Google Kubernete’s new community lead: Sarah Novotny

November 30, 2015

A couple of weeks ago I attended KubeCon in San Francisco.  There were a series of talks as well as a bunch of vendors who were there in mini-booths chatting with folks and showing off what they do.  As always, the part I get the most out of at conferences like this is the “hallway track” where I get to chat one-on-one with various folks.

One such folk was Sarah Novotny, who recently joined Google as the first Kubernetes community lead.  Check out the video below where Sarah talks about her goals for the community, how it will fit with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and how she hopes to extend this beyond a Google only effort.

Extra credit reading

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

ContainerCon: How Google helps developers with Kubernetes

August 26, 2015

Last week at Container/LinuxCon I conducted  a handful of video interviews.  Video number three stars Brian Dorsey from Google. Brian works with developers to get them up to speed with Kubernetes.

Here’s what Brian had to say:

Some of the ground Brian covers

  • Brian’s focus on cloud-building developers, specifically those working on Kubernetes
  • Key partners such as Red Hat, CoreOS, Kismatic and many, many more
  • How Brian and the team reach developers  (events, blogs, videos, sample code…)
  • Where he sees Kubernetes going over the next year

Extra-credit reading

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Posted by Barton George

Introducing Kubernetes 1.0 and the Cloud Native Computing foundation

July 22, 2015

This morning at OSCON a special event was held to announce the launch of Kubernetes 1.0 (Google’s open source container management framework) as well as the introduction of the Cloud Native Computing foundation.

One of the key speakers at the event was Craig McLuckie of Google who is a founding member of Kubernetes’ team.  Craig has also been working with the Linux Foundation to set up the Cloud Native Computing foundation.

I sat down with Craig for a quick chat regarding both of these efforts.

Some of the ground Craig covers:

  • Craig’s role at Google and his relationship with Kubernetes
  • Today’s announcement as it relates to both Kubernetes 1.0 and the Cloud Native Computing foundation.
  • Where does Craig see Kubernetes going over the next year and what new workloads will it run

Extra-credit reading:

  • As Kubernetes Hits 1.0, Google Donates Technology To Newly Formed Cloud Native Computing Foundation – TechCrunch
  • ​Cloud Native Computing Foundation seeks to forge cloud and container unity – ZDNet
  • Linux Foundation wrangles app container wranglers into new org – The Register

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Cloud Foundry picks up Crowbar to speed installation

August 17, 2011

In case you’re not familiar with Cloud Foundry, it’s an open source Platform as a Service project initiated at VMware.  More specifically it provides a platform for building, deploying, and running cloud apps using Spring for Java developers, Rails and Sinatra for Ruby developers, Node.js and other JVM frameworks including Grails.

The project began two years ago when VMware’s CEO Paul Maritz recruited Derek Collison and Mark Lucovsky out of Google and set them to working on Cloud Foundry.  Collison and Lucovsky, who built and maintained Google’s API services, were brought into leverage their experience of working with hugely scaled out architectures.

The Cloud Foundry project has only been public for a matter of months and one question that I’m sure has popped into your mind is what if I want to pilot Cloud Foundry in my own environment, won’t installation and configuration be a total pain?

Enter the Crowbar

Crowbar is an open source software framework developed at Dell to speed up the installation and configuration of open source cloud software onto bare metal systems.  By automating the process, Crowbar can reduce the time needed for installation from days to hours.

The software is modular in design so while the basic functionality is in Crowbar itself, “barclamps” sit on top of it to allow it work with a variety of projects.  The first use for crowbar was for OpenStack and the barclamp for that has been donated to the community.  Next came The Dell | Cloudera solution for Apache Hadoop and, just recently, Dreamhost announced that they currently working on a Ceph barclamp.  And now…

Two great tastes that taste great together

Today’s big news is that VMware is working with Dell to release and maintain a Crowbar barclamp that, in conjunction with Crowbar, will install and configure Cloud Foundry.  This capability, which will include multi-node configs over time, will allow organizations and service providers the ability to quickly and easily get pilots of Cloud Foundry up and running.

Once the initial deployment is complete, Crowbar can be used to maintain, expand, and architect the instance, including BIOS configuration, network discovery, status monitoring, performance data gathering, and alerting.

If you’d like to try out Crowbar for yourself, check out: https://github.com/DellCloudEdge

Press added after initial posting

Extra-credit reading

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

The Data Center ecosystem of players

December 12, 2010

As I mentioned in a recent entry, last week I attended the Gartner Data Center conference where I learned a ton.  One of the folks I learned a lot from was Dave Ohara who consults in the data center arena.  Dave is uber connected in this space and pens the blog, Green (low carbon) Data Center blog.  Dave provided a bunch of introductions while I was there and sat down with me to do the following short video on the ecosystem of data center players.

Some of the ground that Dave covers:

  • What he covers in his blog Green Data Center
  • How do you go about building a data center and who are the players in each phase e.g site selection -> architecture/engineering design -> construction…
  • What are some of the key disruptions coming to this long standing industry e.g. cloud, Google

Pau for now…

Extra-credit reading

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Posted by Barton George

Mark Shuttleworth dicusses the Cloud and Ubuntu

March 30, 2009

Last month Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu Linux, CEO of Cannonical Ltd and First African in Space, announced that Ubuntu was going to be making a big push into cloud computing with their release slated for October.  This will add to early cloud support that’s debuting in next month’s release, Ubuntu 9.04.  (BTW, For a good backgrounder on Mark and Ubuntu, check out Ashlee Vance’s story in the New York Times from January).

I  was interested to get some more details so I reached out to Mark to find out his master Cloud plan, his thoughts on Cloud Computing today and where he thought it was going.  This is what he had to say:

My interview with Mark (9:51)  Listen (Mp3) Listen (ogg)


Mark and myself at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Boston at the end of ’07 (Mark’s the one without the “Barton” name tag.)

Some of the topics Mark Tackles:

  • Ubuntu has picked two anchor points for its cloud strategy: Amazon EC2 and UCSB‘s (go Gauchos!) Eucalyptus.  Eucalyptus is for those looking to create “private clouds” on their own and on the Amazon side they are making it easy for users to plug into EC2 as well as offering folks the ability to run Ubuntu-based machines on their cloud.
  • Why they went with EC2 and Eucalyptus.  On the Eucalyptus side it has to with it being Java-based, which meshes nicely with the work Ubuntu did with Sun to get the Java stack “straightened out” on Ubuntu for  app servers.
  • The constraints that EC2 imposes actually make it more interesting by providing discipline, much in the same way that http applied the discipline of being completely connectionless.
  • We haven’t yet seen the “definitive cloud” in  the way that Google came along and captured the spirit (and revenues) of the web.  It will still be 5 -10 years before the cloud computing is nailed.
  • Portability in the Cloud is key if we want to avoid gross lock-in issues.  People are trying to tackle this in a variety of ways but it makes sense to look at the way http came to dominance.
  • Any truth to the rumor that Google is planning on using Ubuntu as a Netbook OS? (listen how Mark deftly responds 🙂
  • Last time we spoke, back in August, Mark said he was looking at profitability in 18 months to two years, is he still on track?

Pau for now…

Update: Here is the Register article based on the above podcast.

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Posted by Barton George

The rise of the Google Enterprise team and Cloud

February 3, 2009

On the second day of Cloud Connect I caught up with Kevin Gough of Google.  Kevin leads marketing efforts for Google Apps, website search, enterprise search and geospatial products and we chatted a bit about the evolution of the Google Apps team.

To watch in High Quality: after clicking play, click the “HQ” button that will appear on the bottom.

Some of the topics Kevin Tackles:

  • Growing the Enterprise team from less than 20 to over 500.
  • The evolution from Search -> Maps -> Earth -> Google Apps (Google’s thrust into the cloud for businesses)
  • Python and App Engine, going with what’s familiar and plans to expand

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

A Quick Peak at Blueprint thanks to Google

December 11, 2008

A couple of weeks ago Alex Moffat, chief engineer for Lombardi Blueprint, jetted out to Mountain View to record a video at Google headquarters.

The video, which is in YouTube’s new 16:9 aspect ratio (the only way you want to watch Lawrence of Arabia or Blueprint demos), is part of a series of developer videos Google is doing to show the cool things that can be built using Google Web Toolkit (GWT).

What you’ll see (and what you’ll get)

In the video, which is only a minute and 16 seconds, Alex shows how business users can enter info in outline form which then generates corresponding boxes in an adjacent map view.  These boxes can be easily moved around via drag-and-drop.  Additionally, at the push of a button this high-level view is auto-magically converted into a process flow diagram.  As Alex points out, thanks to GWT, all of this happens completely within any browser without the user having to download any plug-ins like Flash etc.

Extra-Credit Reading

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Google Addresses Three Cloud Computing Myths

October 3, 2008

I came across the following short video featuring Jeff Keltner a Business Development Manager for Google Apps.  The video is from TechWeb from mid August and it looks like it was taken at an event featuring various “Cloud Players” (I noticed Amazon’s VP of Amazon Web Services, Adam Selipsky is sitting on the couch while Jeff speaks).

For those who prefer reading, here is a quick summary of Jeff’s talk:

He starts with two positives for Cloud Computing

  1. From an IT perspective: He cites the Gartner statistic that only 20% of the total cost of ownership for software is the purchasing of the software while 80% of the cost comes from the ongoing maintenance.  He cites the centralized nature of the cloud as a way of reversing that trend and actually flipping the relationship.
  2. From a user perspective, we are shifting from personal to group productivity and shifting towards a single instance of an application and collaboration which the cloud supports.

He then focuses on the Myths

  1. It’s not secure: Jeff argues that an enterprise with the size and scale of an Amazon, Google or Salesforce.com is much more secure than most.  He also rightfully points out that you can’t assume that today’s in-house model is zero risk.  (This seems like an obvious point but one that people often miss when comparing the two models).
  2. It’s not proven (no one’s done this before):  He talks about how cloud began with services like ADP payroll and then rolled out to other vertical apps like Webex and Salesforce.com and has continued from there.
  3. It’s not for the enterprise:  He points to the large scale of Google support and infrastructure.

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Google out, Zoho in — to the tune of 400,000 desktops at GE

September 23, 2008

Who doesn’t love a David and Goliath story?  Looks like General Electric has chosen India-based Zoho over Google to supply its cloud-based desktop suite on 400,000 desktops.  Zoho is a 600 person company that has never taken venture funding and currently generates $40 million a year.

According to Daya Baran’s blog “A GE spokesperson who did not want to be identified said their decision was based around issues of personal and corporate privacy, functionality, support, features and Zoho won hands down.”

Hmmm, GE might be a great candidate for Blueprint 🙂

Zoho landing page.  Look familiar?

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George