Not in front of the CIO: grassroots drive Linux container adoption

Here’s a thing. CIOs don't care about vast swathes of technology in their organisations. They have people to do that. While they make speeches at fancy conferences about being agile / compliant / regulated / on top of the suppliers / skilling up the workers bees, those worker bees are handling the next Windows refresh. …

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds lovely

But without stakeholder buy-in by the CIOs any penguin invasion will be off the books and scrapped if / when noticed.

I'm afraid that while the technically illiterate* continue to sign the cheques the IT systems will sleepwalk into comfort zone lock-in of Windows or Apple (if they're a media/marketing company).

*Understandably not everyone needs to know how thier systems work, that's why they hire us.

My personal experience, medium to long term savings doesn't matter so long as they can still open thier proprietary file formats on a familiarly branded machine. Turns out linux is a very tough sell or I'm not a very good salesman.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Sounds lovely

Perhaps the technically illiterate know a bunch of stuff you don't know. When looking into Docker recently there are a whole crap ton of really huge glaring issues that should make the vast majority of companies run for the hills. They work for the big boys like Amazon, Google and Facebook because they have very smart people who are great at process. They will fail for everyone else for the same reasons that other technologies fail - lack of full understanding. Patching and compatibility are being ignored and dicker is touted as an easy way to package once, run anywhere. Containers can not and will not make incompatible versions compatible or stable. Patching those containers never gets talked about, neither does security within those containers, authentication and revocation of access. All of these things can be managed with containers, but the thing everyone is avoiding, the elephant in the room, is that it's actually harder than with virtual servers because of the lack of tooling!

[Anonymous Coward]

Not the first time

In fact I've seen this pattern before, usually with open source or other no-budget-approval-required sourceing, and it typically goes in three stages:

"Don't know": The techies are using it and spreading it among themselves, nobody else is even aware

"Don't ask, don't tell": low- and mid-level managers know, but as long as it is helping meet budget and project goals, they look the other way.

"Don't care": finally, senior management finds out, and as long as it hasn't dragged in some security or liability issue, they have no interest in ripping it out. (Although they may be pissed about the commercial licenses for equivalent products that they are paying for and not using.)