ISSUE 239: The Story Behind the Sale

“All the solutions that you see are very focused on solving the problem from a cluster perspective, rather than the application. So we started looking at it in a different way, where we thought about creating an application management framework that sits on top of these multiple Kubernetes clusters.”

Welcome to The New Stack Makers: Scaling New Heights, a series of interviews with engineering managers who talk about the problems they have faced and the resolutions they sought, conducted by guest host Scalyr CEO Christine Heckart.

The challenges engineering leaders face define how technology decisions are made to support the demands of rapid-growth businesses.

Heckart’s first interview is with Adam Wolff, Robinhood’s former vice president of engineering who recalls two years ago when Kubernetes looked so right — and then the difficulties that followed when Wolff mandated the platform’s adoption. Robinhood is an online investment service, offering a free app for trading on financial exchanges.

The Story Behind the Sale

At The New Stack we tend not to cover much in the way of business technology news. We don’t follow the quarterly financial results of the tech giants such as IBM, Oracle, or Microsoft. Nor do we pay much attention of venture capital investment rounds of the start-ups. We are, at heart, more interested in the technologies that make cloud native computing go, not the money to fund the creation and support of those technologies. 

There is one area of technology business reporting we do tend to, however — that of acquisitions, where one company purchases another, either for the company’s technology, engineering talent, customer base or even channel connections. For one company to outright buy another usually provides a glimpse into where its technology stack is evolving.

Take, for instance, the IBM $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat. When it was finalized last year, a few industry observers had likened it to a reverse merger. Sure, IBM was buying Red Hat, but Red Hat has the greater growth potential, in large part thanks to OpenShift.  This prognosis appeared to be proven correct last week, when Big Blue unexpectedly announced it would be splitting into two companies. The company that will be keeping IBM’s name will focus on cloud services and the hybrid cloud. “Clearly the intention is to follow through on its giant acquisition of Red Hat, capitalizing on the growth of the hybrid multicloud platform from Red Hat, coupled with the IBM Cloud business mostly derived from its SoftLayer acquisition of 2013 — along with emerging market opportunities such as artificial intelligence,” 451 Research analyst John Abbott told TNS’ new freelance business reporter Juan Perez. The other part of IBM will be spun off into another company, as of yet unnamed. This portion is IBM’s Managed Infrastructure Services unit, which is part of its Global Technology Services (GTS) division, which focuses on managed services and hosting. In these areas the company has been seeing declining returns for several years.

The split validates what those of us in cloud native space have been believing for a while: That cloud services are the future, but only with the accompaniment of cloud native open source software to enable not only multi-cloud operations, but also hybrid cloud operations. 

Nvidia’s planned acquisition of the ARM chip design firm also leaves a set of virtual tea leaves to interpret. Nvidia came to prominence through the selling of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), chiefly for video cards, the high-end models of which have been loved by PC gamers and, more recently, AI researchers and bitcoin miners. The ARM chipsets have been a huge hit with mobile device developers, though ARM has been trying to break into the server market as well, touting its lower-cost and more power-efficient design. Data center success thus far has been limited, though Nvidia is betting, heavily, that owning the whole compute stack — including networking, peripheral processing units and business partners throughout the channel — will make the ARM choice a more compelling one to data centers and large cloud services. The move is timely, given the sputtering performance gains that chief competitor Intel has long enjoyed through Moore’s Law. 

Microsoft distinguished engineer Kushagra Vaid has suggested that disaggregation is the way to keep Moore’s Law going, TNS U.K. correspondent Mary Branscombe wrote. “While many are arguing that we are reaching the limits of Moore’s Law, we believe that Moore’s Law can be applied to halving the cost every two years for the whole data center campus — not just the chip. This means that, collectively, the network, the hardware and data center are optimized as a system to enable that goal,” Vaid said.

What this means for the cloud native developer is that the hardware companies are continuing to help distributed systems run faster and more smoothly than before, by providing a wider range of compute options at the chip level. Be sure to tune into The New Stack in the weeks and months to come to find out how. 

Red Hat Brings Ansible Automation to Kubernetes

Red Hat’s Ansible automation platform is soon coming to an OpenShift Kubernetes cluster near you. This week at AnsibleFest, Red Hat previewed an Ansible integration with Advanced Cluster Management (ACM), a tool for managing and scaling OpenShift clusters across the hybrid cloud. ACM provides life cycle cluster management, policy-based management, and advanced application deployment; and with the addition of Ansible, Red Hat OpenShift users are now able to insert Ansible automation directly into those life cycles without the need for ad hoc scripts or other methods.

Where Service Mesh and SmartNICs Meet

Smart Network Interface Controllers (SmartNICS) puts the service mesh at center stage where the network and the application layer meet. The new dimensions that come with the integration of hardware and software is ushering in a new generation of capabilities, such as cryptographic operations and new approaches to resource utilization. What we are seeing today is a change in the way we think of networking and application technologies.

HashiCorp Adds Vault to Its Cloud Platform, Launches Access Security Project

Infrastructure software and services provider HashiCorp made its popular Vault secrets security management tool available on HashiCorp Cloud Platform (HCP). The company has also launched of Boundary, an open source project for identity-based access management. With the HCP version of Vault as a Service, users will be able to adopt a more flexible pricing model, the company said, as opposed to the traditional way of downloading, installing and managing Vault directly while paying a set fee for the use of its proprietary features.