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The New Stack Update

ISSUE 85: Open Source Wins All the Things

Talk Talk Talk

“These companies have become the biggest, most imposing gatekeepers in human history. That’s an issue for democracy.”

___
Author Franklin Foer, on the growing influence of Google, Apple and Facebook.
Add It Up
47% of Surveyed Companies' Employees Are Open Source Contributors
Colocation not hurt by public cloud boom
 
Cloud providers and hyperscalers continue to build new data centers. The public cloud continues to grow while enterprise data centers continue to face tightening budgets. Given that environment, you would expect that the AWS’s, Apples and Microsofts of the world would be the leading buyers of real estate for data centers. That is not always necessarily true. According to CBRE, in the first half of 2017 hyperscalers were busy digesting what they bought and leased in 2016. In that time period, of the 12 large deals tracked by CBRE, only five were purchases by companies planning to own or operate a data center. The remaining purchases were speculation by investors hoping to eventually sell to a hyperscaler or colocation provider.
 
A recent report published by Schneider Electric and 451 Research shows that public cloud will continue to grow at the expense of enterprises-run data centers. It also shows that many more companies are migrating workloads from colocation to public clouds instead of in the opposite direction — 62 percent vs 41 percent. What’s fascinating is that this will not impact the 2020 outlook for colocation — it will remain approximately the same percentage of total data center capacity in terms of square feet. As the public cloud grows, colocation customers say corporate-owned facilities will drop from 39 percent of data center space today to 34 percent in two years.
 
Colocation companies appear to be maintaining viability for two reasons. First, enterprises are much less likely to build a new data center. Even if they plan to continue operating private clouds, they are more likely to look to a third-party to lease the facilities. Second, public cloud providers have increasingly become customers and partners for colocation providers. Rhonda Ascierto, research director for 451 Research, believes this trend will continue for at least the next five years. In fact, some large customers looking for improved latency may start to demand that their cloud services be hosted in the same facilities as their colocated IT infrastructure equipment. Although none of the 454 colocation customers surveyed said it was extremely important, 32 percent did say this was very important.
What's Happening

To the multitude of languages supported by a runtime that is internal to Docker, appc, and OCI containers, add Visual Basic, C# and F#. Last month, Microsoft re-engineered its open source .NET Core runtime with version 2.0, to easily execute code in any of these three languages — at one time, exclusively associated with the Windows operating system — in any container, on any platform.

“When the .NET Standard 2.0 was being developed ... I had a .NET 1.0, 15-year-old application that was part of my senior project [in 2000],” explained Scott Hanselman, Microsoft’s principal open source program manager, in a discussion with Scott Fulton for The New Stack Makers. “It was a tiny virtual machine, and it was going to simulate an abstract virtual machine. This was the kind of code that you’d write 15 years ago. It’s not idiomatic 2017 code. It’s classically old, .NET code. It is as much a legacy application as it could be.”

Microsoft Builds a BASIC Bridge to Containers with .NET Core 2.0

Open Source Wins All the Things

If there were any doubt that open source is eating the software world (which, in turn, is eating the rest of the world), then Dino Dai Zovi, who just founded the container security company Capsule8, has provided yet another observation about the inevitability of this transformation. He noted, at O’Reilly’s Velocity software engineering conference in New York, that the quality of reverse engineering tools for analyzing software programs has gotten so good that any the operations of proprietary software can be relatively easily mapped out. “The secrets in your source code really aren’t all that secret,” he told the audience.

Sure, tools like OBJ Dump have long allowed anyone to read the assembly source, which is painstaking, but doable. But other programs — hacked together for anything from Capture-the-Flag contexts to automobile hacking — can do advanced stuff like rebuild a program’s call graph and the function control graph, and even rename functions and variables to rebuild the source code through de-compilers. “The only thing that remains a secret when you release a binary into the world is the comments,” Dai Zovi said, casting a dim view at the state of today’s documentation. In fact, some researchers prefer the reverse engineering tools, which offer a better view of what is happening at the processor level, compared to examining the sometimes obfuscated source code itself.

This is not to say that proprietary software vendors don’t have other means of protecting their crown jewels from pillage — patents and trademarks are two other widely-used protections against potential theft of intellectual property. But Dai Zovi does point out that refusing to reveal the source code — where it could be reviewed by customers and inspected by security professionals — doesn’t particularly afford any special protections. Perhaps this is why Apple this week open sourced the source code for its iOS operating system — a move that, a decade ago, would have seemed unfathomable.

The times they are a changing, as Steve Jobs’ musical hero once chimed in.

Airbnb’s 10 Takeaways from Moving to Microservices

At the recent FutureStack 2017 in New York, Melanie Cebula, Software Engineer at Airbnb, talked about her company’s growing use of microservices. It deploys 3,500 microservices per week, with a total of 75,000 production deploys per year, all overseen by 900+ engineers.

OpenWorld: Oracle Sets Sights on AWS with New Serverless, Container Services

While the late-to-the-party Oracle has not started an outright price war in the cloud computing market, it has picked some battles around high availability and reliability, touting them as included features, not premiums added on top of instance charges on a per-minute basis. The company has also enhanced its cloud support for containers, and introduced a serverless service, based on the work done by Iron.io, that can work as a drop-in replacement for Amazon Web Services’ Lambda.

Containers and Microservices Spark a Search for Better File Systems

File systems usually stay low, both at the operating system level and in tech discussions. But Red Hat’s recent deprecation of the Btrfs file system from its platform ignited some interest in the role of file systems in containerized environments.

Party On

Netflix’s Mike McGarr, discussing polyglot programming at Netflix, at O’Reilly’s Velocity Conference in NYC.

Pinterest’s Swami Sundaramurthy and Mark Cho (right) at O’Reilly’s Velocity Conference in NYC.

On The Road
Cloud Foundry Summit Europe Pancake Breakfast OCTOBER 11-12, 2017 // BASEL, SWITZERLAND @ CONGRESS CENTER BASEL

OCTOBER 11-12, 2017 // BASEL, SWITZERLAND @ CONGRESS CENTER BASEL

Cloud Foundry Summit Europe Pancake Breakfast
VMware is helping us bring the Pancake Breakfast World Tour to Switzerland, where we’ll be talking about Kubo and the next wave of customer deployments. Come join us for a short stack with The New Stack! (Swiss cheese not included) 20% off with code: CFEU17TNS20Register Now!
All Things Open OCTOBER 23-24, 2017 // RALEIGH, NC @ RALEIGH CONVENTION CENTER

OCTOBER 23-24, 2017 // RALEIGH, NC @ RALEIGH CONVENTION CENTER

All Things Open
This is the largest open technology event on the East Coast of the U.S. We expect more than 2,500 from all over the world in 2017. The event will feature some of the most well-known technologists and decision makers in the world, as well as the world’s top technology companies. 20% off with code: NewStack20Register Now!
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