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May 10 · Issue #2 · View online
I'm a technology evangelist at Red Hat where I deal with topics such as containers, DevOps, cloud strategy, and IoT. Those will be the primary focus of this newsletter but I'll also use it to highlight generally interesting links and to provide updates on my comings and goings.
Blog: http://bitmason.blogspot.com
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I was tempted to hold Issue #2 of this newsletter for a bit given that my output tends toward a rugged landscape of peaks and valleys. Nonetheless, the content for a container-themed issue filled up pretty rapidly and there’s probably no good reason to hold things much longer.
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Grant Shipley will be presenting at the Triangle Kubernetes meetup session this coming Thursday, May 12. 6:30pm in the Red Hat Annex at 190 E. Davie Street in downtown Raleigh.
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One of my colleagues passed on the following photo and observation from CoreOS Fest in Berlin. (The speaker is Fintan Ryan of RedMonk who all do a great job of mining often non-traditional data sources for insights.)
The observation was this: In the current state of Kubernetes you would normally see mostly interest in source code. But with Kubernetes he sees an unusual growth of meetups. This could be an indicator for more future adoption of users not just platform builders.
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RedMonk's Fintan Ryan at CoreOS Fest in Berlin
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I’ll add the observation that what’s happening in the container world and its associated ecosystems (orchestration, software-defined infrastructure, immutable container-optimized OSs, DevOps, etc.) is… unprecedented(?) in the IT world. I certainly can’t remember a period when existing architectural and operational models were being overthrown at such a pace. There’s a reason we’ve been so focused at Red Hat on working in the upstream kubernetes, docker, OpenStack, Project Atomic, and OpenShift Origin (platform-as-a-service) communities as well as commercializing these are downstream product subscriptions.
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Divide et Impera – tecosystems
“[Caesar’s] purpose always was to keep his barbarian forces well scattered. During all of his campaigns in Gaul, he had a comparatively small army. His only means of success, therefore, against the vast hordes of the Gauls was to ‘divide and conquer.’”
– Harry F Towle, “Caesar’s Gallic War” Continuing on the container theme, this Stephen O'Grady post (which includes the below graphic by way of @cra) highlights the importance of unifying across upstream communities and technologies in order to create platforms that are useful to and consumable by ordinary enterprises. (The Twitters and Facebooks can roll their own. You probably can’t–or at least shouldn’t.) This is one of the things that we’re doing with OpenShift (CICD, containers, container orchestration, etc.) whether you’re talking developer-oriented use cases or ops-oriented ones.
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The creators of Siri just showed off their next AI assistant, Viv, and it's incredible | The Verge
Dag Kittlaus and Adam Cheyer created the artificial intelligence behind Siri, Apple’s iconic digital assistant, and one of the first modern apps to capably handle natural language queries on a smartphone. This article loses no small amount of credibility with the first sentence. There is very little about Siri’s operation that I’d describe as “capably handling natural language queries.” Alexa does better in the voice recognition department but, like Siri, it breaks down pretty quickly once you leave the domain of precisely-worded incantations to perform specific tasks. That said, as I was discussing with Lew Tucker at the last Linux Collaboration Summit, I’m somewhat hopeful that AI virtual assistant could be a real killer app within a relatively short period of time–by which I loosely mean software that will be able to perform purely digital tasks with the ability of a marginally competent, if not particularly imaginative or inventive, human virtual assistant. (More on this thought to come.)
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Why 2016 made a mockery of Nate Silver
Official site of The Week Magazine, offering commentary and analysis of the day’s breaking news and current events as well as arts, entertainment, people and gossip, and political cartoons. I can slightly buy the idea that a lot of political data journalism is about predicting horse races rather than getting at deeper truths–whatever those may be. However, the mostly anti-data argument isn’t helped by: “It’s like predicting what moment a ship is going to come into port. You could expend enormous effort on timetables, fuel efficiency, weather forecasts, and barnacle fluid dynamics, or you could just wait until the dang thing arrives.” I can imagine a great many reasons why I might want to optimize the timing of supply chains and other processes whether or not a pundit can or not.
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Data, like code, is better open | Opensource.com
Code isn’t the only form of openness that’s important. Let’s talk about open data. After all, information outlives, transcends, and is more valuable than software. This is a piece that I wrote for opensource.com that discusses open data and how you might use some of that data.
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This week in OpenStack: May 9 -15 | Opensource.com
Catch up on the latest OpenStack happenings in Opensource.com’s weekly open source cloud roundup.
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In this section, I highlight pieces I’ve written at some time previously either because they’re still (mostly) relevant or particularly worthy of eye-rolling. (Hopefully, not too many of the latter.)
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Connections: How application virtualization was reborn
However, client virtualization (in any of its forms) has never truly gone mainstream, whether it was because it often cost more than advertised or just didn’t work all that well. It’s mostly played in relative niches where some particular benefit—such as centralized security—is an overriding concern. These can be important markets. We see increased interest in VDI at government agencies, for instance. But we’re not talking about the typical corporate desktop or consumer. Furthermore, today, we access more and more applications through browsers rather than applications installed on PCs. This effectively makes PCs more like stateless thin clients. And, therefore, it makes client virtualization something of a solution for yesterday’s problems rather than today’s. Except for one thing. Client virtualization, in its application virtualization guise, has in fact become prevalent. Just go to an Android or iOS app store. To this I add, continuing the container theme that dominates this issue, that on the server side the container ecosystem has emerged as another way to virtualize applications even though containers started life as “operating system virtualization.” In effect, much of the dream of application virtualization has been achieved or is being achieved–even if it doesn’t look much like the original vision of app virtualization from a technology perspective.
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