I agree that being swallowed up from the bottom is our main risk. Which is why, above, I said I talk about this a lot internally.
> And doing so is still easier than bearing the cognitive burden of learning CF!
Right, the incremental cost seems small. A bit here, a bit there. And actually, it's a lot of fun to roll your own. You know it, you can push it in any direction and so on.
The flipside, and this is where Pivotal and other CF distributors are making money, is that it turns into a nightmare pretty quickly.
A lot of big companies are perfectly happy to pay someone else to build their platform.
Before I transferred to Cloud R&D, I was in Pivotal Labs. I got to see several hand-rolled platforms. Some of them were terrible. Some were ingenious. And all of them were millstones. That experience is pretty much what turned me into the annoying pest I am now.
We're at an interesting moment. Right now, writing your own platform seems reasonable -- even attractive -- to lots of people. In maybe 5-10 years, it won't be a thing that many people do any more. These days, for most projects, most engineers don't consider first writing an OS, or a database, or a web server, or a programming language, or an ORM, or a graphics library and on and on. Those are all well-served. Once upon a time it was a competitive advantage to roll your own; these days it just doesn't enter anyone's thinking.
There will be between 1 and 3 platforms that everyone has settled on, with a handful of outliers that people tinker with. My expectation is that Kubernetes will slowly morph from an orchestrator and be progressively extended into a full platform. Docker are clearly doing likewise. I think Cloud Foundry will be one of the three, simply because it's the first and most mature full platform already available for big companies to deploy.
Doesn't mean we can't have some of our lunch eaten.
> And doing so is still easier than bearing the cognitive burden of learning CF!
Right, the incremental cost seems small. A bit here, a bit there. And actually, it's a lot of fun to roll your own. You know it, you can push it in any direction and so on.
The flipside, and this is where Pivotal and other CF distributors are making money, is that it turns into a nightmare pretty quickly. A lot of big companies are perfectly happy to pay someone else to build their platform.
Before I transferred to Cloud R&D, I was in Pivotal Labs. I got to see several hand-rolled platforms. Some of them were terrible. Some were ingenious. And all of them were millstones. That experience is pretty much what turned me into the annoying pest I am now.
We're at an interesting moment. Right now, writing your own platform seems reasonable -- even attractive -- to lots of people. In maybe 5-10 years, it won't be a thing that many people do any more. These days, for most projects, most engineers don't consider first writing an OS, or a database, or a web server, or a programming language, or an ORM, or a graphics library and on and on. Those are all well-served. Once upon a time it was a competitive advantage to roll your own; these days it just doesn't enter anyone's thinking.
There will be between 1 and 3 platforms that everyone has settled on, with a handful of outliers that people tinker with. My expectation is that Kubernetes will slowly morph from an orchestrator and be progressively extended into a full platform. Docker are clearly doing likewise. I think Cloud Foundry will be one of the three, simply because it's the first and most mature full platform already available for big companies to deploy.
Doesn't mean we can't have some of our lunch eaten.