DockerCon, The Search for ROI, and Tech Funding — Software Defined Talk #36
Jul 1st, 2015 9:05am by

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!
Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes, RSS Feed.
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.