Devopsdays 2019: communities: a success factor? - Eric Han¶

Tags: devopsdays, kubernetes

He showed a number of the power plugs and adapters that he has to take with him when traveling. Quite a lot. The original power plugs were designed by the acutal power companies.

The cloud industry today is like the power industry in the beginning: basically unregulated and very powerful.

A starting industry needs a “killer app”. For the electrical power industry, it was the light bulb. There was quite a lot of fight on plugs and connectores as the one who controls that has a lot of influence, including lock-in effects. Same with the cloud: every provider has its own tooling and “standards”.

Containers are multi-cloud. They’re a bit like the multi-cloud plug, like a power plug adapter. You avoid lock-in.

Cloud is changing the world. Businesses, software vendors, communities are all involved. He thinks the communities are the most important in the end. We, the community, have to solve problems collaboratively. We are the ones that have to figure out the new standards.

A difference between cloud now and power industry then: around 1900 you had Taylorism. Industrializagion, having just a few decision makers. You’d get standardized tests so that you didn’t need a schooled chemist anymore, but that a regular worker could “just” do a simple test.

The difference he sees in the cloud now is the community. We’re the ones making the technology choices (=kubernetes, for instance). We cooperate and we talk and we see ourselves at conferences like this.

We can design the “multi-cloud”. With containers and kubernetes, we can be cloud-agnostic. As a community we can collaborate on true portability of all workloads. We’ll have to keep asking the vendors and the clouds about this. We should steer this multi-cloud effort.

Multi-cloud is in everyone’s future. Let’s disrupt together!