thinking beyond virtual machines
The last few months saw the emegence of industry standards on containers and container orchestration, leading to initiatives like Open Container Project and Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Red Hat’s OpenShift became the first application deployment platform on top of Docker based Containers and Kubernetes. There are many other vendors planning to offer platforms using Docker and Kubernetes. The momentum around Open Container Project and Kubernetes got me thinking about potential correlation to the other open source movement that completely reshaped enterprise IT, Linux Operating System. Though both belong to different technical categories, we can model the current platform landscape using … [Read More...]
Ever since open source took off in the enterprise market, we are seeing more and more vendors using open source as a marketing tool. One of the recent marketing strategies is to talk up the idea of open source foundations. Let me make it clear before I get beaten up on this statement. I am not saying that all the open source foundations are meaningless but I am arguing that more and more vendors are using the idea of a foundation as a way to gain open source credibility in today's enlightened world. There is nothing wrong with what they are doing. In a free market, anything is acceptable as long as it is not illegal. At the same time, free market works well when there is no information … [Read More...]
For a long time I have been advocating that a good Platform as a Service offering should have MBaaS component. I have got push back from folks saying that it is not the case. I never argued that MBaaS is a feature of PaaS but it complements PaaS to make a complete application platform. There are some misconceptions that MBaaS abstracts away PaaS just like PaaS abstracts away IaaS. Rather, I see PaaS and MBaaS as peer services and together they make a good enterprise developer platform. MBaaS is fast becoming a hot market segment with more and more players jumping in to compete with upstarts like Parse, Kinvey, Appcelerator, etc.. Part of the reason for this boom is the mobile first … [Read More...]