New beginnings in an exciting growth area
Posted on 1 November, 2017, on LinkedIn.
After over three years at Canonical, I've decided to join Cloud 66 as VP of Sales & Business Development. I start today!In a way, this continues my transition from the hardware level, to the operating system, and now to the software that sits on top. Put another way, I moved from server environments, to virtualization, and now to containers.Working at HP at the beginning of this decade, I powered through the Windows 8 launch and the emergence of cloud-focused form factors such as the Chromebook and the Surface. Wanting to be part of that transition, I looked for software companies on the bleeding edge of cloud.I was lucky to have been hired into Canonical by Chris Kenyon in mid-2014, and to have had such amazing experiences growing the public cloud business exponentially. Apart from our business achievements, and Ubuntu's continued dominance in every scale-out architecture, I have to say it's rare to find a company full of people who, despite being so talented, are generally still so nice to work with.But I digress. One of the strongest currents in IT in the past few years has been the emergence of containers as a viable alternative to virtualization. But the industry is only at the start of this journey, with not many companies running production. At a risk of contributing to over-use of the vending machine analogy, I like to classify the marketplace this way:
Vendors that enable customers to build great shelves, or perhaps you even build the shelves for the customers. In other words, they are focused on container infrastructure, perhaps with a sleek UI/installer, but not on the app. Still a fragmented and not very enterprise-y space with lots of DIY-stacks. Devs rejoice; Ops worry.
Vendors that deliver a fully-stocked vending machine to customers, leaving them no choice in what gets sold through it. In other words, these are the highly opinionated/structured PaaS vendors, as well as GKE, ECS, and ACS. Devs feel constrained; Ops might worry about lock-in but hey, at least the thing runs reliably.
Vendors that deliver machines continuously specified by Ops, used by Devs, and managed by the vendors. In other words, this isn't just about bringing up clusters, but also about how to deploy apps to that infra, and how to keep it all running intelligently at scale—with native databases, networking, firewall options and a good balance of flexibility and governance. This is what will need to happen for Kubernetes to be the new vSphere. This is where Cloud 66 shines.
At Cloud 66, Khash, Vic and their team have been providing solutions for this problem for years, and with the end-to-end container stack of Cloud 66 Skycap and Cloud 66 Maestro, backed by Kubernetes, I believe we are positioned extremely well to accelerate container adoption in production, at scale, in the enterprise. We will be looking for partners on this journey:
System Integrators and Cloud/DevOps Consultancies that want to complement their services with a proven product set.
IaaS providers who want to add an integrated, feature-rich container engine to their compute business.