This blog and website is for the BitMasons LLC analyst firm and Gordon Haff. The focus is on technology matters but we'll post on other things that catch our eye as well. And just have some fun too.
My first customer roadshow when I was at Red Hat highlighted governance (and security) as one of the concerns that many folks had about doing everything in a public cloud. This was at a time when the popular narrative, as well-written about in Nick Carr’s The Big Switch built on an earlier concept by computer scientist John McCarthy about utility computing . The gist was that computing was just a…
The customary dating of AI is to the 1956 Dartmouth Summer Research Project, a gathering of elite researchers at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. What would come to be called Cognitive Science dated to another gathering a few months later (at MIT with some attendance overlap) but that’s a topic for another day. We could also go back to some of Alan Turing’s earlier work and probably find…
For various reasons, the past year has seen me devoting way too much time and mental energy to house and related matters (middle-of-the-night kitchen fire--no one hurt but very disruptive--MAKE SURE YOUR SMOKE DETECTOR BATTERIES ARE CHANGED!) which are pretty much resolved at this point. In any case, that's water under the bridge, and am jumping back into post-Red Hat analyst work again. In…
We're at one of the more interesting periods for virtualization in 25 years of so. That's about the time that Diane Greene, a co-founder of VMware and its CEO, was making the IT industry analyst rounds to talk up VMware's push into the x86 enterprise server virtualization space that didn't really exist at the time. Large Unix servers (and mainframes) had various ways to carve up the systems for…
I had a discussion with someone at the Linux Foundation Member Summit after Richard Fontana from Red Hat's talk and they didn't buy any arguments that, perhaps, training data not being open didn't invalidate the model as a whole being considered open. But I agree with the pragmatism angle. I'm something of an absolutist with respect to the open source definition with respect to code. But there are…
A bit over a year ago, I gave a presentation at the Linux Foundation Member Summit , where I took a look at some of the technologies catching a lot of attention and how the might develop. At the time, a lot of this was based on various work around Red Hat, including Red Hat Research, where I was working at the time. Think of this as both a fleshing out of the presentation, for those who weren't…
Not everyone bought my comparison of how the cloud developed and AI is developing that I posted the other day . But I wanted to flesh out some thoughts about cloud from that post and my presentation at the Linux Foundation Member Summit in 2023 . First, some house keeping. When I write "we got wrong," I don't mean everyone and some—including myself—never fully bought into a number of the…
Even if you stipulated that cloud computing was going to be a big deal, the early cloud narrative got a lot of things wrong. To name just a few which I'll deal with in a subsequent post: Cloud wasn't a utility, security really wasn't the key differentiator versus on-premise, and cost savings weren't a slam dunk. Much deeper discussion for another day. Cloud computing was an important movement but…
Throughout my stint as an IT industry analyst during the 2000s, one of my significant interests was Intel's Itanium processor, a 64-bit design intended to succeed the ubiquitous 32-bit x86 family. I wrote my first big research report on Itanium and it seemed like something of an inevitability given Intel's dominance at the time. But there were storm clouds. Intel took an approach to Itanium's…
It never got to the point where the whispers about an impending AI winter got that commonplace, loud, or confident. However, as widespread commercialization of some of the most prominent AI applications—think autonomous vehicles—slipped well past earlier projections, doubts were inevitable. At the same time, the level of commercial investment relative to past AI winters made betting against it…
I find that large industry shows like KubeCon + CloudNativeCon (henceforth referred to as just KubeCon for short) are often at least as useful for plugging into the overall zeitgeist of the market landscape and observing the trajectory of various trends as they are for diving deep on any single technology. This event, held in late April in Amsterdam was no exception. Here are a few things that I…
John Shegerian is the co-founder and executive chairman of recycling firm ERI and the author of The Insecurity of Everything . In this podcast, we talk about both the sustainability aspects of electronic waste and the increasing issue of the security risk associated with sensitive data stored on products that are no longer in use. Shegerian argues that CISOs and others responsible for the security…
There's a lot of complexity, both necessary and unnecessary, in the environments where we deploy our software. The open source development model has proven to be a powerful tool for software development. How can we help people better collaborate in the open around operations? How can we create a virtuous cycle for operations? Rob and I talked about these and other topics before the holidays. We…
RISC-V is an open instruction set architecture that's growing rapidly in popularity. (An estimated two billion RISC-V cores have shipped for profit to date.) In this podcast, I sat down with Mark Himelstein, the CTO of RISC-V International, to talk about all things RISC-V including its adoption, how it's different from past open hardware projects, how to think about extensibility and…
The Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) is a fairly new organization under the Linux Foundation focusing on open source software security with an initial primary focus on software supply chain security. Brian Behlendorf recently moved over from the Hyperledger Foundation which he headed up to take over as General Manager of OpenSSF. I was able to grab a few minutes with Brian at the Linux…
Richard North is the creator of the popular open source integration testing library, Testcontainers , and former chief engineer at Deloitte Digital. I caught up with Richard shortly after the company he co-founded and of which he is CTO, AtomicJar , emerged from stealth with a $4M seed funding round led by boldstart ventures. Although AtomicJar has not yet announced a product, Richard said on the…
In this podcast, Mux co-founders Steve Heffernan and Matt McClure talk open source strategy and making contributors feel rewarded. They also delve into why video is so hard and how a community working on it helps to solve the hard problems. Demuxed 2021 conference for video engineers Listen to the podcast [23:11 - MP3]
In this podcast, I speak with Ian Bartholomew of Nobl9 about the release of OpenSLO as an open source project under the Apache 2 (APLv2) license. The company describes OpenSLO as the industry’s first standard SLO (service level objective) specification. In this podcast, we discuss: What site reliability engineering is and how it relates to more traditional sysadmins Trends in observability Why the…
I've known Irving since his days at IBM running Linux strategy. Since he "retired," he's been busy with many things, including a number of roles at MIT, where I've kept touch with him including through the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium. We were emailing back and forth last week and discovered that that we've been on something of a similar wavelength with respect to AI. Irving just wrote a blog post…
Martin Mao is co-founder and CEO of Chronosphere, a company that offers a hosted SaaS monitoring service. In this podcast, he discusses: The observability landscape The rise of Prometheus The role of open source What happens when instrumentation is built into everything cloud-native in a standardized way In an earlier podcast , I spoke with Martin about the challenges of open sourcing an internal…
Anurag Goel, an early Stripe employee, co-founded Render which puts a PaaS layer on top of Kubernetes. In this interview, we talk about: How things are different for PaaS than in its v1 days How he thinks about what being "opinionated" means in the context of PaaSs The importance of user experience The benefits for everyone of open sourcing software components Listen to the MP3 [25:56]
This is an update to 50 authors, 50 science fiction stories shorter than novels . It's mostly an addition of 30 more authors (many from outside the "big SF names") but I also made some other tweaks. I've been playing around with re-reading favorite science fiction short stories while also seeing if there's anything that has managed to elude me over the years. I've also tried to catch up with more…
Env0 provides IaC tools for hybrid and multicloud environments. Although public cloud costs often get cited as an issue, cloud costs are mostly treated as an operational concern that developers don't have visibility into. Env0 works with the open source Ansible and Terraform projects to provide better cross-cloud cost visibility. Env0 also recently open sourced Terratag, which lets Terraform users…
William Henry is a senior distinguished engineer at Red Hat who has been involved with open source since Slackware. Part of this involvement included the development of open source grid software such as Condor. In this podcast, we discuss: How supercomputing has evolved What grid software was designed to do How container orchestration and grid did and do relate Why containers for HPC Listen to the…
See the updated 80 author version. I've been playing around with re-reading favorite science fiction short stories while also seeing if there's anything that has managed to elude me over the years. I've also tried to catch up with more recent authors given that I don't read as many books as I used to. (The market for science fiction short stories, in general, is in something of a decline but there…