Links and Posts: 11/12/18
Interesting Reads with Commentary
There are 3 public clouds left and we’ll use all of them
IBM was the 4th public cloud if you leave the Chinese market dominated by Alibaba out of the picture. IBM Cloud was losing ground to the top 3 public clouds. They decided to acquire RedHat for 31% of their market cap. This was a big bet on a hybrid and multi-cloud future.
That means that there will be three public clouds left that each spend $10b+ per year on new data centers.
The question is if organizations will standardize on one cloud or go multi-cloud. Moving an application to another cloud after you used cloud specific services like Lambda, DynamoDB, and BigQuery is a lot of work for little payoff.
- I agree with the premise.
- I’m glad they start with this one:
People in the organization need capabilities that only one cloud provides.
- Too often multi-cloud is assumed to be the ability to run my system on any cloud provider without having to change code. But that is not how I would build many of my systems. And not how we’ve historically used the cloud. We’ve been using the cloud for over a decade now and we’ve been multi-cloud the entire time. Never once have we ran the same system on different providers. Instead, we use the services that best fit our needs. If one is on AWS, great. If another is on GCP, fine.
(PODCAST w/Transcript) Ben Thompson on Business and Tech (Ep. 52) — Conversations with Tyler — Medium
Not only is Ben Thompson’s Stratechery frequently mentioned on MR, but such is Tyler’s fandom that the newsletter even made its way onto the reading list for one of his PhD courses. Ben’s based in Taiwan, so when he recently visited DC, Tyler quickly took advantage of the chance for an in-person dialogue.
In this conversation they talk about the business side of tech and more, including whether tech titans are good at PR, whether conglomerate synergies exist, Amazon’s foray into health care, why anyone needs an Apple Watch or an Alexa, growing up in small-town Wisconsin, his pragmatic book-reading style, whether MBAs are overrated, the prospects for the Milwaukee Bucks, NBA rule changes, the future of the tech industries in China and India, and why Taiwanese breakfast is the best breakfast.
- Two of my favorites sit down for an interview and it delivers. Some great insight from Thompson throughout this conversation.
- I love this section:
COWEN: What are venture capitalists chronically underrating?
THOMPSON: I am very curious about — we’re entering this world where we have these extremely dominant platforms. I personally am a huge believer that there is room for all sorts of new types of businesses that are uniquely enabled by the internet. Obviously I’m quite literally living that with my life and career. I think that venture capitalists are very eager to get into many kinds of businesses that should not have venture capital.
There is a lot of small-scale businesses that can be bootstrapped or a minimal investment to get started, that can build very, very niche products for very, very niche audiences that can be reached via social media, via digital marketing.
Basically, the entire world, which enables all these unprofitable niches that you could never serve geographically but can actually be something viable. But all those businesses are not venture-style businesses. Even, arguably, the companies that support them are not necessarily venture-style businesses.
It’s going to be very tempting, and you see it a lot — venture capitalists and companies raising money to go into these spaces. It’s not that the idea is bad or the business model is even bad. It’s that there’s not venture-level returns there to be had.
But I think the challenge from a venture capitalist perspective is, these big companies are so dominant that where is a similar level of return to be gained? Particularly on the consumer side, and that’s a little harder to see.
Quick Hits
News / Random
- Daring Fireball: The 2018 Retina MacBook Air and Daring Fireball: The 2018 iPad Pros
- Amazon Kindle Paperwhite (2018) review: the new best-seller — The Verge
- The Mental Habits of Effective Leaders: My Interview with Jennifer Garvey Berger. This is one of the better podcast episodes I’ve heard. I had so many blog topics pop into mind while listening.
- Amazon now plans to split HQ2 between 2 cities | VentureBeat. This doesn’t sit right with me. Double the tax incentives. Double the access to congressmen. Seems to be more politics than business. Which is common in our country (and world), but I still like to hold out hope. And especially with the tech companies. I’m not surprised, just disappointed.
- Execution is Everything — 25iq. Nods in agreement. Without some structure around execution, it is very easy to slip and become more and more inefficient. The key is creating a structure that pushes execution without sacrificing optionality, decision making, etc at the core levels. Management creates a strategy and then the executors create, potentially innovative, solutionsthat meet the defined measurements set as part of the strategy./
- Oracle’s cloud has robotic, Star Wars-like cyber defenses: Larry Ellison — YouTube. I don’t even know where to start with this. Other than to say this is high comedy. It also proves how lacking the media’s knowledge of technology is (which should make you question their knowledge in other areas). “We have robots!”
- Against the Current: What We Learned From Eve Transcript / Observable. Videos here: “Against the Current” by Chris Granger (Part 1) — YouTube and “Against the Current” by Chris Granger (Part 2) — YouTube
Systems / Infrastructure / Cloud
- Announcing Cloud Scheduler: a modern, managed cron service for automated batch jobs | Google Cloud Blog
- Jessie Frazelle’s Blog: You might not need Kubernetes
- Heptio will be joining forces with VMware on a shared cloud native mission. After the IBM — Red Hat purchase we have this. It’s pretty clear that the battle for the non-cloud container-based infrastructure provider has ratcheted up. In one corner, IBM, in another, Dell-VMWare. Let the battle begin.
- Directing traffic: Demystifying internet-scale load balancing | Opensource.com
- Moment-based quantile sketches for efficient high cardinality aggregation queries | the morning paper
- gRPC Load Balancing on Kubernetes without Tears — Kubernetes
- Cloud Computing without Containers
Product Development / Programming
- The Trouble with Typed Errors
- Typed Functional Programming and Software Correctness | Marko Dimjašević
- Building Your Color Palette
- Typed-Holes and Valid Hole Fits
- Modeling Message Queues in TLA+ • Hillel Wayne
Math / Science / Behavior / Economics
- Physics — Synopsis: Second Law in an Optical Cavity and a BEC
- Sci-Fi Writer Greg Egan and Anonymous Math Whiz Advance Permutation Problem | Quanta Magazine
AI / Machine Learning / Data Science / Statistics
If you’re looking for help with your architecture or development organization feel free to reach out: realkinetic.com @real_kinetic
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