DockerCon, The Search for ROI, and Tech Funding — Software Defined Talk #36

After discussing which days holidays usually land on, we discuss the news out of DockerCon, along with some unicorn talk based on a recent a16z chart-fest of tech funding. Then we talk ROI. It’s riveting!

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Show Notes

• If you like video, see this episode’s video recording.

“Rise of the Infrastructure Plumbers”

It’s DockerCon this week …

• Everything announced at DockerCon 2015.
• Docker joining the OCP effort.
• “The Docker client, engine, daemon, orchestration tools, etc., will continue to live at Docker … We will continue to provide a well-integrated tool chain for developers. We are purposely not trying to standardize the many things which are in areas where there is still a diversity of opinions and approaches.” (Official Docker blog post.)
• VMware getting more API friendly, wrapping containers in VMs and such-like.
• IBM showing up big.
• Some momentum stats: “They have grown from a project launched by Solomon Hykes in 2013 to one that has 40,000 Docker-based tools and over 150,000 Docker-based applications. It has been downloaded more than 500 million times.”
• Microsoft buying Docker? — “Investors wouldn’t sell for less than $3.5 billion.”
• Related: blogs as the new press release.

A16Z U.S. Technology Funding – What’s Going On?

• Check out the McKinsey titles!
• “And tech IPOs are essentially dead.”
• Discussion from Ben Thompson.
• “Realtime” Unicorn tracker.

What’s “ROI”?

• I’ve been trying to figure this out of late.
• Saving money on one option vs. another?
• Creating growth?
• Proof that you made a good choice?
• ROI = (Gains – Cost)/Cost; e.g., ($20,000 – $10,000)/$10,000 = 100 percent ROI (yes, I made it a percentage, math nerds.)
• Theory: ROI is only a useful metric for comparing the cost of things, and whether the gain is well understood and predictable.

Miscellaneous

• The DevOpsDays Austin recordings are up — Coté’s talk, Matt Ray debate, Damon’s value stream mapping, etc.
• Lords of Computing podcast — acquisitions are hard.
• Red Hat share price hits 15 year high.

Recommendations

• Brandon: The Finest Resort, in Cancun Mexico. Hatching Twitter.
• Matt: House of Cards.
• Coté: Flickr Camera Roll service — soon to have 20,000+ of my wife’s photos.

Michael Coté studies how large organizations get better at building software to run better and grow their business. His books "Changing Mindsets," "Monolithic Transformation" and "The Business Bottleneck" cover these topics. He’s been an industry analyst at RedMonk and 451...

Read more from Michael Coté