I attended Red Hat Summit earlier this month. I accidentally ran into a few of my old colleagues by accident and everyone was wondering where I have been for the last few years! Yes.. There is linked in that I occasionally visit and some local meet ups that I attend. But it is still pretty hard to keep up with. It has been a while ( 5-6 years actually) I haven't blogged about anything. So here I am blogging about some recent experiences ...
Red Hat Summit was a great community meetup with lots of interesting discussions and presentations around new (and also not-so-new) technologies. With 5000+ attendees in attendance and most of them coming from midsize and large companies, it was great to interact with a number of people. These guys were not your typical technology enthusiasts that you meet at a tech Meetup but technical leaders from established companies with ambitions to grow and adopt/make relevant technologies for growth . Here are my top 5 takeaways...
1. Enterprises are moving to the cloud at a much faster clip
It was great to see enterprises of all sizes moving to the cloud as fast as they can. These were multi-billion dollar financial institutions and government agencies talking about how they are overcoming traditional barriers like security, governance and regulatory compliance during the migration process. Keeping applications agnostic to underlying deployment infrastructure is very critical for a number of businesses. There were also presentations and discussions about using a middleware platforms like OpenStack and OpenShift container platform eliminates the direct dependency on cloud providers. Executives from cloud service providers like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Rackspace and CenturyLink all were on the stage describing the support they are providing to make the transition successful. My favorite presentation was MS SQL Server running on Linux containers hosted on Azure and being accessed by dockerized apps running MS .NET and java apps alike.
2. Containers have already started to rule the app world
It was amazing to see a lot of momentum behind docker and containerization of the deployment platforms. Again these are not those Silicon Valley startups but intelligent banks like Deutsche bank moving to the containerization platforms. This is going to be an interesting area to follow for the next several years until it becomes the mainstream.
3. Kafka has become the defacto messaging solution
Move over MQ … companies of all sizes are looking at Kafka as the next generation alternative. With the growth in the data and messages, it is becoming more important to handle the data. Coupled with the microservices philosophy of 'dumb pipes', architects are loathe to push the orchestration and mediation to the middleware hub style solutions.
4. DevOps in NOT only about build and deployment automation
These days a number of companies are pitching software products that allow to create and manage the devops pipeline. However the pipeline is just one part of it. Ultimately it is a combination of tools, people and processes that yield true results. Educating and empowering the teams, setting up feedback loop, changing the mindset and making stakeholders comfortable in their new riles are the most challenging aspects. Often it turns out to be the real challenge where adoption fails. It was great to see several banks sharing their journey to DevOps and how they moved away from ‘create ticket’ mode to ‘self service’ as a measure of true agility.
5. Planning as-we-know-it is dead !
This comes from RedHat CEO. It is a philosophical take and change in mindset around how companies tackle the problems and build solutions. The days of ‘traditional’ approach of 5 year strategic plans and long release cycles are over. The companies that are successful today are the ones reinventing themselves with iterative cycle of Try -> Learn ->Improve. Actually this is practically the mode with which every startup works but it is a refreshing to see companies of all sizes buying into the same approach via thinking 'lean' and MVPs.
You can catch some of action here
