{"id":6366,"date":"2011-03-29T10:56:30","date_gmt":"2011-03-29T16:56:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.redmonk.com\/cote\/?p=6366"},"modified":"2011-03-29T10:56:30","modified_gmt":"2011-03-29T16:56:30","slug":"itmanagement08","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/2011\/03\/29\/itmanagement08\/","title":{"rendered":"OpsCraft, a PaaSing interest, SXSW, MMS2011, John&#039;s new job &#8211; IT Management &amp; Cloud Podcast #086"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"pic\"><a title=\"Cheeseburger topped with pastrami - this is what they're eating in heaven. by cote, on Flickr\" href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/cote\/5540220133\/\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/farm6.static.flickr.com\/5013\/5540220133_e314090473.jpg\" alt=\"Cheeseburger topped with pastrami - this is what they're eating in heaven.\" width=\"500\" height=\"500\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The missing &#8220;craft&#8221; of operations, what&#8217;s up with PaaS-hype, and some updates from conferences like SXSW and the Microsoft Management Summit &#8211; that&#8217;s what&#8217;s going on in this episode. Oh, and John has a new job!<\/p>\n<p class=\"embed\">\n<p>In addition to clicking play above, you can <a href=\"http:\/\/traffic.libsyn.com\/redmonk\/itmanagement086.mp3\">download the episode directly<\/a> or subscribe to <a href=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/ITManagementGuys\">the IT Management &amp; Cloud feed<\/a> (in iTunes or wherever) to have this episode automatically downloaded for your listening pleasure.<\/p>\n<h2>Show Notes<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/cloudyawards.com\/\">Cloudy Awards<\/a>, SXSW dev\/ops inside cloudcamp. Later, I ask John to evaluate the worth of going to SXSW for cloud\/infrastructure and dev\/ops people.<\/li>\n<li>VisibleOps overview from John, as one of the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.itpi.org\/?page=Visible_Ops\"><em>VisibleOps<\/em><\/a> dudes was there.<\/li>\n<li>The idea of getting rid of operations as a cumbersome barrier to development needs to be smoothed out.<\/li>\n<li>OpsCraft: <a href=\"http:\/\/community.spiceworks.com\/topic\/131988?page=4#entry-695979\">Spiceworks Exchange thread as an example of ops craft<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>PaaS hype &#8211; Is this just a PaaSing interest?<\/li>\n<li>What I want is to be flexible in my business decisions.<\/li>\n<li>What&#8217;s this <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.forrester.com\/mike_gualtieri\/11-02-07-i_dont_want_devops_i_want_noops\">NoOps business<\/a>?<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www-03.ibm.com\/press\/us\/en\/pressrelease\/33840.wss\">Advanced Virtual Deployment Software<\/a> from IBM; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.redmonk.com\/cote\/2011\/03\/08\/your-very-own-openstack-cloud-quick-analysis\/\">Dell OpenStack Installer, Project Crowbar<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.redmonk.com\/cote\/2011\/03\/24\/3-important-things-from-the-microsoft-management-summit-2011\/\">MMS 2011 overview<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>John has a new job!<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.dtosolutions.com\/fully-automated-provisioning\/\">The dto solutions paper<\/a> Cot\u00e9 likes.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.redmonk.com\/cote\/2011\/03\/29\/whos-using-virtualization\/\">Virtualization post over at Spiceworks<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;It it ain&#8217;t broke, don&#8217;t cloud it&#8221; vs. &#8220;When in doubt, cloud it out!&#8221; vs. &#8220;Cloud &#8217;em all, and let ops sort it out.&#8221;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2>Transcript<\/h2>\n<p><strong>Michael Cot\u00e9:<\/strong> Well, hello everybody! This is 28th of March, 2011. This is the IT Management &amp; Cloud Podcast #86, if I have the number right, which I just looked up the number, John, and all of a sudden I am having doubts that it\u2019s actually #86. I don\u2019t know why I feel like these extreme doubts, can you explain it?<\/p>\n<p><strong>John Willis: <\/strong>Well, I think it should be more than 86, right?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Michael Cot\u00e9:<\/strong> Yeah? It is 86, because we recorded like three episodes last time.<\/p>\n<p><strong>John Willis:<\/strong> Yeah, we have been slackers for quite a while now.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Michael Cot\u00e9:<\/strong> That\u2019s right. That\u2019s right. Well, did you have a safe trip back from South by Southwest?<\/p>\n<p><strong>John Willis<\/strong>: I did, yes. It was good.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Michael Cot\u00e9:<\/strong> I have to admit, I played a little of the disappearing Houdini act there several times. I didn\u2019t hang out as much as I could have with the family in town, but why don\u2019t &#8212; how did the Cloudy Awards end up?<\/p>\n<p><strong>John Willis:<\/strong> It was fun. I mean, I guess for anybody who was paying attention &#8212; they had to change the venue a couple of times. Originally the venue was going to be at this house. Did you hear this story? It\u2019s hilarious, right?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Michael Cot\u00e9: <\/strong>No.<\/p>\n<p><strong>John Willis:<\/strong> The Dyn Inc. guys were ready to house &#8212; they are just a fun bunch. I mean, if buying software because you like people is a good enough reason, then buy all their Dyn Inc. and all the DynDNS stuff they have, because they are just fun, awesome dudes.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, so they rented a house for the week, party animals. So they were going to have the Cloudy Award there. So they had like 700 people registered, figuring that maybe only like 300 would show up. But about a week-and-a-half before, the lady who owns the house looks up online, she calls them and says, you know, if you guys have more than 60 people there, I am calling the cops.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Michael Cot\u00e9:<\/strong> Nice!<\/p>\n<p><strong>John Willis: <\/strong>So then, they go ahead and rent like an used warehouse floor on Congress or something, I don\u2019t know, downtown, and then the day of, the Fire Marshal shows up and says they can\u2019t have an event there.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Michael Cot\u00e9: <\/strong>That happened to a lot of people I heard at South by Southwest this year.<\/p>\n<p><strong>John Willis:<\/strong> Really? Yeah.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Michael Cot\u00e9:<\/strong> I mean, I am all for preventing people from being burned alive.<\/p>\n<p><strong>John Willis:<\/strong> Hey, I am glad, I always prefer not to. Well, and then the place they found was &#8212; do you remember the name of that place? It was beautiful.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Michael Cot\u00e9:<\/strong> It was Serranos; it\u2019s Symphony Square they call it.<\/p>\n<p><strong>John Willis:<\/strong> Yeah.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Michael Cot\u00e9:<\/strong> It\u2019s a Tex-Mex restaurant that\u2019s been there for a while and they have &#8212; they are sort of this grotto, I guess is the technical term, that\u2019s all done out. So there is a little stage with the moat along the stage. So there is kind of a theater sort of thing going on.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s a very nice setting. It\u2019s kind of well-hidden, if you will, metaphorically and literally from the kind of downtown scene, so there is not a lot of &#8212; it\u2019s kind of a surprise when people find it, if they don\u2019t know about it already.<\/p>\n<p><strong>John Willis:<\/strong> Yeah, it was a brilliant venue, because here, again, the Dyn Inc. guys had planned on having bands all afternoon. And I guess one of the guys, Kyle York, he is Head of Sales there at Dyn Inc., he is also somehow in the music business, not really sure how, but they had these bands from like Minnesota and different &#8212; there were like bands that came in from different parts of the country and they would play like a couple of set and then we would announce some Cloudy Award and then they would play another set. It was just a blast. They had free drinks and great venue. It was more fun than you should be able to have and get paid to be there.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Michael Cot\u00e9:<\/strong> That\u2019s right.<\/p>\n<p><strong>John Willis:<\/strong> That was very &#8212; and they had a local hero, Michael Cot\u00e9 won, he came up and accepted his award.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Michael Cot\u00e9: <\/strong>Oh yeah, and then Josh Duncan from Zenoss was there too, right?<\/p>\n<p><strong>John Willis: <\/strong>That\u2019s right. It was fun. Most of the people in the crowd like didn\u2019t really care, but it was kind of fun. At one point, you probably missed it out, I pulled out my little flip camera and I said, hey everybody, my wife doesn\u2019t think I really do anything important, can you all say, hi Vicky? And the whole crowd waved to her, so it was kind of cool.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Michael Cot\u00e9:<\/strong> That\u2019s right. And then how was the CloudCamp that you went to? I was only there for a little bit during a session that you had, as I recall, about famines and people wearing grass hats.<\/p>\n<p><strong>John Willis:<\/strong> Yeah, we kind of hijacked it, but Dave Nielsen let us run a DevOps &#8212; impromptu DevOps kind of meeting within the CloudCamp thing, and it was very cool. We went ahead and Gene Kim, \u2018The Visible Ops\u2019 author and Founder of Tripwire, he came in and gave a presentation, and Ernest Mueller, National Instruments, and myself and a couple of other people.<\/p>\n<p>So it was really a nice little &#8212; it was fun. We kind of hijacked a nice little South by Southwest DevOps meet up.<\/p>\n<p>(00:04:51)<\/p>\n<p><strong>Michael Cot\u00e9:<\/strong> That\u2019s right. And so while we are on this little tangent here, can you sort of go over what \u2018The Visible Ops\u2019 thing is? I mean, I saw that people were very obsessed with it recently, so I finally got the book and kind of read through it myself. And it has got some good stuff in it, but I am curious to hear another retelling outside of my own head of what the deal is?<\/p>\n<p><strong>John Willis: <\/strong>I mean, I have read it a couple of times around the years. It\u2019s just a good playbook for operations. It\u2019s commonsense, but they talk about why tracking change and incident is so important. It\u2019s really not an ITIL push it down your throat, but it\u2019s very much service management is very important, populations, and case studies of why.<\/p>\n<p>And it really &#8212; I mean, anybody in operations should at least read it once because it\u2019s &#8212; for me, when I first read it, I am like, big freaking deal. But it\u2019s got &#8212; actually &#8212; it was kind of the same thing when I first saw ITIL. The first time I was introduced to ITIL, I was like, so yeah, so what?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Michael Cot\u00e9:<\/strong> So we should have a process where people request us to do things and track us doing them.<\/p>\n<p><strong>John Willis:<\/strong> And track changes and &#8212;<\/p>\n<p><strong>Michael Cot\u00e9:<\/strong> Think genius.<\/p>\n<p><strong>John Willis:<\/strong> Well, it\u2019s funny, because later on, hopefully, we will talk a little bit about all this screaming and hollering about DevOps, but that\u2019s actually what a lot of guys, I guess now to look at it from their perspective, they are saying, okay, DevOps, yeah. Tell me something I don\u2019t already know, right?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Michael Cot\u00e9: <\/strong>Yeah. As I recall, we had an episode a few ago where I was that guy complaining about that.<\/p>\n<p><strong>John Willis: <\/strong>Yeah. But yeah. So no, the thing &#8212; I kind of came back and respected it, but again, when I first read it I was like, big deal. But now what I realize is, very much like I thought, it\u2019s a way to get everybody on the same playbook, and that\u2019s a great thing, because we are all talking from a common perspective, we understand what\u2019s important.<\/p>\n<p>I think that actually to some of the naysayers of DevOps right now, I think that\u2019s probably the reason why people say, well, DevOps, so what? Isn\u2019t it just all commonsense? Why are you guys making such a big deal out of it, right? Well, yeah, it is commonsense, but let\u2019s just get all on the same playbook, because not everybody else &#8212; there\u2019s a lot of people that didn\u2019t think incident and change was important, especially lot of web operations companies.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Michael Cot\u00e9: <\/strong>Right. Yeah, I think how you open it up is &#8212; I mean, that is a good explanation from what I saw as sort of &#8212; I have come to appreciate when there is discipline and process and stuff involved. Like being able to distill it down into something less than like &#8212; it\u2019s basically like an 80-page book. It\u2019s actually &#8212; I think if you have ever sort of encountered ITIL or MOF or any of these big process things and they seem really overwhelming and expensive and sort of cumbersome, like it\u2019s good just to like read that book because it kind of like &#8212; it gives you the lay of the land, if you will.<\/p>\n<p>I mean, that\u2019s &#8212; yeah, I mean, I think it\u2019s a nice book. It\u2019s a kind of book that you could kind of hand to someone and be like, this kind of tells you what the point of IT is. Not what the point is, but like what the day-to-day &#8212; it\u2019s sort of one view of what the day-to-day operations of IT is going to be like and it\u2019s not like the view and you need to modify and whatever, but it gives you &#8212; when I was a programmer at some point I had no idea what IT management was about and I had to learn that so I could program tools for it, and it would have been nice to have that book at the time, to just kind of lay out all the stuff that you could further build down into.<\/p>\n<p><strong>John Willis: <\/strong>Well, it\u2019s funny, because I mean, I was talking before on our podcast is that, there is this whole thing about NoOps now. It shouldn\u2019t be DevOps, it should be NoOps.<\/p>\n<p>Like I agree but I disagree, and the part &#8212; I think we are not speaking the same language. So there almost needs to be this kind of handbook again of, let\u2019s just all get on the same page before we start arguing. Like the idea of operation as being a cumbersome barrier for development to get things done, we need to eliminate, we need to move that out.<\/p>\n<p>But the idea that we don\u2019t need &#8212; it depends on what you mean by NoOps, is, do you mean that like you don\u2019t care about all that knowledge and IP of people who fundamentally know how to run IT datacenters?<\/p>\n<p>By the way, sports fans, just because you put it in the cloud doesn\u2019t mean a lot of that secret sauce of running operations goes away. People think, oh, you just use Heroku or you just use Elastic Beanstalk and you are done. Hey! All right, good, good luck buddy, because there is a &#8212; there is a secret sauce to running an operations business. It isn\u2019t just cloud and it isn\u2019t just a tool, it\u2019s a lot more. Again, it\u2019s a process of cloud tools and it\u2019s a know-how.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s like a great developer and architect understands it has a sense of how to develop great features in a way that makes sense. Well, a great operations guy has that kind of same black magic. You know what I mean?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Michael Cot\u00e9:<\/strong> I think you are right. I think it\u2019s always easier to find examples of sort of like developer culture, because they are a very chatty bunch, than it is operations culture, and it\u2019s &#8212;<\/p>\n<p><strong>John Willis:<\/strong> We are a little chatty bunch. I mean, that\u2019s our problem.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Michael Cot\u00e9: <\/strong>Yeah, yeah, and so it\u2019s &#8212; therefore that\u2019s one of the reasons it\u2019s easy to gloss over, there is actually a lot of craft, if you will, as the programmers would call it in operations.<\/p>\n<p>Back, starting at the beginning of agile development and even before that with books like \u2018Peopleware\u2019 and some sort of like back in the Microsoft heyday of code as culture, if you will, there was &#8212; I think the development world kind of learned that being navel-gazing about your craft and the way you do stuff in your practice and things beyond the documented path, if you will, was very valuable for the overall community.<\/p>\n<p>And I feel like to some extent there is sort of like Linux people and UNIX people and there is some craft and stuff in there, but it\u2019s not quite at the same level of sharing &#8212; of useful sharing that I see in the development world as much.<\/p>\n<p>There are little pockets here and there of people doing it again, but a little bit to your point, somewhat tangentially, but almost directly from it. A lot of the whatever Ops you want to call it that\u2019s fascinating is a chance to kind of jump on that and for everyone to just discuss kind of the craft side of things.<\/p>\n<p><strong>John Willis:<\/strong> Yeah, I think that\u2019s it, and I think there is like &#8212; it\u2019s funny, because there is three types of people. There are the people that really don\u2019t understand it and they are like, well, that\u2019s so limited with the cloud, right? In their world operations is about rack and stack and hardware. Over, checkmark, don\u2019t need it anymore.<\/p>\n<p>And there are lots of idiots out there that will just say, well, why don\u2019t we need anything with Ops, Ops has been solved, right? I am like, no, it has it. Go ask &#8212; go see how Amazon runs their operational infrastructure or eBay, like there is a lot of craft there.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Michael Cot\u00e9:<\/strong> It\u2019s like when FoxPro and Filemaker solved programming, you didn\u2019t really need programmers after that.<\/p>\n<p><strong>John Willis:<\/strong> There you go, there you go. But then there is the guys that are in the trenches that are saying, well, you know this, why are you making a big deal out of it, right? The guys who were sysadmin guys. But that\u2019s the point is, we don\u2019t share our craft, we don\u2019t talk about it. It\u2019s the Bob\u2019s, and Bob scripts and Bob directories that like they are in the trenches. They were like, we don\u2019t want this DevOps thing, I have got work to do.<\/p>\n<p>Whereas the guys in the middle, I think, which I like to include myself on is the guys who are really trying to expose the craft of how operations can play really well and is important.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Michael Cot\u00e9: <\/strong>There you go. Yeah, we need to get the O&#8217;Reilly guys to come up with some &#8212; or maybe the pragmatic programmers. But see, that\u2019s a thing that needs to exist in the IT world as equivalent of the pragmatic programmers, that\u2019s another sort of code as craft thing, but someone should do some book that\u2019s sort of like operations craft missive.<\/p>\n<p><strong>John Willis:<\/strong> I mean, web operations is definitely a good one, but that\u2019s &#8212; it\u2019s still kind of &#8212; it brushes over, it\u2019s web operations.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Michael Cot\u00e9:<\/strong> Yeah. This is a little bit of craft, but you know one of the &#8212; I don\u2019t know, I think it kind of directly relates, I was reading, over in Spiceworks they have this community where their admins talk with each other; crazy idea. I am laughing at myself with that phrasing.<\/p>\n<p>But anyways, there was one form post on, some guy was considering using hosted exchange versus on-premise, and it was just fun to read. He was asking what the pros and cons were, and it was fun to read all the admins from different sizes of companies kind of discussing like what the pros and cons were beyond like &#8212; I mean, obviously cost is one thing to figure out. Like there is a certain amount of &#8212; I don\u2019t know, it\u2019s one think to pay like whatever it is, $5 a user a month I think is what you get for the hosted exchange is kind of the going rate, it\u2019s one thing to pay that for like 20 people.<\/p>\n<p>And if you have like &#8212; it\u2019s kind of crazy once you get into like thousands of people, of course your cost are much bigger. Now, that\u2019s one aspect of it.<\/p>\n<p>But then there was also the other aspect, the craft part, if you will, where it\u2019s like, well, ultimately you are going to be responsible for that stuff being up. And there is various levels of support you get from people.<\/p>\n<p>Like, for example, Google Apps is really great and it\u2019s relatively cheap, but there is really no support from anyone. So like if you actually need support, the cost is not that good. There are all these interesting considerations to go over.<\/p>\n<p>And then there was also this sub-thread going on about how, which I thought was funny; funny from an outsider, because I am sure all of them kind of don\u2019t even realize the funniness of it. It was complaining about, or not complaining, but talking about how much disk quota or email quota and attachment quota they had.<\/p>\n<p>I think all of them would say like, well, regular users get a 1 gig quota or whatever it was, but then executives get the 5 Gig quota. And it\u2019s funny, like executives have this whole other quota level associated with their email, whereas everyone else does. And there is just &#8212; I mean, I think the variability of levels of service dependent on how high above the hierarchy the user is from you, that\u2019s to put it in wonky terms, is a piece of craft to explore.<\/p>\n<p><strong>John Willis:<\/strong> No, yeah, and I think it\u2019s funny just in general that whole &#8212; we run into &#8212; we could talk about &#8212; I mean literally, when you try to sell it as a service, particularly to systems administrators, there is that kind of &#8212; there is a lot to be said about the craft. The hosting thing gets a lot down to &#8212; I am kind of wandering all over the place, but it\u2019s losing control.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Michael Cot\u00e9:<\/strong> Yeah, there was a tremendous amount of it.<\/p>\n<p><strong>John Willis: <\/strong>Yeah. And it\u2019s not even losing control, it\u2019s that you are losing that kind of possibility for secret sauce that &#8212; well, and to get a little esoteric here, I mean, that\u2019s what I worry about like Platform-as-a-Service is.<\/p>\n<p>Like Platform-as-a-Service is, like they sound good, Parney thinks they are kind of a primrose path, because like you are going to go put your app there and everything looks good and all the things are handled, but now all of a sudden your company is faced with an opportunity, and there is some technology out there that you can&#8217;t use in this Platform-as-a-Service.<\/p>\n<p>And that craft around how well you adapt as a business and all that, you might have given that up. You know what I mean? And I think that lies in the kind of &#8212; the people who really think about it think, it\u2019s not just about the dollars, it\u2019s not just about the, I don\u2019t get &#8212; you running something for me at scale will probably be more efficient than me running it. It\u2019s that like, there might be something I am not seeing that I will hit that roadblock and I don\u2019t want to be in a position where I can&#8217;t take advantage of it.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Michael Cot\u00e9:<\/strong> Yeah, yeah, you want maximum flexibility for maximum disaster.<\/p>\n<p><strong>John Willis: <\/strong>Yeah.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Michael Cot\u00e9:<\/strong> You can draw one of those four quadrant things and do disaster level and flexibility and you always want the upper left or whatever. I guess it\u2019s upper right.<\/p>\n<p><strong>John Willis:<\/strong> Upper right, yeah.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Michael Cot\u00e9: <\/strong>I don\u2019t know what I am talking about with charts; I am not that kind of analyst.<\/p>\n<p>So let me ask you this, since you mentioned it, I have noticed this &#8212; let me compare some notes with you and the listeners. I have noticed this rise in people saying how PaaS is a big deal, the Platform-as-a-Service, and this Infrastructure-as-a-Service, that\u2019s all fantastic, but the new thing is Platform-as-a-Service.<\/p>\n<p>I don\u2019t have anything beyond anecdotal sort of conversations here, but it seems like everyone, and let me put a little footnote there that I am going to get to on everyone is excited about PaaS stuff, and now the footnote is, most of the people I hear talking about PaaS stuff are like vendors who have a PaaS.<\/p>\n<p><strong>John Willis:<\/strong> Who sell PaaSs, right?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Michael Cot\u00e9:<\/strong> Yeah. So I don\u2019t know, I mean, I am a little &#8212; so my background is like, I don\u2019t think there is anything necessarily wrong with a PaaS, if you go in &#8212; just like you were talking about and kind of evaluate, basically I think any piece of software you depend on instead of writing yourself, and this is a bit of an absurd statement, it\u2019s just all about the time demarcated takes.<\/p>\n<p>Like obviously you don\u2019t want to write every piece of software, including an operating system, because that\u2019s going to take you way too long, so you just keep piling up stuff that you are reusing, and at some point a PaaS is something that you don\u2019t have to write and worry about.<\/p>\n<p>But like you said, there could be limitations that you have, who knows, or maybe not, I don\u2019t know. But what are you seeing out there with this &#8212; is this just a passing interest, Johnon?<\/p>\n<p><strong>John Willis: <\/strong>No. Well, I mean, certainly I am working against the tide because the &#8212; I mean, everybody is high on PaaS and PaaS is going to accelerate. My concern about a Platform-as-a-Service &#8212; the bigger picture is that, to try to put everything that we talk about in the cloud in three buckets is really pretty silly, really, when you think about it, right?<\/p>\n<p>We tend to like say, well, that\u2019s a SaaS and therefore it will do x and y and that\u2019s a PaaS and therefore it\u2019s going to be a, b, and c, and that\u2019s Infrastructure-as-a-Service. Like, well, I mean, like it\u2019s kind of silly to say, look at all the possible things that are associative of cloud computing and say, okay, it\u2019s only in three categories and that\u2019s it.<\/p>\n<p>My point is that, by calling something a PaaS is like anywhere from &#8212; like people are even starting to say maybe Amazon\u2019s new CloudFormation, Elastic Beanstalk, are kind of the starter set of a PaaS, and then you go all the way over to something like Force.com, which is on the complete other end, and so it\u2019s hard to make generic statements about a PaaS, and say, well, PaaSs are bad or PaaSs are good.<\/p>\n<p>Because again, I mean, the spectrum of what we are talking about is anywhere from a loosely coupled Infrastructure-as-a-Service that looks like a PaaS, to something like totally proprietary unused force &#8212; whatever the language is for Force.com, like that\u2019s like as PaaSy as it\u2019s going to get, right?<\/p>\n<p>So I think the question is not whether I think PaaS is a good idea, I think abstraction of services or abstraction of solutions is like absolutely where we have to be.<\/p>\n<p>I mean, APIs are the root of most of this. Like building a robust API set, or I have seen now people have started using the XaaS, which is Everything-as-a-service. That starts making the sense is like, I don\u2019t care whether it\u2019s IIS, what I want is the ability to be flexible in my business decisions. And so if you throw a technology at me that doesn\u2019t allow me to be flexible on my business decisions, then I get worried.<\/p>\n<p>And even something like Heroku or Force, where yeah, I mean, my time to market can be really quick, but if for tomorrow somebody lays out a solution that\u2019s Cassandra based and they have this and this, and now I am already down, like my business is already in Heroku and they are going to tell me they don\u2019t support it for another 18 months so it\u2019s not even on their roadmap, I don\u2019t want to be in that position.<\/p>\n<p>I mean, if you look at the companies that are kind of following the Lean startup model, they are able to adapt and change very rapidly, and there is price you pay for that. The price about &#8212; like I don\u2019t think it\u2019s a smart idea to have a leading edge business idea or company and run it completely on something like Force or Heroku or Engine Yard, I will flat out say it.<\/p>\n<p>Even though it\u2019s easy to get to market, now, if there are pieces of your infrastructure, like the FlightCaster guy, that was a great example. They had the whole backend in Hadoop, with closure and all this stuff, and they credited their web front end on Heroku. That\u2019s a brilliant idea, because they can move their web at front end anywhere. \tThey could throw it up on their own.<\/p>\n<p>But if you start thinking about the PaaS as the end all be all for your business, I think you are going to &#8212; you are possibly limiting yourself for opportunities, where your competitors are a little bit smart.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s about building composite infrastructure, so that you can kind of decouple things and move them around and become, what I call, bullet proof. So I think that in those cases the pure PaaSs could be dangerous.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Michael Cot\u00e9:<\/strong> Yeah. No, I think it warrants some more investigation, because I mean, there is almost like two types of PaaSs you are talking about in there, and one of them is just the classic PaaS, or what I would consider a PaaS is just like, someone just has pre-selected some middleware for you and you just build stuff on top of that middleware, whereas there is another type of PaaS, which is kind of like the Force.com model, that\u2019s more &#8212; you are really just writing a plug-in for an application, like it\u2019s difficult to imagine a non-Salesforce type of thing you would do on top of Force.com.<\/p>\n<p>Now, I know because people have shown me that you can do non-stuff like that, but it\u2019s sort of like, it\u2019s an application specific PaaS, which I know is another thing people advocate quite a lot.<\/p>\n<p>But yeah, it\u2019s the old cross-platform worrying that you do, like do you write only to Windows or do you write a web application or do you write to Mac or do you write to Solaris or do you write to whatever? You see that in the mobile space nowadays quite a bit where it\u2019s sort of okay to write only for the Apple ecosystem, but increasingly people want to write for Apple, Android, and have a web thing.<\/p>\n<p>So there is like &#8212; in my little group of programmer friends we have this &#8212; we kind of joke about this thing we called Whichard\u2019s first principle of programming, and it goes back to this guy Brandon Whichard we know, who used to work on identity management stuff, but he also used to be the Product Manager of the group we worked at, at BMC.<\/p>\n<p>And he said that one of the biggest anti-patterns that you always have with the programmers is they always implement a user and a writes management system. Like they never, ever, and I am obviously overstating it, sort of reuse some user management system.<\/p>\n<p>And it\u2019s just funny, because you end up spending all this time writing a user and their permissions and orchestrating all of that stuff, when there is like tons of them available out there.<\/p>\n<p>And because you have this proliferation of user and rights management, which is sort of like an essential part of most software, especially when it becomes enterprise software, it just creates all sorts of problems.<\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s the kind of thing where like you would really like that not to be the case, and that\u2019s one of those things where I feel like, along with the database and some other stuff, it would be great if a Platform-as-a-Service would sort of handle that for you so you weren\u2019t rewriting that stuff.<\/p>\n<p>So I guess what I am saying is looking a Platform-as-a-Service strictly is sort of like component reuse, I don\u2019t really see that big of a deal for it, but if your Platform-as-a-Service is more like you are just writing a plug-in, then you kind of have to be aware of that\u2019s the sandbox you are sticking yourself in.<\/p>\n<p><strong>John Willis:<\/strong> Well, I think that was a great point about the &#8212; you don\u2019t want to have to write, like today they are &#8212; when you sit down and want to build a business, there are so many abstractions to even build on top of it.<\/p>\n<p>Now, I am a big fan of kind of the roll your own infrastructure as code model, which is harder than building using a PaaS, but I have this &#8212; it\u2019s PaaS light, because long as I can build my abstractions, I kind of componentized my infrastructures, if you will, I componentized my web servers, so now I have built it once, it has got its inputs, it has got its outputs, I can put it anywhere I want.<\/p>\n<p>I think that\u2019s a much safer way. I mean, obviously I have the hardest race with Chef, but I mean, I think that\u2019s a much safer way to build, but ultimately what you do want is you definitely want, wherever possible, somebody else to do it. But I think today there is so much opportunity with solutions out there that you can pretty much cherry-pick infrastructure to lay &#8212; already built on top of &#8212; I mean, to put together a Ruby LAMP Stack on Amazon is pretty freaking darn easy if you Chef, Puppet, or even now CloudFormation.<\/p>\n<p>Now, to make it scalable, a little harder; make it elastic, a little harder, but not incredibly harder. So again, I think I am more of a fan of staying on the do it yourself more than let somebody else do it, but always look for &#8212; if somebody has already written that infrastructure for billing, use that open source component, don\u2019t write your own monitor, there are plenty of great monitoring tools. There are pretty of great things out there that you can abstract with and still not be very into the PaaS.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Michael Cot\u00e9: <\/strong>So you were mentioning like &#8212; did we talk about this NoOps business, you said there was some little kerfuffle going on about that?<\/p>\n<p><strong>John Willis<\/strong>: Yeah, there has been a whole bunch on Twitter. There are basically two posts. One was that DevOps is a scam or something like that. The thing is, he makes some okay points. His first point is that agile was a scam and how everybody got so rich on it, now DevOps is the new snake oil.<\/p>\n<p>And I think that, all right, everybody is entitled to their opinion, but if I look at the kind of people that are pulling DevOps, I am like that\u2019s &#8212; I am not including myself, I mean, some really &#8212; people like &#8212; these guys are not salesman, like John Allspaw, Patrick Debois, Andrew Shafer, Adam Jacob, Jesse, Luke Kanies, I mean, these guys are not &#8212; they are changing the game out there. I mean, they are doing some real shit. And to just take one sloth and say, well, DevOps is just snake oil sales pitch, like come on, it\u2019s not that simple either way. It\u2019s not as simple to say DevOps solves all problems and it\u2019s not that simple to say DevOps is just some get rich scheme. You know what I mean? It\u2019s neither.<\/p>\n<p>I think, again, a lot of people who are just kind of jumping into the conversation, it\u2019s like cloud two years ago, it was the same thing you saw on Twitter about the cloud, all these people came in and said, what\u2019s the big deal, cloud, we have been doing this for ten years? Yeah, you kind of have but you kind of haven\u2019t.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Michael Cot\u00e9:<\/strong> Yeah, nowadays all the vendors like to tell you they have been doing it for years too, this stuff, that\u2019s always exciting.<\/p>\n<p><strong>John Willis:<\/strong> So the old Cisco commercial, they are right there. IBM has pretty much owned the &#8212; not IBM, Microsoft has owned their silly cloud commercials, but Cisco has, I don\u2019t know if you have seen it now. They have got, we are the guys that connect the clouds. They are more realistic than the Microsoft one.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Michael Cot\u00e9:<\/strong> Yeah, yeah. Cisco is always weird. I was talking with someone about this around South By South West and it is &#8212; Cisco is always annoyingly trying to talk about being a collaboration company and everything and really we just want routers and I guess servers.<\/p>\n<p>They have that video TelePresence stuff which looks impressive, I saw it on 30 Rock! last night they were using it, so that\u2019s good stuff.<\/p>\n<p>I always get being someone who consults with companies about their sort of technology marketing. I was getting frustrated when they market their aspirations a lot more than their here and nows if you will or not even &#8212; well now it is a lot more quantitatively but I feel like it\u2019s one thing to speak up to like what you would really like to be doing in the future and everything but you need to make sure you have equal volume on what you are currently doing. I always imagine hoards of conference scores at various tech companies sort of thinking in their head, well this stuff looks great but I have got this laundry list of bugs I would like you to fix with stuff I am already running.<\/p>\n<p><strong>John Willis:<\/strong> Of course the guys who &#8212; they get back and then they want to have the like &#8212; how come it doesn\u2019t work the way it worked at the conference? Yeah, well, one of the conference had a little bit of extra stuff.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Michael Cot\u00e9:<\/strong> Yeah, but to be fair, I think Cisco could tell a very incredible story as far as running the networks, so that would be just fine.<\/p>\n<p><strong>John Willis:<\/strong> No, their commercial is actually pretty much it like where the guys connect the cloud, and there is a logic to that but &#8212; as opposed to Microsoft ones or some silly, I am going to go to the cloud.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Michael Cot\u00e9:<\/strong> So going back up at our little hole here to the South By South West thing, let me ask a wrapping up question on that topic. So it\u2019s one of my little hobbies to help people come up with excuses to come to South By Southwest and let me ask you as like a cloud guy if you will, and a recovering normal Ops IT guy like do you think it\u2019s a conference worthy to go to if you are in the infrastructure cloud area?<\/p>\n<p><strong>John Willis:<\/strong> I think it\u2019s a bullet, I mean it\u2019s like \u2013 this is the first one I have ever been to and there was some really exciting stuff around IT technology and everybody speaks that language. So I think it\u2019s just going to get better-and-better every year, right?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Michael Cot\u00e9: <\/strong>Yeah, probably. What I tell people is like a lot of the people who are there, I mean they all need to run their stuff somewhere. So it\u2019s a good idea to go there and kind of see a wide swath of a certain type of customer and I figure it\u2019s more in the small and medium segment, right, like I don\u2019t know if there is a lot of enterprise people who go there, but there is a large volume of people who need to run their stuff whether it\u2019s on &#8212; need to run their stuff on the public Internet somewhere and so usually that points towards doing cloud stuff or something else.<\/p>\n<p>And the other thing that\u2019s important to pay attention to is the \u2013 no one would use this phrase but as the infrastructure people were kind of tracking the types of workloads and infrastructure I mean, the applications that are running on top of all that, because it does tend to drive a lot of lower level stuff, like I finally got around to &#8212; as a somewhat related example, I finally got around to reading one of the posts of my fellow Redmonk\u2019s Steven O\u2019Grady about, he calls it the speaking of link bait, they are coming like data apocalypse or whatever.<\/p>\n<p>And his point is, he was just looking at his own personal usage of his data plan on AT&amp;T and once he discovered that he could watch like NetFlix and his baseball on-demand stuff, it\u2019s like quadrupled or whatever and he costed out how much it would cost to have an unlimited plan and being aware of these huge volumes of data that are traversing around as he gets to in kind of the advice part of his piece. If you don\u2019t see those applications coming they are kind of going to be a shock. A lot of the discussion of South By Southwest is about the types of applications.<\/p>\n<p>And then even more worse, even worse for the point I am trying to make, driving people to needlessly click Reload over-and-over again, or just to use those applications a lot. So there is this sort of peak bandwidth issue that I am sure people will sort out, as all peak issues are sorted out where application writers don\u2019t really care about bandwidth consumption or processor consumption and yet they are driving their users to create and consume more-and-more of it and it\u2019s a nice problem to know about.<\/p>\n<p><strong>John Willis:<\/strong> Well, and I was thinking about South By Southwest and I am obviously have a hammer type of guy, so there was an underlying DevOps theme and he is like, wow, wait a minute, we didn\u2019t get that for yet, but we did, because if you think about all the companies there, like they are all faced with these same problems. They are all like social and big data and media and they are all faced with the same common problem is you\u2019ve got to be able to run IT efficiently and cost-effectively, and these are all the things &#8212; and even to the point where Etsy, the reason I came in a day early was Etsy had a craft by code or code by crafting, you were there, where they talked about how they do continuous delivery.<\/p>\n<p>Here they are, right in the middle of South By Southwest Etsy giving like a couple hour presentation and how they do continuous delivery at Etsy, showing a continuous integration, deployment and the room was packed, I mean packed with people, because this is a common like &#8212; whether you like it or not, you are in the IT business these days. It goes back to why operations are so important, I mean, whether you like it or not you are in the op business of running operations, and just having your cloud doesn\u2019t solve that, you\u2019ve got to run it effectively, efficiently, and so to me the underlying theme that wasn\u2019t the broadcasted theme or you\u2019d have to be looking for it like a guy like me who sees everything as a nail.<\/p>\n<p>It look like a swarming, everybody is willing to have an infrastructure discussion. I even had this little thing at the Apogee party, there was this party Apogee had with a couple of other companies, there were like three companies that teamed up, had this really soiree party and I was in there and I was wearing my Opscode shirt, and some young guys with ear rings in their noses and eyes and all that  \u2013 just started talking to them, and they were like what\u2019s the OC stand for, man? And I am like, I said, oh you know that TV show, the OC, and they were like, oh wow, really? That\u2019s cool, and I am like, no, I am just kidding.<\/p>\n<p>And then I said so what is it then? I am like, oh, well we are a company called Opscode, we\u2019ve got this product, and I am trying to explain at the highest level thinking, it\u2019s one of those kind of Christmas party conversations, and he said, oh, is it they were like zoo-keeper, I am like, oh s**t, this kid knows what he is talking about. And then I said, no, I said, you haven\u2019t heard of Puppet. He is like, yeah!  I said, well, we have a product called Chef, he says, oh Chef, we use Chef, and I am like, dopey me, trying to be funny about the OC thing. I mean like there were people come up to me and tap me on the shoulder and say, hey, we use Chef, we love your product.<\/p>\n<p>So there was this kind of underlying theme, like anybody who is \u2013 all the people are going there \u2013 not all the people, but a lot of people are going there, building like high-powered social media, media web or big data type solutions and across the board on all those three kinds has to be lean infrastructure. And most of those people are well aware of kind of the DevOp techniques. So my point is, I had a lot of fun, I had a lot of touch-points with a lot of technology that I love. The Infochimps guy had a nice big data stuff, the Etsy guys had something.s Apogee had an interesting part, I think next year is just going to be even more discussions about infrastructure.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Michael Cot\u00e9:<\/strong> Yeah, maybe it will have like a track along those lines and everything, I mean I know that they had a fair amount of cloud panels including one that I moderated. So it might be nice if they dug a little deeper if you will.<\/p>\n<p><strong>John Willis:<\/strong> Cloud schmoud. it\u2019s not the infrastructure, dude!<\/p>\n<p><strong>Michael Cot\u00e9:<\/strong> That\u2019s right, it\u2019s all about the platform as a service.<\/p>\n<p><strong>John Willis: <\/strong>No, it\u2019s not the infrastructure, you haven\u2019t been paying attention.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Michael Cot\u00e9:<\/strong> So speaking of like cloud like infrastructure stuff, you were telling me, I keep forgetting the name of this IBM thing, but you were telling me you\u2019d come across like a high-scale virtualization automation roll out magic voodoo, what\u2019s the name of it officially?<\/p>\n<p><strong>John Willis: <\/strong>It\u2019s Advanced Virtual Deployment Software.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Michael Cot\u00e9: <\/strong>There we go.<\/p>\n<p><strong>John Willis:<\/strong> So this is again, IBM shoots themselves in the foot. This name, like if you don\u2019t peel the onion on this, you\u2019ll think, oh jeez, here we go, it looks like a private cloud, I mean it looks pretty darn slick.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Michael Cot\u00e9: <\/strong>Yeah, when I was at Pulse a few week ago now I was hanging out with an IBM friend of mine, Bill Higgins, who now works at Tivoli and doing all sorts of fun stuff. And he introduced me to the guy doing this project and I got kind of &#8212; he was going to do a demo later in the evening, which ended up not working because of VPN issues and all this network stuff.<\/p>\n<p><strong>John Willis:<\/strong> VPN issues.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Michael Cot\u00e9:<\/strong> That\u2019s right. But anyways, the way he described it, it was kind of like, I am sure you and other listeners have heard of that Dell OpenStack Installer thing, with sitting in the office next to me, Matt Ray worked on that a little bit, and then basically, this thing is somewhat similar in the sense that there is a &#8212; you have sort of got a bunch of bare metal laying around and there\u2019s all sorts of like little pixy booting and fun peer to peer stuff to spread things around and automate just sort of &#8212; I am wiggling my fingers now doing the sort of magic thing.<\/p>\n<p>All sorts of like configuration magic and provisioning magic which actually looked pretty exciting. They mentioned it in passing in the keynote, but it was the kind of thing where like &#8212; and I wrote this up in my Pulse overview thing. I mean, this is the kind of thing where I feel like they should give it like ten minutes on the keynote in a two hour keynote to go over, because everyone will just be like, oh, now I get it. I mean, it will be like a big, even if it is whatever beta released or whatnot, it\u2019s still &#8212; that\u2019s the kind of advanced thinking you want to see in this &#8212;<\/p>\n<p><strong>John Willis: <\/strong>Yeah, I mean, if I am just coming out with a private cloud that\u2019s ultimately going to pair up against things like Eucalyptus and whatnot, then that\u2019s an interesting start. You know what I mean?<\/p>\n<p>But again, if you like at it and you don\u2019t see that much, you kind of dig little deep and see that &#8212; because even the Dell stuff right, so I worked on a little bit with that, Matt did most of the work there, but the Crowbar, I mean, all the Crowbar is, is really kind of &#8212; the Dell Crowbar, which is the proof of concept name for their open source project, that it\u2019s just going to &#8212; it basically is kick start on steroids.<\/p>\n<p>So you take a rack and just like these machines come online and they will get the bios and if you generate it, the OS will get burned, not burned, but installed.<\/p>\n<p>And what Matt did is put OpenStack on the backend of that to turn &#8212; to kind of fulfill, not just the five, six boxes in a rack, but become then an OpenStack cloud controller with nodes in it.<\/p>\n<p>But it sounds like this advanced virtual deployment software is like an OpenStack or a Cloud.com or Eucalyptus. So if that\u2019s what IBM is throwing out there, that could be pretty interesting. IBM writes pretty software.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Michael Cot\u00e9:<\/strong> No, from the way the demo was &#8212; that thing was described to me and the bit of the demo I could see, it was nice. It was sort of like &#8212; it was kind of like a right scale kind of thing mixed with a bunch of provisioning and configuration management, and I don\u2019t know, we will see what they do with it.<\/p>\n<p><strong>John Willis: <\/strong>Yeah, I will just go and try to take a look at it and see what &#8212; because I am always interested in the IBM angle, I have done so much work with IBM, with particularly Tivoli.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Michael Cot\u00e9: <\/strong>Yeah, well, also in conference news, I went to the Microsoft Management Summit last week, and that was exciting as an analyst from the angle that I had actually missed going to it last year because we had some family business back then. But it exciting, because they were really cloud crazy there, but in a very a much more defined way than just sort of being very cloud imperative, if you will.<\/p>\n<p>They talked about their Project Concero thing, which is a way of managing your private and your public clouds and things like that, and they had a lot of virtualization stuff. But you can kind of see, and I wrote up kind of a little post along these lines, but you can see there, they seemed to genuinely be working on enabling a lot of private cloud stuff for their customers.<\/p>\n<p>And to be fair, this is the part of the Summit that goes over &#8212; the part of &#8212; Microsoft has a lot of conferences and this is the one that\u2019s all about sort of on-premise stuff, if you will.<\/p>\n<p>So they weren\u2019t sort of dismissing Azure public cloud stuff, it\u2019s just more like &#8212; it\u2019s not exactly their kind of thing at that conference, whereas in a few weeks now MIX is coming up where I am sure we will talk about Azure a little bit, and there is Tech\u00b7Ed this summer and so forth and so on.<\/p>\n<p>But yeah, they were a lot more respectable in their cloud talk than I have seen coming from them and even some other vendors, they had a lot of products to speak about.<\/p>\n<p>Now, all that said, it\u2019s not like they were really GA on most of the cloud stuff, if all of it that they talked about, aside from Azure, so it is kind of a, here is what\u2019s coming kind of thing, and you could of course get their Concero &#8212; I can\u2019t &#8212; your funny way of pronouncing things is messing me up, John. Their Project Concero thing, I think you can get a beta of that or something like that, which sounds good.<\/p>\n<p>And as I wrote up in the post, you know the thing that I would challenge them and anyone else who kind of has a proprietary way of going about this stuff like for Microsoft, the big question is like, so if I wanted to be like a Microsoft cloud developer, right, would I have to use Visual Studio to get like maximum effect and I think figuring out the nuanced answers to that question will sort of point you at that kind of locking that you were talking about earlier, and really there is tons of people who deploy on the Microsoft stack, and it does great for them.<\/p>\n<p>So at some point, one of the many points you get to it makes sense to just go that way, but you know your needs might be more varied and you may not want to become a Microsoft developer if you will, and I don\u2019t think it\u2019s &#8212; I don\u2019t quite understand the full openness of their cloud stuff at the moment despite Azure running like Python and Java and things like that. It\u2019s still what it gives down to is that &#8212; and you were kind of alluding this earlier, how everyone at South By Southwest, or if you want many people are talking about using Opscode or ZooKeeper are like there is a certain tool belt or tool chain if you will that emerges, and the question becomes how much of that stuff that you can kind of swap in and out versus stuff you\u2019re forced to use to mess with all the configuration metadata.<\/p>\n<p><strong>John Willis: <\/strong>Yeah, no I mean I think about this a lot and I mean again I have this hammering out problem but I look at like these continuous delivery models that seem to be working really well and right now I don\u2019t really from my perspective to me it\u2019s all about how do you officially build a matrix around that, you know what I mean, in other words. And is it Puppet, is it Chef, is it ZooKeeper, there is an interesting guy here in Atlanta called John Winston has written this thing called Nova, and Novas are pretty interesting for ZooKeeper, it\u2019s a Ruby-based implementation with ZooKeeper. And it\u2019s getting a lot of good attraction because ZooKeeper is a little more complex to implement and resisting is really darn simple.<\/p>\n<p>There are some things out of the box that don\u2019t happen with ZooKeeper, it has some opinionated models for just doing the kind of things that everybody choose a ZooKeeper for, but anyway the point is that like if you think about the service pipeline, it has continuous integration, it has kind of a unit test model bill, it has test-driven development or behavior-driven development, it has obviously configuration management, a piece like Puppet or Chef or Cfengine and it has kind of a deployment management model, and I think about that model and I am watching companies that are doing this today at lightening speed and delivery models.<\/p>\n<p>So I don\u2019t think much about like how would somebody who has their own kind of model fit into this. I don\u2019t think about that much, you know what I mean? That\u2019s just an out there problem for somebody else to solve.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Michael Cote: <\/strong>Yeah, and two more things on the MMS stuff just for people who care, what are the few more things, one of them and I am kind of summarizing the little post I wrote is there is &#8212; they released this interesting product called Advisor like System Center Advisor, it\u2019s basically a SaaS hosted knowledgebase kind of thing to get to like pulling best practices that integrates onto the tool and as long time listeners know I am always fascinated with the idea of sticking any expect of IT management in SaaS, and more importantly like what I would call Collaborative IT Management is this idea of applying like the learnings from community and the web to sort of doing operation stuff, all that craft stuff we were talking about before.<\/p>\n<p>And to be fair like I think the Advisor thing is sort of &#8212; not sort of, is locked down to just Microsoft and put its stuff, so it\u2019s not open like the Spiceworks Community is, where similar stuff kind of goes on, and a less than kind of and kind of kind of way, if you will.<\/p>\n<p>Anyways, but it is and lots of people have tried to do this, or a fair amount of people tried to do this in the past, but it is &#8212; it\u2019s I haven&#8217;t seen a large organization be excited about it in the same way that Microsoft seem to be, so that\u2019s an interesting thing to look at and they also released I think Windows Intune which has been a Beta for a while, and it\u2019s basically from managing client desktops which means desktops that employees use not servers and Microsoft Lingo and it\u2019s a SaaS-based thing.<\/p>\n<p>But what\u2019s interesting is I am pretty sure that they would like to do it for servers at some point, I mean they didn\u2019t really say that but it kind of makes sense, like if it works for clients, one day it should work for servers, and overall that is kind of like some reading between the lines that I was getting is that they would like to do a lot more IT management as SaaS stuff, which I think that\u2019s overall good and I mean like in the OC they are all about managing servers.<\/p>\n<p><strong>John Willis:<\/strong> Yeah, that\u2019s true, that\u2019s nice.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Michael Cot\u00e9: <\/strong>So a similar sort of thing going on there. But yeah, there is more &#8212; you can read more detail on this stuff in the little wrap-up post that I did, but I think overall it was a usually when I have been to MMSs in the past as some people in the audience will attest to its all \u2013 well you know what I am talking, about what it\u2019s all about, SML and SDM and MOF and modeling the IT process and they pretty much are done with that in all senses of the word \u2018Done\u2019 as they\u2019ve quoted enough of it and they are not really interested in talking about that stuff anymore.<\/p>\n<p>They are more interested in talking about private clouds and things like that, they even mentioned DevOps several times. And Microsoft within the Microsoft world which is always the big caveat, they have a very credible footing to talk about having a unified tool chain if not culture between the application development and the delivery of it. They have some pretty good actual working code to do stuff like that. I don\u2019t know if it\u2019s sort of in production for a bus cell code, but they have good demos and stuff going on there.<\/p>\n<p>So anyways before I make you fully fall asleep, because I know Microsoft, I know Microsoft is about as invigorating to you as drinking a full bottle of cough syrup, so I\u2019ll wrap that up and there is more if you want to read about it.<\/p>\n<p><strong>John Willis:<\/strong> Yeah, so anyway it was going to kind of wrap up a little bit of big news.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Michael Cot\u00e9: <\/strong>Oh yeah, that\u2019s right.<\/p>\n<p><strong>John Willis: <\/strong>Big news, wow! So I am going to be &#8212; this is my last week at Opscode.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Michael Cot\u00e9: <\/strong>At the OC as it were.<\/p>\n<p><strong>John Willis: <\/strong>At the OC, yeah, there was those kids and all there, the party is on the beach and all just getting too crazy. Yeah, and I am going to be going \u2013<\/p>\n<p><strong>Michael Cot\u00e9: <\/strong>This means you are not going to be sleeping with your best friend\u2019s mother anymore, right?<\/p>\n<p><strong>John Willis: <\/strong>That\u2019s right, the whole \u2013 the volleyball on the beach and best friend\u2019s mothers and all sorts of crazy stuff that goes on at the OC. Now it\u2019s all good stuff, I am going to go over to work with DTO and it\u2019s actually a good fit for. I had some great conversations with Adam Jacob, the Founder of Opscode and we both think it\u2019s a great idea.<\/p>\n<p>Part of what I did last year was a lot in Opscode which was evangelism, kind of like you meet my metaphors. I felt that I was helping build the religion last year and I think I was pretty effective in building the religion and I know Adam and Jesse agree and are very happy to know what I did and now it\u2019s time for Opscode to build the church, if you will. Construct the church and really figure out how the cells, models and they are really building a company.<\/p>\n<p>So that\u2019s part of it. I like the building, the religion and I am really fascinated with the DevOps portion of the next step. I love Chef, I think it\u2019s my favorite product on the market and the infrastructure\u2019s code is absolutely the way this has to be done and when somebody comes up with a better way, so I am big fan, but I think the bigger picture is what we talk about is how do you solve the whole problem and that\u2019s the religion I want to fight this year and are embraced. So it\u2019s all good.<\/p>\n<p>The other part is I really, in heart and soul of me, you\u2019ve talked about this before I am a services guy and Opscode is a product company primarily and I am a services guy. So I really want to go out and build service organizations and that\u2019s &#8212;<\/p>\n<p><strong>Michael Cot\u00e9:<\/strong> Yeah, it sounds like it will be exciting for you.<\/p>\n<p><strong>John Willis:<\/strong> Yeah, it\u2019s exciting and DTO is already a part. I just want to say that DTO is already in partnership with Opscode so we are always talking about working on deals already together.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Michael Cot\u00e9:<\/strong> So why don\u2019t you tell people what DTO does for those who don\u2019t know?<\/p>\n<p><strong>John Willis<\/strong>: So DTO stands for Dev to Ops, but basically we are a service company. We actually have an open-source tool. We kind of work around the open-source tool chain and the DevOps, we call the DevOps tool chain and we work around infrastructure\u2019s code products like Puppet and Chef, and then also a continuous integration, building models for continuous delivery, release management, help service companies, help provide services to company, help them fulfill kind of what continuous delivery model in the services, very strong Java, very strong DevOps, so good stuff.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Michael Cot\u00e9<\/strong>: And along with Andrew Shepherd back when they &#8212; I think when he worked at Puppet lab still or Reductive Labs as it was called, I think DTO and I think it was Damien and him wrote the &#8212; I still show it around as like when people ask me what DevOps is, it\u2019s one of the few sort of things to point at, I think isn&#8217;t it the fully automated provisioning tool chain, speaking of IBM names John I think \u2013<\/p>\n<p><strong>John Willis:<\/strong> Yeah, I don\u2019t really &#8212;<\/p>\n<p><strong>Michael Cot\u00e9: <\/strong>It is, that paper came from &#8212; it\u2019s like &#8217;09 paper.<\/p>\n<p><strong>John Willis:<\/strong> Yeah.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Michael Cot\u00e9:<\/strong> It\u2019s been aged now but it\u2019s kind of it gives you &#8212; it\u2019s one of the few like I said kind of grounded senses that gives you a sense of what\u2019s going on and I think having &#8212; we actually, DTO was a client of ours for a little while back, I guess, in 2010 or something and having done work with them, those guys are very busy actually out there building stuff. So they always &#8212; you\u2019ll be simmering in the soup if you will of all this business.<\/p>\n<p><strong>John Willis:<\/strong> Yeah, and that\u2019s the fun thing is that they are delivering real-life continuous delivery models for large customers right now kind of under the radar, people don\u2019t know and they just didn\u2019t &#8212; plus the other thing is they recently released an interesting product that fills the gap in the space which is called RunDeck which is &#8212; it\u2019s kind of a Run Book Automation, I would say orchestration product, open-source, and it really, really works well with products of Chef and Puppet. So yeah, it\u2019s going to be a lot of fun. I am looking forward to it.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Michael Cot\u00e9: <\/strong>Well, that will be great.<\/p>\n<p><strong>John Willis:<\/strong> Great stuff!<\/p>\n<p><strong>Michael Cot\u00e9: <\/strong>You\u2019ll have a good time.<\/p>\n<p><strong>John Willis:<\/strong> Yeah.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Michael Cot\u00e9:<\/strong> So let me see if I can scrape the bottom of the bucket here before we wrap. I think we can come in at 60 minutes, John. That would be because we are professionals.<\/p>\n<p><strong>John Willis:<\/strong> Yeah, that\u2019s right.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Michael Cot\u00e9: <\/strong>Well, let me put in a little ad here at the end and then I\u2019ll let you wrap up with anything you have. But I started, speaking of Spiceworks, I started a little project with them where they do this thing every quarter called the voice of SMB IT, I think they put SMB in there.<\/p>\n<p>They also do a lot of things where they have this big pool of data of what people are kind of &#8212; they have a giant asset database in the cloud and a bunch of other stuff. So they kind of along with their own surveys, they look over all this data and kind of do what are people actually doing out there and they had one post recently that was like in various sectors like education and construction and manufacturing and software like how much virtualization are people using.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s a very short to the point post and there\u2019s also a ranking of hypervisors use which as you can predict is pretty much an order is VMware, Hyper-V and then XenServer are what people are using according to their study.<\/p>\n<p>Anyways, so I am doing a little series with them where I am kind of adding the &#8212; I\u2019d like to think that I am kind of like the John Madden color commentary on this where I am just kind of adding some commentary on some of their data posts, and I put the first one up which I\u2019ll put a link to in the Spiceworks Community where &#8212; so they did this thing like I said and the lowest users of virtualization were the education sector and the highest user of course was the software sector.<\/p>\n<p>So I talk to some folks that I know including our very own Matt Ray about &#8212; he represented the software sector, I talked to this other guy that in West Texas who is kind of &#8212; I think he Director of IT for the Winters ISD for Education and I kind of asked them both like so, what\u2019s up with your virtualization usage so you could kind of figure out the extreme ends of the scale there? And it was fun to see what they are talking about and what their plans were with virtualization.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s interesting because in the high-end on the software scale like people don\u2019t really even realize that they are kind of using virtualization. I mean they realize they are using it but they don\u2019t think about it as a novel concept, it\u2019s so engrained in software developers\u2019 heads whereas in things like education, it\u2019s still kind of some new magic on the horizon for many people.<\/p>\n<p>So yeah, I am curious to see if anyone has commentary and why or why not they are using virtualization kind of by the sector they are in.<\/p>\n<p><strong>John Willis:<\/strong> Well, I think with Spiceworks you are probably going to skewed view too, because I mean it\u2019s funny, I think there\u2019s still a lot of enterprises that still will &#8212; oh yeah, we use Virtualization for test out but not production. There is still quite a few surprisingly that actually still have that kind of little bit of a boogeyman about, you know, well we don\u2019t use virtualization production. Why? No, no, no\u2026 we are not sure or its performance we take.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Michael Cot\u00e9: <\/strong>Yeah, that\u2019s true. Yeah, well that reminds me of a principle I came up when talking with the Microsofties about &#8212; they spend a lot of time and I talk with them a lot about dividing up legacy IT versus Greenfield stuff, the legacy stuff which is kind of difficult to get in the cloud way maybe. I kind of derive this principle from them I think which my phrasing is if it ain\u2019t broke, don\u2019t cloud it. We\u2019ll see &#8212; I don\u2019t know. It will be interesting to sort out how far the stuff goes just like Virtualization.<\/p>\n<p><strong>John Willis: <\/strong>Well, I am just the opposite like the phrase I want to remove from all IT lexicon is and I am so when I hear it, my cringe is like well how would we be able to do that companywide, John? You don\u2019t?<\/p>\n<p>So like you were talking about the cloud, I would say, when in doubt, cloud it, you know what I mean. I just don\u2019t like, cloud everything &#8212;<\/p>\n<p><strong>Michael Cot\u00e9: <\/strong>So you are saying &#8212; so I am typing this in right now. If it ain\u2019t broke don\u2019t cloud it versus when in doubt cloud it out.<\/p>\n<p><strong>John Willis: <\/strong>Yeah, like I am not really sure what the hell, let\u2019s throw it into cloud.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Michael Cot\u00e9: <\/strong>And I think there\u2019s another phrase that we could say versus &#8212; for what is it? Like build on top of cloud and let ops sort it out.<\/p>\n<p><strong>John Willis:<\/strong> Yeah.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Michael Cot\u00e9: <\/strong>That\u2019s right. Cloud it all and let ops sort it out.<\/p>\n<p><strong>John Willis<\/strong>: Yeah &#8212; no I think that but that\u2019s why a little bit of my pet peeve is that kind of, I am not yelling at you but that whole like when in doubt don\u2019t cloud it and that is it goes back to the whole, people think it\u2019s a binary thing. It\u2019s like cloud or nothing, like we can\u2019t do that because it would just destroy our organization.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Michael Cot\u00e9: <\/strong>Yeah, yeah, oh that reminds me of another sub-project that I have going on. Have you noticed I started these sub-projects whenever I actually do them? It\u2019s very exciting.<\/p>\n<p><strong>John Willis: <\/strong>Yeah.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Michael Cot\u00e9:<\/strong> But I emailed you about this one too but for the listeners, I want to &#8212; I actually have some input from people and I am kind of just waiting for permission from their people to use it. So it\u2019s a just kind of a matter of paperwork if you will, but I am trying to gather just at this very moment, if you will, being this year or something. Like when people are building a public or a private or a hybrid or a dancing or maybe an elephant cloud, whatever kind of cloud do you want to call it, like I am very curious about &#8212;<\/p>\n<p><strong>John Willis:<\/strong> The black cloud.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Michael Cot\u00e9: <\/strong>There you go. I want to know like the exact kind of like infrastructure they are using from like servers to routers to their wiring and the infrastructure. Like there was one thing that I thought was really missing from the Microsoft management thing.<\/p>\n<p>Being a software company, it\u2019s fine, and they have partners with HP and Dell to be their cloud partners or whatever, which is cool, but I think at this point in the cloud world, especially if this whole private cloud thing is going to take off, I mean we really need &#8212; and by \u2018we\u2019, I mean people on the buying side of the fence. We really need to sort of out what that means hardware-wise because I mean I kind of feel like there\u2019s sort of this &#8212; the iceberg under the water is like, oh yeah, all those datacenters, you are going to need to totally replace all those guys with these crazy cloud boxes and that\u2019s &#8212; I don\u2019t know, I don\u2019t feel like there\u2019s quite enough conversation going on about below the software layer of cloud stuff in the private cloud area.<\/p>\n<p>So I am curious for people who are doing anything that they would consider cloud, I don\u2019t really care of the orthodoxy of it, like what the hardware situation looks like. I would appreciate any input people have.<\/p>\n<p><strong>John Willis: <\/strong>There you go. Good!<\/p>\n<p><strong>Michael Cot\u00e9:<\/strong> So we are only two minutes over the 60 minutes, John, which means that we are professionals with icing on top.<\/p>\n<p><strong>John Willis:<\/strong> There you go.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Michael Cot\u00e9:<\/strong> Do you got anything else you want to throw up there before we wrap up on this fine Monday?<\/p>\n<p><strong>John Willis<\/strong>: No, I think that\u2019s it. It\u2019s good.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Michael Cot\u00e9: <\/strong>So are you officially with the DTO now or do you have a little &#8212;<\/p>\n<p><strong>John Willis: <\/strong>No, Monday &#8212; I\u2019ll start Monday.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Michael Cot\u00e9:<\/strong> So you can say anything crazy this week that you want, but come Monday, you are a company man.<\/p>\n<p><strong>John Willis:<\/strong> That\u2019s right. Well, I can\u2019t &#8212; yeah, I guess like that, I don\u2019t know. But yeah, we\u2019ll see, it all under adventure.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Michael Cot\u00e9: <\/strong>All right, well that sounds good. I am going to look forward to all of your new IM names and Skype names and email names.<\/p>\n<p><strong>John Willis<\/strong>: Yeah.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Michael Cot\u00e9:<\/strong> Every time John has an organizational change, he generates a bunch of new identities for me to keep track of. So that will work out well. Well, thanks as always for everyone for listening and we\u2019ll see everyone next time.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Disclosure:<\/strong> see <a href=\"http:\/\/www.redmonk.com\/clients\/\">the RedMonk client list<\/a> for clients mentioned.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The missing &#8220;craft&#8221; of operations, what&#8217;s up with PaaS-hype, and some updates from conferences like SXSW and the Microsoft Management Summit &#8211; that&#8217;s what&#8217;s going on in this episode. Oh, and John has a new job!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,44,34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6366","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conferences","category-itmanagementguys","category-systems-management"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6366","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6366"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6366\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}