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Steve Singh will become Docker’s new CEO

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Re: Steve Singh will become Docker’s new CEO

#71

Docker is being used to cure diseases, keep planes in the air, to keep soldiers safe from landmines, to power the world’s largest financial networks and institutions Why do this?

Because containers make life every so slightly less terrible? And container orchestration allows for better efficiency of resources?

The following government entities are known to use, or have used (Docker) containers:

* USAF

* US Navy

* CFPB

* CDC

You can look up their RFPs online and see why they want to use containers. IMHO, these are pretty direct ways of keeping soldiers safe, and curing disease.

Re: Steve Singh will become Docker’s new CEO

#72

My company has been a partner of Concur for several years, starting back in 2012 when the original founders (Steve, Raj and Mike) were all still there. Steve was easily the most-respected leader in the travel industry- even people that disliked Concur admired Steve. He was articulate, created a clear vision for Concur that they maintained even as they grew like wildfire, and he inspired trust and goodwill with Concur…

This is standard PR stuff. Docker's PR machine has been working hard and churning out stuff like this. > Steve was easily the most-respected leader in the travel industry... When you read "easily the most-respected", it triggers some doubt. > They didn't build Concur to sell it, they built it to conquer, which they had basically done when SAP bought them. You meant they were conquered when they were bought by SAP, ri…

I'm not affiliated with Docker in any way and I'm just speaking from my experience. My only connection to Steve Singh is just that my company still partners with Concur.

Concur became a behemoth in corporate travel, and companies that competed against them or didn't want to work with them eventually had to.[1]

It sounds like you don't know a lot about the corporate travel industry which is fine. I'm sure a lot of people would love to get "conquered" for $8B some day.

[1] http://www.businesstravelnews.com/Business-Travel-Agencies/I...

Re: Steve Singh will become Docker’s new CEO

#73
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes more sense in the context of the criticism that Docker gets. It's a counter to the inane "Docker isn't stable enough, Docker isn't secure enough, Docker isn't whatever enough to use in production" critique that some obstinate old ops person will throw up because they'd rather keep their job comfortable than try to accommodate a need beyond their own. I don't read it as Docker does all those things so much as…

> obstinate old ops person will throw up because they'd rather keep their job comfortable than try to accommodate a need beyond their own Oh, come on. This is why I hate Docker. Right here. It's like a heat seeking missile that looks for the friction points between engineering and operations, then explodes in a fireball of "do we really need operations? They're just old and obstinate and in the way of progress," with…

To me, "old" as a prejorative has about as much to do with age as "gay" as a prejorative has to do with homosexuality.

The meaning people use the word to get at is "from another time when problems were solved differently, and staid in their opinions toward new solutions vs. those from the previous era."

I've heard myself called an "old man" online for liking SQL stored procedures. I was 23 at the time. :)

Re: Steve Singh will become Docker’s new CEO

#74
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think that a board seat (the group that the CEO reports to ) is a consolation prize? That makes no sense at all.

It makes all the sense in the world when you realize how board's actually work.

Can you expand on that? I'm not familiar enough with how boards operate to understand what you mean.

Re: Steve Singh will become Docker’s new CEO

#75
post #3

My kneejerk reaction is that a senior leader from Concur, then SAP, is going to buzzword bingo and "enterprisify" docker into something very different. That's probably not fair though. Concur is a pretty big success story, sold for $8B, and it appears some good decisions drove that.

Walking around the exhibit hall at DockerCon, and then trying to pick sessions, I couldn't help but feel that heading a small engineering team I was at the wrong conference.

Same at CloudNativeCon by the way. I went to the technical-sounding talks (as opposed to "success stories"), but most of them were just "observe as I upload a YAML file into Kubernetes and stuff happens".

Meanwhile, the booths were 50% "we can install Kubernetes for you" and 50% "we can do monitoring/logshipping for your Kubernetes", which is interesting given that the Kubernetes guys are working on solving the first issue and Prometheus/Grafana/Fluentd solve the second issue already.

Re: Steve Singh will become Docker’s new CEO

#76
post #33

Not that I'm anybody to say so, but I think it's worth posting a friendly reminder that Solomon is a beneficial HN contributor here in good standing (shykes), and will likely read the remarks we post here at some point. I see some of the posts trending towards vitriolic here, but it's worth remembering that CEO or not, he's one of us, and deserves to be treated as well as any other member of the community. Personally…

I'm legitimately confused - has Solomon ever been CEO of Docker? I don't believe he is now. Why would extra sensitivity around Solomon be needed right now?

Huh. He was CEO of dotCloud, so I just assumed that he came over as CEO of Docker. Looking at LinkedIn, I guess he was CTO anyway.

I didn't know these things. Thanks for the correction.

Re: Steve Singh will become Docker’s new CEO

#77
post #33

Not that I'm anybody to say so, but I think it's worth posting a friendly reminder that Solomon is a beneficial HN contributor here in good standing (shykes), and will likely read the remarks we post here at some point. I see some of the posts trending towards vitriolic here, but it's worth remembering that CEO or not, he's one of us, and deserves to be treated as well as any other member of the community. Personally…

I'm legitimately confused - has Solomon ever been CEO of Docker? I don't believe he is now. Why would extra sensitivity around Solomon be needed right now?

He was CEO of dotCloud, as far as I know, I don't think he was ever CEO of Docker, Inc.

Re: Steve Singh will become Docker’s new CEO

#78
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes more sense in the context of the criticism that Docker gets. It's a counter to the inane "Docker isn't stable enough, Docker isn't secure enough, Docker isn't whatever enough to use in production" critique that some obstinate old ops person will throw up because they'd rather keep their job comfortable than try to accommodate a need beyond their own. I don't read it as Docker does all those things so much as…

> obstinate old ops person will throw up because they'd rather keep their job comfortable than try to accommodate a need beyond their own Oh, come on. This is why I hate Docker. Right here. It's like a heat seeking missile that looks for the friction points between engineering and operations, then explodes in a fireball of "do we really need operations? They're just old and obstinate and in the way of progress," with…

For what it's worth, I'm older than you and started in ops. If it helps to put things into context, I spent a ton of 1997 using a chisel to shave a bit off standard RAM to help avoid Sun's near 10x markup. The startup I worked at was provisioning around 20 Sun boxes per week and we had to patch together tools to manage infrastructure of that size before off-the-shelf tooling to do that really existed. I wrote a lot of expect in 97-98.

Where I get frustrated with ops is when they forget that they're in the service business. They're there to serve application developers in the same way that the application developers are there to serve customers. An application developer pushing back at a customer ask with the line, "without really stopping to ask what progress is from the perspective of developers" would be rightly lampooned. And yet somehow there's people that think the ops mindset is reasonable. In my view, "no" is not a valid viewpoint. Application developers are telling you they want the kind of functionality that Docker offers. That makes it your job to figure out how that happens, not if it happens.

Re: Steve Singh will become Docker’s new CEO

#79
post #3

My kneejerk reaction is that a senior leader from Concur, then SAP, is going to buzzword bingo and "enterprisify" docker into something very different. That's probably not fair though. Concur is a pretty big success story, sold for $8B, and it appears some good decisions drove that.

Walking around the exhibit hall at DockerCon, and then trying to pick sessions, I couldn't help but feel that heading a small engineering team I was at the wrong conference.

Agreed. There was a remarkable difference between 2017 DockerCon and 2016. I felt right at place in 2016 but 2017... just missed the mark. Felt very much like all the session were geared toward "Introducing Docker" or "How to convince your manager about Docker".

Oh well :\

Re: Steve Singh will become Docker’s new CEO

#80
post #3

My kneejerk reaction is that a senior leader from Concur, then SAP, is going to buzzword bingo and "enterprisify" docker into something very different. That's probably not fair though. Concur is a pretty big success story, sold for $8B, and it appears some good decisions drove that.

>"enterprisify" docker into something very different. That's probably not fair though.

But that's actually the industry containers are good for. Enterprise. Predictability trumps costs. The flaws of docker may over time get fixed. It's the small companies and startups that are making a fool of themselves by pretending they extract any kind of value out of docker.

Imagine a large 100+ man software project that spans two years and involves four different organisations collaborating. There are at least 100+ non-technical 'knowledge workers' interacting with this process. The people have the intent of 'not being responsible for anything', but establishing their position/role so their cost/budget is validated. You know, the typical large-scale Oracle/Cap-Gemini/IBM clusterfuck of incompetence.

But that's the secret! They aren't incompetent at all (as organisations). They sell something no-one else sells. They sell predictability.

Because for all what it's worth: they don't make huge architectural fuck ups. They make their deadline. And they are able to deliver something, even with this many stakeholders pissing all over the project from any direction.

For them, docker is brilliant. It standardizes something. It doesn't do it very well, but that doesn't matter. They aren't in a low-margin world. "Docker isn't really secure, you really should run every docker image in a separate VM". Sure. These sort of people are paying 500-1000 per instance anyway. No one cares. Coordinating devops with this many stakeholders, now _thats_ expensive.

The quality of the actual technology (much like on the web itself) is initially irrelevant. The value is in the fact there's a contract. A standard. Docker is a bad implementation of reasonable idea. The question isn't if it's a good technical choice. No, it's not. But it's organisational and economically more compatible with the rest of world.

And you know what? At least those enterprise idiots will run JVM instances on their docker images, so if they need more than three servers it's not because they are incompetent (like every startup wasting their time on cloud orchestration stuff). At least when they pay the price in complexity for building something scalable it's because they actually need something scalable.

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