Software Defined Talk: Unbreakable Docker

Sep 2nd, 2016 11:08am by Michael Coté

Eventually, you have to decide how your open source software is going to make money, and your partners probably won’t like it. That’s what the dust-up around Docker is this week, it seems to us. We also talk briefly about VMware’s big conference this week, and rumors of HPE selling off its Software group to private equity.

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This episode features Brandon Whichard, Matt Ray, and Coté.

Show notes

Nippers — “Nippers learn about safety at the beach. They learn about dangers such as rocks, and animals (e.g. the blue-ringed octopus), and also about surf conditions, such as rip currents, sand bars and waves. Older Nippers also learn some basic first aid and may also learn CPR when they reach the age of 13.”

Can someone explain this “Docker forking” hoopla?

Coté’s write-up.
Docker Inc. doesn’t want to be a commoditized building block.
From a Red Hat person: “The conflict started to escalate earlier this summer when Docker, Inc. used its controlling position to push Swarm, it’s own clone of Kubernetes-style container orchestration, into the core Docker project, putting the basic container runtime in a conflict with a notable part of its ecosystem. Docker Inc. then went on to essentially accuse Red Hat of forking Docker — at the Red Hat Summit no less. After that, Docker, Inc.’s Solomon Hykes came out strongly against the efforts to standardize the container runtime in OCI — an initiative his company co-founded.”
Re: that episode where we discuss Docker ecosystem challenges: “Yet on a regular basis, Red Hat patches that enable valid requirements from Red Hat customer use cases get shut down as it seems for the simple reason that they don’t fit into Docker, Inc.’s business strategy.”
A fight over where to draw the line between free/open/commodified and costs/proprietary/competitive: “And while I personally consider the orchestration layer the key to the container paradigm, the right approach here is to keep the orchestration separate from the core container runtime standardization. This avoids conflicts between different layers of the container runtime: we can agree on the common container package format, transport, and execution model without limiting choice between e.g. Kubernetes, Mesos, Swarm.”
Don’t bring a pistol to a bazooka fight. Enterprises love RHEL — have you ever tried to sell Ubuntu into organizations? It’s like what selling NT must have been like.

VMware hybrid cloud solution

Brief notebook from Coté. More coverage.
Keywords “mostly cloud.”
A representative, not too poorly supported VMware obit.
NSX up in the cloud.

This Week in Tech Private Equity…

HPE looking to sell off Software group, sources say, “hoping it can fetch between $8 billion and $10 billion”
“HPE’s software unit generated $3.6 billion in net revenue in 2015, down from $3.9 billion in 2014.”
Dell/EMC thing set to close on Sep 7th, 2016.
Quest Software, One Identity To Operate Separately From SonicWall After Dell Software Sale.

Recommendations

Matt: Bubble-sort algorithm explained with Hungarian (“Csángó”) folk dance.
Brandon: LastChanceU.
Coté: Ulysses — I don’t think there’s any expensive text editors left for me to buy.
This American Life’s Worst Song Ever: hear it.

Docker is a sponsor of The New Stack.

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...