Enterprise DevOps Adoption Reports Show Open Source Software vs. VMware Divide

As the end of 2018 approaches many groups are releasing their annual IT reports with Puppet, Google, Java Magazine (JVM), & MediaCurrent producing some interesting documentation on patterns of software usage in large business organizations. Puppet released the "State of DevOps 2018" which surveyed over 30,000 individuals in enterprise IT internationally in Fortune 500 companies to show how software development teams are adopting DevOps techniques. The Puppet report suggests five stages of DevOps adoption cycle, which range from normalizing the technology stack, to standardizing and reducing variability. Companies seek to expand DevOps practices further, then automate infrastructure delivery, i.e. through web hosting configuration-as-code scripts like YAML or command line utilities like Ansible, Jenkins, Grunt, SaltStack, etc. These build the ability in the IT department to provide self-service capabilities in operations, i.e. Saas/PaaS solutions. Although DevOps practices are mostly centralized in developed nations & male employees, Puppet found that DevOps adoption is advancing across business organizations of all sizes & financial capability. Comparing the data from the State of DevOps Report prepared by Puppet with other IT surveys from Google, JVM, & MediaCurrent shows the major software trends advancing in Agile programming teams for web/mobile apps at the highest levels of computer science in the industry, as well as the financial investment involved on both sides.

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"Game Changing" Move by IBM the Largest Software Company Acquisition in Corporate History

IBM announced this weekend that it will acquire the shares of Red Hat (NASDAQ: RHT) at a $190, a 62.8% premium to their closing price of $116.68 in a $34 billion USD deal still subject to approval by regulators & stockholders. If closed successfully, the deal will represent the largest purchase price paid for a software company in history, topping the 2016 acquisition of LinkedIn by Microsoft for $26 billion USD. In initial comments on the merger, IBM CEO Ginni Rometty stated: “The acquisition of Red Hat is a game-changer. It changes everything about the cloud market. IBM will become the world’s #1 hybrid cloud provider, offering companies the only open cloud solution that will unlock the full value of the cloud for their businesses.” Founded in 1994, Red Hat is one of the oldest and most widely used Linux distributions available for data centers today. Red Hat was the first open source software company to $500 million USD in annual revenue and is expected to surpass $3 billion in revenue in 2018. IBM gains the Red Hat Enterprise Linux codebase, programming talent, patents/IP, & goodwill, as well as the OpenShift, Kubernetes, OpenStack, JBoss, CoreOS, & Ansible resources. Red Hat has over 12,600 employees with corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina. As IBM is projecting cloud scale-out at the global level as a $1 trillion USD annual market, Red Hat's programming & engineering talent is already innovating at the highest levels of implementation for Fortune 500 corporations and provides an industry leading Linux product suite for data center management. This merger could have a major impact on the future of CentOS.

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Commodity Approach to DNS Servers & Ultra High End Security Options for Domain Names

Cloudflare announced this week that the company will begin operating services as a domain name registrar in late 2018 with a wholesale price guarantee to customers to take no commission on sales. In a radical press release, Matthew Prince stated that the current domain name registration system is "crazy... messed up" and "as nutty to us as certificate authorities charging to run a bit of math." Prince writes that Cloudflare views the current domain name registry system as a broken market, mostly dominated by middle-ware companies with up-sell offers that are adding little value to the supply chain. Worse, domain name registrars make businesses reliant on the host company's security policies, creating a potential link in the web hosting chain that hackers can exploit for access or control to websites. Prince revealed that Cloudflare almost lost control of their own domain names to hackers through a registrar company, where the new service includes "ultra high end" security that can be as advanced as having multiple people required to verify DNS changes for a domain for the configuration to be saved. Cloudflare now has security features for domain name registration & DNS servers that are beyond what any other company on the market offers, although the new service is still invite-only. Combined with Cloudflare's CDN, Edge server, & anti-DDoS security products, as well as weakness in competitors in the sector, the new Cloudflare domain registration platform looks poised to become very successful, with Namecheap, GoDaddy, Enom, etc. potentially losing profit & customers to the venture-funded ($182 million USD) start-up platform.

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ClustrixDB Scales High-Traffic MySQL Apps in Production on Public/Private Cloud Web Servers

MariaDB was launched in 2009 by the original founders of MySQL after Oracle legally acquired formal ownership of the popular open source database platform. This week, MariaDB announced the acquisition of Clustrix, a twelve year old start-up company that develops a drop-in replacement for MySQL databases designed for better performance at scale in demanding high-traffic cloud environments. The ClustrixDB is already used by enterprise data centers in support of over 100,000 transactions per second for ecommerce. Programmers from the company will be integrating the code & features from the ClustrixDB framework into new releases of MariaDB. Enterprise data centers operating websites for the world's largest brands already doubt the reliability of MySQL in production for their website & mobile app transaction requirements at max scale. With Clustrix, MariaDB will also be able to offer better support for MySQL apps in containers on public cloud hosts with faster performance speeds. ClustrixDB includes the ability for users to choose either to shard databases into synched versions across multiple web servers for "big data" applications or to scale tables horizontally without sharding. ACID compliance allows MariaDB to challenge the performance speeds of Hadoop, Redis, & NoSQL solutions for "big data" requirements with the advantages of drop-in MySQL compatibility for code. Although financial details of the MariaDB-Clustrix deal were not disclosed, TechCrunch reports that Clustrix previously received $72 million in VC funding compared to around $100 million for MariaDB. ServiceNow will be partnering with MariaDB on the financial terms of agreement. MariaDB is gaining huge traction over MySQL in professional CMS development.

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Weaveworks Cloud & Flux - Git Version Control for Automated Kubernetes Web Server Configuration

According to Alexis Richardson, co-founder/CEO of Weaveworks, and William Denniss, project manager at Google Cloud Platform, GitOps are "modern best practices for high velocity app development using cloud native tools." With GitOps, web server configuration is regarded as code and subject to version control, where Git operates "as a single source of truth for the whole system." GitOps depends on completely automated software delivery pipelines, with 24/7 monitoring and observability "baked into the beginning," where data security is of "critical importance. Everything has to be version controlled and stored in a single source of truth from which you can recover." In Agile development teams, Terraform, Spinnaker, Puppet, & Ansible are currently popular for web server script automation using Git for disk image prints with Docker & Kubernetes on public cloud hosts for CI/CD requirements in project management. Weaveworks has developed a number of cloud platforms that address the software development & web server hosting pipeline holistically such as Weave Cloud, Weave Flux, and integrated AWS container management products. GitOps allows developers to make hundreds of small changes per day to running websites & mobile applications in live production rather than rolling out monolithic upgrades. YAML is used to build declarative infrastructure statements that can be repeated and implemented as standards for cloud network automation. In GitOps, diff alerts & pull requests are managed through decentralized networks of programmers in Agile teams from any office location using Git, increasing management flexibility in hiring and worker productivity times. GitOps has now become standard in web/mobile app development for enterprise corporations, start-up companies, non-profits, government agencies, & SMEs worldwide.

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