History Lesson on PaaS People often rewrite history in their minds. They see the way the landscape looks today, forget the chronological order of events, and reconstruct a false model of cause and effect. I am guilty of doing this from time to time. One such history is that of PaaS. The year was 2012, and PaaS was all the rage. Heroku was killing it, Cloud Foundry...

I’ve seen a lot negative reactions to the terms multi cloud and hybrid cloud. I would argue, that’s because we are framing it wrong. It’s really Hardware 1.0 and Hardware 2.0. In Hardware 1.0 Dell, IBM and HP all tried to sell us fairly similar servers. We typically bought these servers, but we could finance them or lease them. I loved the DL380,...

  Background Going back to basics, there are two major parts of an operating system – the kernel and the user space. The kernel is a special program executed directly on the hardware or virtual machine – it controls access to resources and schedules process. The other major part is the user space – this is the set of files, including...

How do you buy a used Linux container? A quick search of “how to buy a shipping container” will turn up a wealth of information, especially how to evaluate used ones. While all analogies are imperfect, this one is pretty good and it does highlight an interesting problem – basically, any Linux container image over a minute old is used in the...

Background So lately, I have been hearing a lot about containers vs. virtual machines and I wanted to get in on the action. I saw the a recap of Alex Polvi’s session at OpenStack Silicon Valley and I was inspired. I agree with Alex, and for fun, I wanted to state all of his points in a different way. Let’s rephrase all of his points with the word...