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I'm not surprised at the Pivotal acquisition. VMware is determined to succeed at Kubernetes. There is already a lot of integration with Pivotal's Kubernetes dis

I'm not surprised at the Pivotal acquisition. VMware is determined to succeed at Kubernetes. There is already a lot of integration with Pivotal's Kubernetes distribution both at a technical as well as a business level.

techntoke 7y ago
I could see them pulling a Microsoft with the three Es.
- hinkley 7y ago
  As someone pointed out to me recently, while waxing poetic about VMWare and K8s, Dell owns a big chunk of VMWare. Private Cloud buildout plays into Dell's interests, but if their execution is worse than even one Public Cloud provider, then they risk this becoming an exit strategy. You can make a lot of money off of being an exit strategy, and for quite some time. But when the evacuation is over you have nothing. Honestly if Dell does this well enough I could see them using some of IBM's old tricks. One in particular I'm thinking of is that IBM would overprovision the customer (installs are more expensive than dormant hardware). Fast forward to your next crunch time and you're oversubscribed, you call up IBM and they send you a piece of code to unlock the rest of the servers. No scheduling, no deliveries. If I'm running my own server room, it turns out having a bunch of hardware around I don't use is prohibitively expensive (in part because corporations use funny math and account for labor costs in weird ways). Which kinda bums me out because I used to get excited about ideas like running servers where it's cold to save huge amounts on electricity. But if I'm leasing hardware from Dell, then the math is simpler. Labor and travel time are the same color of money as the hardware. Installing a whole rack of servers and only leasing you a half or quarter rack at a time (and using some of the extras for hardware failure) might be more cost effective. And I'm sure IBM knew what they were doing. The immediacy of picking up a phone and having 'more hardware' today versus scheduling it three weeks out (and having the team decide to prioritize optimization work) must be more lucrative. If a little bit like drug dealing...
brown9-2 7y ago
Who uses the Pivotal distribution of Kubernetes? Why?
- IanGabes 7y ago
  My team and i tried leveraging different pivotal products as part of a test deployment of our current esxi managed vm deployment imagined through the pivotal kubernetes deploy. We found that Pivotal's kubernetes makes it easy to run kubernetes on top of existing vmware infrastructure, so our ops team could continue to manage their normal vmware stack, with an admin interface to manage kubernetes clusters that live within esxi. They could provision us devs with a cluster for a specific use, and hand us the keys to do the rest. It was pretty cool, except for the fact that we discovered kernel incompatibility with the underlying esxi version/os that brought down the entire deployment repeatedly a few days before the event where we intended to stress test the product. The use case is definitely there for larger orgs who want to share hardware, but you also get the "on prem cloud" quick wins. Our experiment obviously failed in a low risk way, but i think the idea is sound.
  - tyingq 7y ago
    For me, "on prem cloud" always sounds like buying a car and renting it back to yourself.
    - stevehiehn 7y ago
      Haha, I don't agree but that is really funny :)
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - Spivak 7y ago
      I think the terminology is a little silly but presenting your devs with an abstract view of the underlying physical/virtual infrastructure is good for the ops and dev teams in terms of flexibility. It’s a framework that makes it hard for one side to accidentally depend on something they shouldn’t.

techntoke 7y ago

I could see them pulling a Microsoft with the three Es.

hinkley 7y ago
As someone pointed out to me recently, while waxing poetic about VMWare and K8s, Dell owns a big chunk of VMWare. Private Cloud buildout plays into Dell's interests, but if their execution is worse than even one Public Cloud provider, then they risk this becoming an exit strategy. You can make a lot of money off of being an exit strategy, and for quite some time. But when the evacuation is over you have nothing. Honestly if Dell does this well enough I could see them using some of IBM's old tricks. One in particular I'm thinking of is that IBM would overprovision the customer (installs are more expensive than dormant hardware). Fast forward to your next crunch time and you're oversubscribed, you call up IBM and they send you a piece of code to unlock the rest of the servers. No scheduling, no deliveries. If I'm running my own server room, it turns out having a bunch of hardware around I don't use is prohibitively expensive (in part because corporations use funny math and account for labor costs in weird ways). Which kinda bums me out because I used to get excited about ideas like running servers where it's cold to save huge amounts on electricity. But if I'm leasing hardware from Dell, then the math is simpler. Labor and travel time are the same color of money as the hardware. Installing a whole rack of servers and only leasing you a half or quarter rack at a time (and using some of the extras for hardware failure) might be more cost effective. And I'm sure IBM knew what they were doing. The immediacy of picking up a phone and having 'more hardware' today versus scheduling it three weeks out (and having the team decide to prioritize optimization work) must be more lucrative. If a little bit like drug dealing...

brown9-2 7y ago

Who uses the Pivotal distribution of Kubernetes? Why?

IanGabes 7y ago
My team and i tried leveraging different pivotal products as part of a test deployment of our current esxi managed vm deployment imagined through the pivotal kubernetes deploy. We found that Pivotal's kubernetes makes it easy to run kubernetes on top of existing vmware infrastructure, so our ops team could continue to manage their normal vmware stack, with an admin interface to manage kubernetes clusters that live within esxi. They could provision us devs with a cluster for a specific use, and hand us the keys to do the rest. It was pretty cool, except for the fact that we discovered kernel incompatibility with the underlying esxi version/os that brought down the entire deployment repeatedly a few days before the event where we intended to stress test the product. The use case is definitely there for larger orgs who want to share hardware, but you also get the "on prem cloud" quick wins. Our experiment obviously failed in a low risk way, but i think the idea is sound.
- tyingq 7y ago
  For me, "on prem cloud" always sounds like buying a car and renting it back to yourself.
  - stevehiehn 7y ago
    Haha, I don't agree but that is really funny :)
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - Spivak 7y ago
    I think the terminology is a little silly but presenting your devs with an abstract view of the underlying physical/virtual infrastructure is good for the ops and dev teams in terms of flexibility. It’s a framework that makes it hard for one side to accidentally depend on something they shouldn’t.