Sunday Reading — October 20, 2019

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Enterprise Te.ch

5 min readOct 20, 2019

Kubernetes evolved: On Wednesday, Microsoft announced two new open-source projects ‘OAM’ and ‘Dapr’ to make developing Kubernetes applications easier for developers. The first project is Open Application Model (OAM), which is an open standard for developing and operating applications on Kubernetes and other platforms. The second project is Dapr (Distributed Application Runtime), an open source project designed to make it easier for every developer to build microservice applications. Microsoft and Alibaba Cloud have worked together to create the OAM project under the Open Web Foundation. The goal of the OAM is to make simple applications easy and complex applications manageable by Kubernetes. From TechCrunch:

As Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich told me ahead of today’s launch, OAM very much solves a problem that a lot of developers and ops teams are facing every day. “If you take a look just at the Kubernetes ecosystem, Kubernetes has no concept of an application,” he explained. “It’s got the concept of a deployment and services, but nothing that coherently connects these things together into one unit and deployment lifecycle that a developer would understand in the way they look at their applications.” He argues that while Kubernetes has Helm charts, once an application is deployed, Kubernetes doesn’t know about the relationships between the objects that were represented in that chart. “We need a first-class application concept in a Kubernetes cluster.”

AWS RDS on Premises: AWS announced this week the general availability of Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) on VMware which delivers AWS-managed relational databases in on-premises VMware environments. The service enables the setup, operation and scaling of a relational database in AWS with just a few clicks. From Chris Wolf, VP and CTO at VMware:

Amazon RDS on VMware gives you the ability to literally deploy RDS anywhere you do business, giving you the benefit of a proven cloud managed database-as-a-service offering that frees IT and database administrators to devote even more time to innovation. Developers benefit from being able to manage their databases using familiar AWS CLI and RDS APIs and IT operations can support RDS using proven VMware tools, policies, and associated processes that they have used for well over a decade. Allowing you to run Amazon RDS — a very popular public cloud service — on your VMware platforms is a major step forward in our strategy to provide our customers and partners with the freedom to allow business requirements to dictate where anything runs.

Security by obscurity: The U.S. Strategic Command has upgraded the system that allows it to receive nuclear launch orders from the president and send those commands to locations around the country. Up until June, the Strategic Automated Command and Control System (SACCS) used 8-inch floppy disks and a computer circa the 1970s to communicate emergency action messages from command centers to the field. The system has been upgraded to “highly-secure solid state digital storage solution.” Why were they using floppy disks for so long? From Defense news site C4ISRNET:

Think of SACCS as the U.S. nuclear force’s version of AOL instant messenger — one of the many old, duplicative systems used by U.S. Strategic Command to send emergency action messages from nuclear command centers to forces in the field. Based in Offutt Air Force Base, Neb., the 595th is charged with upkeeping SACCS and ensuring its day-to-day operations.
“I joke with people and say it’s the Air Force’s oldest IT system. But it’s the age that provides that security,” Rossi said in an October interview. “You can’t hack something that doesn’t have an IP address. It’s a very unique system — it is old and it is very good.”

MPLS is backed: Pensando Systems, a cloud startup founded by Cisco’s legendary “MPLS” team Mario Mazzola, Prem Jain, Luca Cafiero, Soni Jiandani and Randy Pond, emerged from stealth with $278 million investment to fund new hardware and software products to help the data centers of customers like investment banks function more like those of big cloud computing providers. In conjunction with the funding, Pensando announced that Mark Potter, chief technology officer of Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), and Barry Eggers, a partner of Lightspeed Venture Partners, joined the board of directors, with John Chambers, CEO of JC2 Ventures, leading as chairman. From CNBC:

Pensando’s hardware and software can help companies run their servers more efficiently. The start-up’s chips take on certain computing work that would otherwise be handled by the main chips, freeing them up to do other things.
The emergence of Pensando shows that interesting computing concepts can be popularized by the few large-scale cloud computing companies, which operate vast fleets of computers for other companies to use, not just the companies that sell hardware.

Go Your Way Podcast: Episode 3: Serverless vs Containers

On this episode, we speak to Adrian DeLuca from AWS, to parse the debate between Serverless and Containers to better understand what is driving their use. Is this simply part of the adoption continuum?

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