Posts by Rocco Granata

VMs were a fad fit for the Great Recession. Containers’ time has finally come

Be careful with analogies

I love to read TP Morgan. To my understanding, here he is advocating one approach in a debate, so is naturally a bit biased.

It is true that the time has come to have many new applications running in containers, orchestrated by Kubernetes or ECS (AWS specific flavor of container orchestration). It is also true that simple analogy with how virtualization entered enterprise computing (it was embedded on mainframes for decades) and workloads moved from physical to VMs does not hold for transition to containers. I successfully virtualized many applications without a single code change, usually even without any support from their developers. Can you do that way moving into containers? (Hint: 9 out of 10 times, no. Out of these 9, 7 can run in container, but you will be sorry you did it as it brings more problems than benefits and support and troubleshooting becomes harder). We all know that business application is a king. There are still COBOL applications running. It is unrealistic to expect that all J2EE, .NET etc based application made in last two decades will be reengineered only to fit into containers.

The sweet spot for containers are stateless workloads where one may need rapid scaling up or down (in matter of seconds). That is usually what very large and Internet companies need. SMEs, not so much. For stateful applications they bring challenges, one of which is more variable latency in I/O.

It will be interesting in next few days to read articles written from different view points.

Å nei! Norway's Stortinget struck by Microsoft Exchange malware

Re: This might be an opportunity for Notes/Domino 12 to make a comeback

This is actually a valid option, IF Domino was not destroyed last couple of years by IBM's preference for financial over product engineering.

From the perspective of 2010-2014, its web interface was OK, it consumed much less (read: multiple times less) resources than Exchange, clustering was rather simple and stable, security IMHO significantly better. It was possible for an average sysadmin to manage it after reasonable amount of knowledge acquisition (one-week training and 2-3 weeks shadowing an experienced colleague).

Migration would not be easy, which is where IBM might find job for their consultants, if they still have knowledgeable ones that cost less than million a day.

I guess that MS is actually wanting to move most of the clients to their cloud, even at the cost of some losses along the way.