A Summery Summary

I left Bitnami at the end of June, I am working on some new exciting things but I also took some time off to recharge, biking in netherlands and some surfing in France.

Summer is now over though — kids are back at school — so it is time to parse that long reading list of articles/blogs that I saw pass by on twitter in the last month or so and also make a small comment on Google Next which I attended late July (thanks to #giftfromgoogle)

Google Next

Google Next was huge (20k people) and a bit of a mess in the Moscone center. Spread over several buildings you had to walk in the street to go from place to place. I am more used to massive conference centers, so that building hoping was new to me.

I attended thanks to Google who invied me to the Community summit. A bit of an hybrid between an analyst day and a open source day. Google’s commitment to open source is undeniable even though the overall story needs some polishing, right now it feels a bit all over the place.

Since it was my first Next, I was pleasantly surprised. Lots of energy, lots of announcements of course. The interesting bit to me was the enterprise focus. Google Cloud was not just compute and k8s :) but it was very focused on enterprise offerings with things like Gsuite. Ultra-boring to me, but clearly a big business for them as there was a strong emphasis on it. The security angle was also very strong. It seemed clear that Google Cloud was targeting the enterprise very heavily with multiple products covering then entire spectrum.

Keynotes were good, I was suprised to see that all speakers follow the prompters. Except a few like the Edge TPU announcement which I found ground breaking. Injong Rhee (I believe) was so excited (and funny) that he forgot the prompter a bit.

In my area there were two massive announcements:

• knative which is a standardizating of all the building blocks necessary to build FaaS solutions on k8s. Basically it is going to unify all the current projects like Riff and OpenWhisk under one roof. This was needed to avoid fragmentation and I look forward to working on knative for the foreseable future.
• GKE on-prem while I knew Knative was coming, GKE on-prem was a shocker. Basically it promises to run k8s on-prem with the cluster showing up in the Google cloud console. That means that Google strategy is going to the datacenter instead of the other way around. Follow on announcements by VMware also go in the same vein. The hybrid cloud battle has clearly began and it will see the cloud extend to the edge/datacenter.

Overall great job Google, big event, huge enterprise focus and some big announcements in the Compute area.

Reading List

Now how about that reading list. Basically I keep a lazy eye on twitter and I forward the links to my email then read when I find time. So here it is, some links that caught my eyes:

• Peeking Behind the Curtains of Serverless Platforms a Usenix paper that describes the architecture of AWS Lambda, GCF and Azure functions. Did not read yet but seems very thorough.
• Brief History of configuration management a video of Mark Burgess from Config management camp — back in January- not sure why it popped on my timeline again. Talks about how we keep trying to solve the same issue but with different tools.
• Rolling Update on ConfigMap update using annotations. Couple nice links on that twitter thread.
• Heptio’s CKA Study Guide to get Kubernetes Administrator certified.
• Go trivia from Stefan Schimanski. I am new to Go so I need to have a look at this one. See the link to the go play in the reply.
• Simon Wardley MapCamp, I cannot attend but would love to
• Cloud Native diagram nice diagram which highlights the complexity of Cloud Native. Ponders…Are we gaining anything ? The source article is nice, I have not read it fully yet.
• The story of two startups, a bit long but very nice !
• Developer Friendly: and how AutoTrader chose Stripe as a new payment process by Redmonk
• Evaluation of Serverless frameworks by Rancher Intro howtos, bit of a let down in the conclusions.
• On Managing DBs with k8s at Gravitational A must read for those interested in stateful apps on k8s.
• VMWare Project Dimension very interesting on the heels of the GKE onprem announcement by Google. VMware working on hardware appliances that will dial back to the cloud.
• Admission Webhooks how to by container solutions. A bit rough but a complete step by step.
• 10 weeks program to have a voice in your social circle. By goserverless.
• A tool on top of kustomize. Kustomize is a tool for declarative update of k8s manifest. And this is a tool on top of it..yeah I know …
• Openshift vs. Kubernetes goes through the main differences. And yes, it is now called OKD.
• Kubernetes security isolation follow up in a nice series on container security from Google.
• Istio minimal install. I will keep an eye on this. First I might start offering training on Istio, second Istio is big and we should have an Istio lite install, third it is in knative and we need to make it very pluggable and easy to installuse.
• Auto API docs with Google endpoints portal. Interesting in the context of cloud functions.