via variety of protocols, something like a machine to machine instant messaging (M2M IM) neural network.

At the Defrafg conference this week in Denver, Brendan Burns of Google gave an overview of Google Kubernetes, the orchestration platform.

Marc Canter Interview - The New Stack Interview, Part One by The New Stack Makers

Part two of our interview with Marc Canter, the man behind the original macromedia, multimedia and now building Interface, a platform for building apps that provide context to the people and things around us.

Basho CEO by The New Stack Makers

Marten Mickos gave the keynote at Ricon, the distributed computing conference in Las Vegas

Much has been discussed about Docker, the tremendously popular (and justifiably so) open-source project that automates the deployment of applications inside software containers.

At New Relic’s FutureStack14 Conference, Solomon Hykes, Docker project progenitor and CTO of Docker, Inc., delivered this keynote address, in which he describes the context within which Docker arose and grows, the reasons for its creation and advancement, and the greater need to build on its momentum in order to help developers as a whole.

Summarizing the key conditions that brought about Docker, Solomon observes that the distributed applications of today “are not distinguishable from the Internet, really.” They’re expected to always be available and always work, and to be accessible from anywhere at any time, no matter how many different users and types of devices are using them. Applications must be elastic, massively scale-able and completely interoperable. End users have come to expect no less, and developers not only must meet the current demand but also build the next generations.

This is hard work, especially in an environment where old platforms no longer meet these challenges, and when a developer hits a snag it’s no longer enough to simply phone an iOS friend or an Android friend.

The tooling solution must address the biggest problem facing developers: the application is not running on only one computer, but it has to seem that way in order for the developer to deconstruct and reason it. This solution “requires independence between the logical software component and the underlying infrastructure, so that when machines go down, or are upgraded or deployed somewhere else, somehow the service is always there, independent of one machine.”

Large tech shops such as Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft have invested considerable time and resources in their own, in-house stacks, and this has left everyone else to cobble together open source tools and persevere.

“The general feeling,” Solomon laments on behalf of all developers, “is that the whole thing lacks a cohesive answer. Developers can’t point to something and say, ‘That’s what I’m building on; that’s my platform.’ That’s really the urge that, collectively, we’ve felt for some time: to come together and just build it, just define what the hell this platform is and just make it meet the requirements, and then we can go on to the interesting stuff…”