Hacker News Reader

Comment by ilovecaching | Hacker News Reader

I'm really worried about Redhat. IBM is currently a sinking ship, they've laid off parts of their workforce, they're failing to capture the cloud market, and the Redhat buy seems to be a ploy to maintain relevance. I'm seriously anxious about Redhat being drug under during IBM's death throes.

Redhat isn't going to save IBM. They sold because they had an unsustainable business, and Openshift is still a risky play to run a stable business on. The container space is starting to get awfully crowded, and cloud providers can provide better tailored experiences and skip containers altogether with serverless.

As a long time taker of Redhat certs, I hope they pull through and still look something like the Redhat I have loved and known.

View on HN

I've been keeping track of the various Kubernetes services and agree the market is massively crowded right now. AWS, Google and Azure dominate the cloud market. IBM is a distant joint last place by most metrics.

OpenShift won't compete with the cloud offerings in the long run. Redhat are currently competing with On-Prem offerings and trying to make a case for 'hybrid'.

Even in this market OpenShift is competing against at least 15 alternatives. For anyone interested I've been crowd sourcing data for each and trying to work out key differentiators.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1nAgDxQZYeAMLwz8iI3_a...

OpenShift is definitely differentiated in terms of security. They also have network and storage features that are arguably valuable to enterprise customers.

Google GKE On-Prem is out soon. I never see Azure Stack mentioned so maybe Microsoft will look into a Docker acquisition to boost their enterprise footprint.

The cloud seems like the bigger growth area though so perhaps this On-Prem container platform land grab will be short lived.

Microsoft is clearly investing in Docker, they bought Deis already.

http://venturebeat.com/2017/04/10/microosoft-acquires-kubern...

> I never see Azure Stack mentioned so maybe Microsoft will look into a Docker acquisition to boost their enterprise footprint.

The companies using Azure Stack today are some of the least likely to be parroting that fact. Microsoft's on-prem is pretty well entrenched, particularly in "boring enterprise" where pragmatism beats idealism, are quiet "do the work, don't leak the work" more than proudly proclaim to be chasing the trends.

That said, Azure Stack (and Azure) already have strong Docker support, without an acquisition to date.

More interestingly, in my opinion, though, is that right now Azure Functions is the only "serverless" runtime with a strong open source story, and equally strong on-prem (both as part of Azure Stack and, increasingly from what I hear, standalone) as well as Cloud support.

Regarding the claimed market presence of Azure Stack can you explain why it's not in the recent Forrester report?

https://reprints.forrester.com/#/assets/2/431/RES141562/repo...

Fascinating. The choices made in the criteria in that report are alluded to but not explicit, so of course we must resort to mindreading. My best guess is because Azure Stack is more than just a "container platform", and the "container platform" for Azure Stack essentially is "just" Docker, so Azure Stack usage in this case would be rolled up in the strong position you see for Docker here.

It would be great to see Forrester more forthright on such methodology, however, and this may be a good reminder that Forrester here is not a transparent, peer reviewed journal and doesn't have to show their homework.

Docker, as mentioned in the Forrester report is "Docker Enterprise 2.0" and as the text mentions it's a Kubernetes platform with Swarm and Kubernetes orchestrators.

AzureStack presumably runs AKS, the same as the Kubernetes service that runs in Azure, which is totally different.

The market size can't be attributed in any way to Azure Stack which is why I was surprised you mentioned it was heavily used. Gartner talks to a wide range of companies usually.

From the report:

> "We did not evaluate native public cloud container or Kubernetes services."

In which case AKS doesn't show up because the report intentionally excluded it.

Again, I don't understand anything about the methodology of this report, it's very clear it's designed to present some bias, but there isn't enough transparency on what/why/where, and every time I skim it I come up with other questions as to the validity of this report towards any market size determinations whatsoever.

That just means they excluded Google GKE, Microsoft AKS, Amazon EKS etc.. all of the public clouds.

I have another comparison sheet for those if anyone is interested.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1U0x4-NQegEPGM7eVTKJe...

The report is from Forrester. I hardly ever read them but Docker has it posted all over its website so I was curious.

Forrester and Gartner seem too high profile to be biased. This one isn't sponsored so the researchers will have had free reign over what was added. If Azure Stack is really in use by many companies I'd be surprised if they missed it.

I'd be surprised if Azure Stack sees big adoption any time soon; they aren't just letting you run some Azure services on existing hardware... the way they're doing it is to really take the "cloud in my datacenter" concept to the extreme:

* Subscription pricing like a cloud service, even though it's on-premise.

* Only runs on certified hardware appliances... You're looking at an investment of at least $300,000 for a base configuration.

So, OK, I get it, you're getting a private cloud and you're not supposed to worry about hardware anymore, but it's probably too big a mental shift for most traditional enterprises. And people with that kind of budget are already locked into a VMWare infrastructure for the next couple of years.

> That said, Azure Stack (and Azure) already have strong Docker support, without an acquisition to date.

Maybe I'm confused about what you mean by "Azure Stack", but there was most certainly an acquisition[1] related to Azure's docker support, the Deis team (now part of Azure team) were some of the earliest contributors to the Helm project, and this buyout was widely hailed from what I can remember as Microsoft's first big investment in Kubernetes.

Many of those people remained with the Azure team, and none of them work on Deis today. So, instead, they are driving the development of tools like Draft, AKS, OSBA, and Virtual Kubelet.

And of course MS also made a high-profile acquisition of GitHub, just not sure that one is relevant to Azure Stack.

[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/10/microsoft-acquires-contain...

It was in reference to an acquisition of Docker, Inc. itself. They've worked quite closely with Docker, Inc. but (so far?) haven't acquired them.

But correct, there have been related acquisitions.

Interesting, I would say that it's fortunate nobody can buy Kubernetes (because it only is composed of acceptance and compliance with a conformance suite, there are dozens of separate implementations and they may all be Kubernetes.)

To be honest that's a great feature and one reason why I am not terribly scared about consequences of any news about a RedHat acquisition; that being so even though I do follow OpenShift with some interest.

I'm sure that Docker is also a target for acquisitions by these bigger companies but while we're on the subject thanks to Kubernetes and the CRI, it's pretty darn unlikely that anyone is ever going to totally corner the market on Linux containers, at least any time in the foreseeable future.

While all of these solutions are maturing at a rapid pace, the problem of cloud is still cultural for most enterprise companies vs. tech stack. Operational discipline to make cloud a business driver is still an unmet need on every large enterprise side and it has lot to do with the non technical items, culture, incentives, organizational models

>I never see Azure Stack mentioned so maybe Microsoft will look into a Docker acquisition to boost their enterprise footprint.

Podman is looking better and better every day.

If you really want to get into the details, Walmart has their own hybrid solution which has been open-source for quite a while, OneOps. It's a terrible product, but somehow they manage to use it.

You miss cloud foundry from Pivotal. It's capturing all the Fortune 100 customers. I'd venture to say it's approaching 100% market share on premise.

Strictly speaking, Cloud Foundry is not Pivotal's, it belongs to the Cloud Foundry Foundation. We're the leading contributor and we sell the leading commercial distribution, but it's still an open source project.

We compete with Red Hat in on-prem and hybrid scenarios but we're also cooperating with Red Hat, Google, IBM and SAP on Knative.

IBM Bluemix is based on Cloud Foundry

Bluemix was, IBM Cloud isn't. IBM Cloud is kubernetes based.

Seems like Redhat is to IBM as a new puppy is to a failing relationship...

However, I am not optimistic that a Glorious Future will be the outcome from the RedHat acquisition;

While at Mirantis, I was assisting in RedHat's implementation of OpenStack with Intel/IBM and it was a nightmare.

OpenStack, at that time was very difficult to implement with smooth success (much like a JBOSS / WebObjects / Tomcat nightmare implementations back in the early days) -- and the BigCo process-procedure-competency-silos that goes along with it...

I can only expect that adding more layers of abstraction and ambiguity of ownership will make for headaches.

Here is to hoping that my pessimistic outlook is proven wrong.

OpenStack is still a nightmare, no matter what distribution.

OpenShift, on the other hand, is a breath of fresh air (k8s in general is - the quality is so much higher). Things just work and the docs don't conveniently leave out all the important details.

Try to install kubernetes by hand.. It reminds me of the old days of "dependency hell"

Now try it using OpenShift's installer. It's awesome :)

Yes, took about a week to figure that one out. Most of the tutorials are always out of date.

Not really. Unless you haven't tried it recently, there are many great options. Kubeadm is painless for simple clusters, and kubespray is easy if you know ansible. Of course, both assume some level of sysadmin experience, since it's a tool to manage large clusters.

You-know-what, I owe myself and everyone involved with that project a little more info:

I was the lead PM responsible for managing the implementation of the OpenStack on RedHat+IBM with Intel TXT being the premise of the implementation such that RH could go back and replicate into their own thing...

It was a nightmare project, but on no part, individually of RH, Intel or IBM or Mirantis...

Openstack just was NOT READY for production secure workloads.

The project was just a bunch of people trying to do their best with shitty tools...

But, openstack/shift/the-current-marketplace wouldnt be without the sacrifice of crap on the battlefield.

So, at the end of the day, just hope that all your failures are something that others can trample to make-the-world-a-better-place...

OpenStack screams “enterprise” and “architects” at the top of its lungs and I for one want nothing to do with that crap. I know exactly what it is just by looking at it - a hobbled together patchwork soup of poorly documented and half-abandoned open source middleware that is meant to pay consultants’ salaries and nothing more. Definitely not meant to solve real problems, that’s for damn sure.

Who is fooled by this anymore, really? Non-technical middle managers who read a bunch of marketing materials?

You can pry k8s from my cold dead hands.

IBM isn't sinking. It is quite large, nearly 400,000 employees. If they laid off 10% of their workforce it would be like a bit more than 1 and a half Facebooks ceased to exist but it would be a drop in the bucket at IBM.

What they are is slow moving and hidebound. I think that at some level they understand that, and at other levels they don't. They have an amazing asset in their labs where they can put 1,000 of some of the smartest people you might ever hope to meet on to a problem pretty much instantly.

In my short time with them post acquisition I found a company that was very slowly losing its calcified husk and becoming more agile. It had some blind spots but when you replace enough people that can be fixed. As Gerstner showed in the 90's, as Satella is showing at Microsoft, what Welch showed at GE. Put the right leadership team in place and you can do amazing things with that power.

> Welch showed at GE

I thought his contribution was "rank and yank" and financial services, both dubious to say the least. Have I been misled?

No, you weren't misled. Welch was/is a prime example of the primacy of personal selfishness applied to corporate management.

It's all contractors being sub contracted to other companies. If they laid off 10% of their workers overnight it wouldn't matter because it's the normal cycle of contracting.

There can be no growth because contractors don't scale. They bring a fix percentage of their day rate.

There could be some products with great people lost in a corner of IBM. However, they will remain a negligible fraction of the company and they won't have the power to turn it around.

If AWS/Microsoft makes a new product or service, they can roll out instantly everywhere and capture clients. If IBM does something new, they couldn't begin to sell it, they'd sell you a contractor.

> There can be no growth because contractors don't scale. They bring a fix percentage of their day rate.

IBM's revenue growth over at least the last three quarters is due to its mainframe business and the launch of the z14.

> There can be no growth because contractors don't scale.

Except of course that when you employ 300K of them it does scale. The mistake many software people make is that only software scales, but IBM (and others) has successfully built a scalable model around consulting.

It scales strictly linearly with the number of sub contractors.

As a recent IBM Hire...one of the first in about 30 years for my role and definitely the first for my region ever I am stoked to work for IBM. Me being hired quite literally wiped about 5 companies contracts out of my region for certain hardware roles...which they deserved because they provided terrible service. IBM is certainly becoming more agile...the one thing I am learning about my role within the company...is that change is a constant for the company.

> Put the right leadership team in place and you can do amazing things with that power.

Sure, but that's the thing: IBM doesn't have the right leadership team in place, and hasn't since Gerstner left. It shows no sign of having learnt from its mistakes.

Fundamentally, IBM is a sales company, not a technical company. For a long, long time its marketing department was able to sell the fiction that it was a technical company, and use that reputation to sell, but folks realise now that it's just not.

Businesses this big and old don't "sink" unless there is utter contempt for obvious changes in market conditions by the entire board, for a sustained amount of time. Even with utter contempt, it would take an enormous amount of time for them to implode. IBM isn't that stupid and they obviously understand something isn't working.

They're also roughly 100 years old (depending on definitions). They're reinvented and reshaped their business many times. "Two new broom handles, two new brushes" but it's still the same company, as they say. I'm afraid I find it ludicrous that IBM would actually end up in anything resembling financial failure.

> They're also roughly 100 years old (depending on definitions). They're reinvented and reshaped their business many times. "Two new broom handles, two new brushes" but it's still the same company, as they say. I'm afraid I find it ludicrous that IBM would actually end up in anything resembling financial failure.

People were saying the same thing of Sears 10 years ago...

Sears falls into the "utter contempt" category, along with utter incompetence. It was obvious to every outside observer their model was busted. It was obvious how bad their stores were to anyone who went there to try to buy something. There was nothing sudden about it, really. I think many could see this happening more than 10 years ago.

Also, unlike IBM, Sears has very little of worth which would uniquely identify it as "Sears" after asset sale. It's all fungible land, rent, concrete store walls, and staff. They have many competitors with practically identical overlap in business. IBM is not like at all like this.

> It was obvious to every outside observer their model was busted.

Well, imagine I am somebody at the target market of IBM (whatever that is), why would I want to hire them?

IBM's customers are the same as Microsoft's customers (at least the high profit ones). Very large enterprise companies locked into contracts worth millions and 100s of millions of dollars. They move slow like icebergs and carry as much weight.

They don't worry about new customers when the largest companies in the world have gone through months or years to get them as preferred tier one vendors.

Sears on the other hand did not serve large Enterprises and were generating revenue mostly from retail. Consumer vs. Enterprise is like Apples and Oranges guys.

Hum... I work in a large MS customer. We are a happy customer for some measure. We are also an Oracle customer, and happier than I would expected to be possible if I didn't know about there.

I just can't imagine anything we could hire from IBM.

It's all fungible land, rent, concrete store walls, and staff. They have many competitors with practically identical overlap in business. IBM is not like at all like this.

Ermm yes it is. What do they do that HPE, DXC, Accenture, Crapita, Fujitsu, TCS, Infosys, Wipro yadda yadda don’t? All IBM had left is the rapidly tarnishing prestige of their once mighty brand.

So you're saying IBM is more like Kodak?

Kodak like Sears made money on retail consumers. IBM like Microsoft make a majority of revenue on Enterprise customers and service contracts.

Have you heard of EDS? How about HP global? They were selling to enterprises and still became obsolete..

I’m not sure that’s true. In the days of film the average consumer shot <1 roll per year. Whereas a professional photographer would shoot a dozen or more rolls per day. Their biggest customers would have been newspapers and studios buying 10,000 rolls at a time on a regular basis

No, they weren't. They were in a pretty much constant decline since the mid-70s, with shit really hitting the fan in the 90s and early 2000s.

https://www.nytimes.com/1991/01/28/business/big-change-is-ex...

The question is not if they will become a Lehman, it's if they will become a GE

IBM patents everything. I feel like if they were to ever actually go through their death throes, they will start becoming patent trolls.

Or get bought by patent trolls. They're big enough that that future is hopefully a long time off.

It is the last stage of any large company anyway: IP vulture.

Would you mind entertaining a naive question? What makes redhat worth it? What would make a company choose redhat over Ubuntu (or any flavor of Debian) in 2018?

RHEL's quality assurance and documentation is top-notch. Ubuntu has been improving, but it's not anywhere as good (which makes sense - Red Hat has much more people working on it).

Support is expensive, but worth it. It's not unheard of to get custom kernel patches mere days after you reported an issue.

Well, that and the ecosystem of enterprise software which refuse to run on anything but RHEL.

And Ubuntu's failure to establish their home-grown stuff: Upstart, Unity, Mir, Ubuntu One, Ubuntu Phone, Juju...

That being said, 18.04 is a lot better than 12.04 or 14.04. I'm a Red Hat fan, but I hope Canonical succeeds - the more independent companies there are, the better.

Unless it gets bought by MS

I've never seen Ubuntu used in a large enterprise. Redhat dominates the server market. They offer better certification, support, and a package repository geared towards stability and backporting. The seperate Fedora (new a shiny) from RHEL (old and stable).

Ubuntu doesn't really have that distinction. Shuttleworth is also kind of a character, and it's hard to rely on him keeping Ubuntu fixed on a particular use case. It's been desktop, then mobile/desktop convergence, and now containers and Kuberentes. Think startup vs big business.

Ubuntu is the default base image for Cloud Foundry, so in fact it's pretty widely embedded in enterprise at this point. But it's an implementation detail, rather than a separate line item on the invoice.

Didn’t google use Ubuntu or Debian or something?

Google originally used Red Hat Linux (not RHEL) but migrated to Debian. They are using a custom version of all their stuff so its probably not really even Debian at this point.

Everywhere I've worked in the valley in the past 12 years standardized on CentOS.

Openshift.

You will occasionally run into problems requiring much deeper systems expertise than in a standard Ops or SWE skillset. Red Hat is a practical and economical alternative to hiring kernel hackers yourself.

Compare: https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterp...

With: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Samba/SambaServerGuide

The docs are just that much better. The server packages are much more reliable. If you want specific software versions, and you're not on docker, you get those versions. It's a breeze to sysadmin a centos machine. An Ubuntu machine is a pile of nightmares.

(Also, very few people actually run RHEL with the support package, most run CentOS, which is patch-compatible but has all the trademarks removed.)

RedHat seems to have already adopted IBM’s approach of “milk the customer base.” They belong together, as neither is a big growth play any more.

As a so-called "long cert taker", I would expect you to be able to write the name right: Red Hat

Last quarter IBM had free cash flow of 2.2B. They spent 2.1B of that on stock buybacks and dividends

You can't really hide your lack of R&D or missing long term vision with numbers like that.

Free cash flow is after R&D expenses.

How would you feel about Redhat if it stayed independent? It sounds like they were in trouble.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com