Containers have grabbed so much attention because they demonstrated a way to solve the software packaging problem that the IT industry had been poking and prodding at for a very long time. Linux package management, application virtualization (in all its myriad forms), and virtual machines had all taken cuts at…

Cloud infrastructures have changed a lot in a short time. Over the past few years, containers have gone from a niche technology to the mainstream. The size and breadth of community around OpenStack has made it the default open source project on which to base private cloud infrastructure. …

Blockchain has certain similarities to a number of other emerging technologies like IoT and cloud-native broadly. There’s a lot of hype and there’s conflation of different facets or use cases that aren’t necessarily all that related to each other. I won’t say that MIT Technology Review’s Business of Blockchain event…

Sentiments like “software is eating the world” and “every company is becoming a technology company” have almost become clichés at this point. But that doesn’t make them untrue. The relationship between IT and other groups within an organization is fundamentally changing. Ad hoc decision making is giving way to data-driven…

This post is based on my recent presentation at DevOps Summit Silicon Valley in November 2016. You can see the entire presentation here. We call it DevOps but much of the time there’s a lot more discussion about the needs and concerns of developers than there is about other groups. …

If you’re ignoring PaaS because early offerings didn’t meet your needs or because you’re more focused on operations than developers, you should look again. PaaS helps ops efficiently give developers the tools they need while also managing the underlying container infrastructure. Circulating in drafts beginning in 2009, some variant of…

Metaphors and models have finite lifespans. This usually happens for one of two reasons. The first is that metaphors and models simplify and abstract a messy real world down to especially relevant or important points. Over time, these simplifications can come to be seen as too simple or not adequately…

A document came out of Gaithersburg, Maryland in 2011. Published by the National Institute of Standards and Technology it was simply titled “The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing.” If you attended tech conferences during that period, reciting some version of that definition was pretty much a requirement. The private, public…

You hear a lot about “bimodal” IT these days. Gartner’s generally considered to have coined that specific term but similar concepts have percolated up from a number of places. Whatever you call it, the basic idea is this: You have Classic IT that’s about attributes like stability, robustness, cost-effectiveness, and…