Beyond the strip mining v. OSS license debate: the rise of the best
I had the privilege of attending the Keybanc Emerging Technology Summit this week in San Francisco as a member of their Mosaic group of technology experts. Buy-side investors asked me and my peers about trends that were impacting Amazon, Google, VMware, Azure, and other public companies. It was a blast being in sessions with the likes of John Willis of DevOps Handbook fame and Chris Wahl the chief technologist at Rubrik and others. I learned a lot from these and other peers and from the lines of questioning of many investors.
One theme that seemed to be under-appreciated at the conference that I thought worth sharing here was the rise of the rest, by which I mean the emergence of best of breed solutions like public companies Okta, MongoDB, Elastic, Twilio, and Atlassian and others and unicorns such as Hashicorp, Databricks, Datastax, Confluent / Kafka, GitLab, PagerDuty and others.
A few years ago when discussing infrastructure investments with major investors in the valley the feedback I received was almost always:
- Open source model still not proven (except for RedHat)
- Amazon will kill everyone
Once again entrepreneurs were well served by listening to investor consensus — and doing the opposite.
How did we get here? What drivers allowed for this flowering of innovation and are they sustainable? Or will we, in the end, all end up working (if we are lucky) for Mr. Bezos?
Drivers:
Don’t tell the engineers how to do their job — focus on outcomes
The rise of DevOps as a more effective and more humane approach to building and running software has brought with it admonitions from practitioners and thought leaders like John Willis that bosses should not pick the tools. This has meant engineers have been able to pick the Amazon solution or, if it works better, some other solution that better fits what they need to do.
APIs make good neighbors
My two pizza team is fine with collaborating with you and your two pizza team as long as you have a wall between us, or at least a documented set of APIs that we both agree to. This level of clarity allows for solutions to be frequently selected by these small teams because it avoids the need for meetings to argue over tools — meetings to negotiate vendor supplied tools and then the…
Read the complete article in MayaData’s Blog.
