Rishidot Research

deciphering the modern enterprise

containers

Decision Makers Guide: Nomad Vs Kubernetes

· · Leave a Comment

Rishidot Research is launching a new product to called Decision Makers Guide. Rishidot Research’s Decision Makers’ Guides are research briefs made to help decision makers gain quick understanding of a technology or compare two or more technologies. The guides are designed to help modern enterprise decision makers quickly understand the pros and cons of specific technologies or scenarios to plan their strategy. Unlike Rishidot Research’s long form reports, these guides are purposed to inform decision makers about the strengths and weaknesses of specific technologies. This understanding will empower them and their teams to make objective strategic decisions without depending on vendor marketing materials. When decision makers want a deep dive into specific technologies or need to evaluate various scenarios as part of their planning process, Rishidot Research can aid that process through consulting engagements.

In the first issue of this series, we are tackling the question of Nomad Vs Kubernetes. We get this question all the time when enterprise decision makers are considering scheduling and orchestration solutions for their cloud native workloads. This guide will help decision makers understand where Nomad and Kubernetes fits in the landscape. You can find the guide in Rishidot Research’s Github Repo.

VMs, Containers or Serverless?

· · Leave a Comment

At Rishidot Research, we often hear from IT stakeholders about their confusion about newer technologies in the Modern Enterprise market. They wonder whether they should use containers or serverless or stick to virtual machines. We have released a flow diagram that will help you understand how these technologies fit for a simple workload.

 

Red Hat Acquires CoreOS To Emerge As A Strong Leader In Container Space

· · Leave a Comment

Today, Red Hat, the open source company focussed on enterprise IT, announced the acquisition of CoreOS, its competitor in the container market (Red Hat press release). This is clearly shaking up the enterprise application platform market and, definitely, the Kubernetes community. CNBC puts the cost of the acquisition at $250 Million, making this one of the largest Red Hat acquisitions. In this quick analysis, we take a look at this news and how it impacts the modern enterprise.

The Competition

As a startup, CoreOS went directly at Red Hat, trying to position themselves as the operating system for containers. They also built a platform called CoreOS Tectonic as the multi cloud Kubernetes distribution going against Red Hat’s OpenShift Container Platform and other application platforms in the market. CoreOS is also one of the biggest contributor to the Kubernetes project and there was speculation that they will get acquired by one of the enterprise cloud providers to effectively compete with Red hat in the space.

What it means for Red Hat?

This helps Red Hat in many ways

  • It helps them emerge much stronger in Kubernetes community. Already, Red Hat is the second largest contributor to Kubernetes after Google. With Microsoft aggressively recruiting Kubernetes contributors and gaining leadership role in the committees and AWS entering CNCF and ramping up their open source efforts, keeping the leadership role in the open source community becomes a competitive advantage. By acquiring CoreOS, Red Hat is strengthening their leadership in the community and it will help them in selling to enterprise IT
  • Red Hat has a strong play in every layer of the modern enterprise stack, from operating system to container engine to orchestration to the developer platform layer. Bringing CoreOS inside Red Hat strengthens this advantage
  • CoreOS was not a threat to Red Hat, but it is definitely a pain in both container space and public clouds. Taking out a potential threat is a smart way to establish long term relevancy even if it comes at a huge (as per Red hat’s M&A standards) cost
  • Canonical’s Ubuntu has a lead in the public clouds. By buying CoreOS, which has both developer and startup mind share, Red Hat can fend off Canonical as well as public cloud providers own version of Linux

But

  • It will be interesting to see how Red Hat fits CoreOS with Project Atomic and Red Hat OpenShift. CoreOS has competing offerings in both container operating systems and application platforms. It is critical for Red Hat to position these offerings in a way that doesn’t confuse the market
  • They will have to retain the Kubernetes contributors for a few years to get better ROI from this acquisition. It will be interesting to see how they fend off the talent poaching after the vesting period

I have reached out to Red Hat Analyst Team with some questions and I will update this post after we hear from them.

What it means for the competition?

This definitely starts the process of consolidation in the Kubernetes community

  • Competitors are going to get aggressive in getting the attention of enterprise customers. Public cloud providers like AWS and Azure are going one step above Kubernetes to make Container as a Service seamless with AWS Fargate (which will integrate with AWS EKS soon) and Azure Container Instances. They will try to go up the stack to lock down customers inside their service
  • Other platform providers like Pivotal, Docker and Mesosphere will recalibrate their strategy after this acquisition. As we pointed out in this analysis, we expect Pivotal to get rid of the technical depth underneath the platform and focus on a more developer centric platform higher up in the stack with their Spring investments and future Functions as a Service offering. We will wait and see how Docker and Mesosphere react to this development
  • Expect to see some other startups in the Kubernetes space to be acquired by other enterprise vendors. Oracle is ramping up their cloud efforts. Both IBM and SAP are focussing more and more on Kubernetes. These large vendors will definitely need help in making their offerings attractive to modern enterprise and this will lead to some more acquisitions in the next year or so

What it means to Customers?

Anytime there is a consolidation in any market, customer lose choice but this round of consolidation is happening in an open source community which has emerged as a standard for container orchestration. In a way, such a consolidation in this space might accelerate container adoption and a stronger movement towards IT modernization. Many enterprise IT organizations have a strong relationship with Red Hat and this acquisition will help them stick with Red Hat as they move towards containerized workloads.

Overall an interesting acquisition by Red Hat and it all depends on how well they position the combined offerings and how well they integrate with existing products. Let us see how it shapes up.

 

Oracle Cloud Strategy – An Analysis

· · Leave a Comment

Oracle., the enterprise giant of the legacy era, hosted their annual user conference Oracle OpenWorld last week shed some more light on their cloud strategy. Oracle made some announcements focussed on cloud computing, Artificial Intelligence, and Blockchain but it came out more like an organization trying to jumpstart their vehicle to catch up with competition than a thought leader pushing innovation. Oracle is almost a decade late into the cloud game and their efforts to compete is still focused on marketing than showcasing any substance. In this analysis, let us dive into Oracle’s strategy for the modern enterprise stack

Current Status

After dismissing cloud for the better part of the decade and then calling their legacy enterprise applications as cloud, Oracle started focussing on Infrastructure as a Service to take on AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and IBM Bluemix. They built an infrastructure service from the ground up, tapping into AWS and Azure engineers, focussing on Compute, Storage, and Network. Then they expanded their offerings to include containers. Here is Rishidot Research’s SWOT analysis on Oracle IaaS strategy earlier this year.

Oracle OpenWorld 2017 Announcements

Oracle made many announcements at this year’s OpenWorld and we are highlighting some of the important ones on their cloud offerings

  • Oracle’s cloud strategy involves basic IaaS which competes with AWS on the “enterprise-centric” pricing strategy and vendor claims about better performance and “PaaS” (quotes used to differentiate Oracle’s definition of PaaS from the traditional industry definition of PaaS) which includes their middleware offerings and database service. At this point in time, their differentiating factor from the industry leader AWS is pricing
  • Set of container-based services on top of their IaaS to compete with container offerings by every other cloud provider. This includes Kubernetes based container service, Oracle container registry and Oracle container pipelines
  • Announcement of an open source functions as a service platform. It is an early stage software than a service on top of Oracle IaaS. However, with their middleware tools and IaaS, this could be a Oracle cloud service in the future
  • Announcements regarding AI strategy and blockchain tools in their cloud
  • Oracle 18c, their enterprise database offering with automation based in machine learning and enterprise grade SLAs

Rishidot Analysis

Oracle is building a infrastructure as a service offering with compute, storage and network. They are also adding container services to the mix. Compared to the top three cloud providers, AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud is still at a barebones stage when it comes to the depth of their offering. We expected a bunch of higher order services on top of their IaaS but we didn’t see any announcements for newer services or even a coherent roadmap to match the depth of services in the other three providers. Oracle spent the news cycles around OpenWorld focussing on a strategy that is more about reducing their bleeding than convincing newer customers about Oracle Cloud as the infrastructure for innovation. They spent way too much time in the Larry Ellison keynote on their pricing strategy compared to AWS than showcasing innovation that could make their competitors sweat. Even their pricing strategy was more about convincing the customers of Oracle database and applications to use their IaaS than enticing newer customers to start embracing their cloud. We think that the pricing strategy is more old-fashioned and focussed on enabling their salespeople to close big deals than a pricing strategy for the modern era.

It is important for the market to have Oracle as a strong player but, to compete effectively, Oracle has to go at full speed to build depth in the services they offer on top of IaaS. Building iteratively is not going to either help them close the gap with the top three providers or in giving confidence to decision makers that betting on Oracle IaaS is a smart choice. Between now and the next Oracle OpenWorld, I would love to see Oracle add a wide range of higher order services so that enterprise customers can really innovate on top of Oracle cloud. Modern enterprise CIOs are more focussed on innovation than cost savings or iterative performance improvements. They need a powerful infrastructure on top of which their developers can innovate. It is critical for Oracle leadership to understand this need and build a compelling offering to outcompete AWS, Azure and Google Cloud.

Oracle’s container strategy is on the right path but the lack of higher order services is going to hinder the developer adoption of their container service. They do offer a suite of tools to manage the containerized applications from development to production but it is still barebones and they have their work cut out in making this offering more compelling as Amazon ECS or Google Container Engine.

I am glad to see Oracle talking about AI and Blockchains as a part of their modern stack and I am hoping that they have a production ready set of tools available by next OpenWorld.

Recommendations For Enterprise Decision Makers

If you are an Oracle Customer wanting to migrate your applications to the cloud, it makes complete sense to consider Oracle IaaS for your migration needs. However, this is recommended for the migration of existing applications than building any net new applications. They have limited set of services for building next gen applications. Wait for their offerings to mature before using Oracle cloud for newer applications.

If Oracle tech stack is not critical for your applications, AWS, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud have a wide range of services needed for the modern applications. We strongly recommend these providers for your next gen applications at this point. Oracle can still evolve fast to compete with these providers by increasing the breadth and depth of their higher order services but they are not there yet.

Conclusion

In spite of their late start, Oracle has shown seriousness and commitment towards a more coherent cloud strategy. They still have a long way to go before they can catch up with their competitors. Right now, their IaaS is quite attractive for migrating existing applications built on Oracle stack because of the aggressive pricing but their cloud is not recommended for net new applications. This may change between now and next OracleWorld if they accelerate rapidly, either by building or acquiring companies, to offer higher order services. We will have to wait and see. Rishidot Research recommends enterprise decision makers to closely watch their roadmap for the next year before betting their strategy on Oracle Cloud.

Virtual Panel: VMworld 2017 Recap

· · Leave a Comment

Yesterday, we hosted a Virtual Panel on VMworld 2017 talking about the news that came out of VMworld 2017 in Las Vegas last week. The panelists are:

  • John Allwright, Pivotal Inc
  • Rob Bissett, Virtustream
  • Scott Fulton, The New Stack
  • Bryan Friedman, Pivotal Inc
  • Krishnan Subramanian, Rishidot Research (Moderator)

We discussed many topics ranging from the recent cloud announcements by VMware, Multi Cloud Strategy, Pivotal Container Service, Enterprise use of Kubernetes and whether BOSH can emerge as a standard for infrastructure services orchestration. Watch the video below.

 

 

Subscribe to Modern Enterprise Newsletter & get notified about our research