OpenShift won't compete with the cloud offerings in the long run. Redhat are currently competing with On-Prem offerings and trying to make a case for 'hybrid'.

Even in this market OpenShift is competing against at least 15 alternatives. For anyone interested I've been crowd sourcing data for each and trying to work out key differentiators.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1nAgDxQZYeAMLwz8iI3_a...

OpenShift is definitely differentiated in terms of security. They also have network and storage features that are arguably valuable to enterprise customers.

Google GKE On-Prem is out soon. I never see Azure Stack mentioned so maybe Microsoft will look into a Docker acquisition to boost their enterprise footprint.

The cloud seems like the bigger growth area though so perhaps this On-Prem container platform land grab will be short lived.

The companies using Azure Stack today are some of the least likely to be parroting that fact. Microsoft's on-prem is pretty well entrenched, particularly in "boring enterprise" where pragmatism beats idealism, are quiet "do the work, don't leak the work" more than proudly proclaim to be chasing the trends.

That said, Azure Stack (and Azure) already have strong Docker support, without an acquisition to date.

More interestingly, in my opinion, though, is that right now Azure Functions is the only "serverless" runtime with a strong open source story, and equally strong on-prem (both as part of Azure Stack and, increasingly from what I hear, standalone) as well as Cloud support.

* Subscription pricing like a cloud service, even though it's on-premise.

* Only runs on certified hardware appliances... You're looking at an investment of at least $300,000 for a base configuration.

So, OK, I get it, you're getting a private cloud and you're not supposed to worry about hardware anymore, but it's probably too big a mental shift for most traditional enterprises. And people with that kind of budget are already locked into a VMWare infrastructure for the next couple of years.

Maybe I'm confused about what you mean by "Azure Stack", but there was most certainly an acquisition[1] related to Azure's docker support, the Deis team (now part of Azure team) were some of the earliest contributors to the Helm project, and this buyout was widely hailed from what I can remember as Microsoft's first big investment in Kubernetes.

Many of those people remained with the Azure team, and none of them work on Deis today. So, instead, they are driving the development of tools like Draft, AKS, OSBA, and Virtual Kubelet.

And of course MS also made a high-profile acquisition of GitHub, just not sure that one is relevant to Azure Stack.

[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/10/microsoft-acquires-contain...

But correct, there have been related acquisitions.

To be honest that's a great feature and one reason why I am not terribly scared about consequences of any news about a RedHat acquisition; that being so even though I do follow OpenShift with some interest.

I'm sure that Docker is also a target for acquisitions by these bigger companies but while we're on the subject thanks to Kubernetes and the CRI, it's pretty darn unlikely that anyone is ever going to totally corner the market on Linux containers, at least any time in the foreseeable future.

https://reprints.forrester.com/#/assets/2/431/RES141562/repo...

It would be great to see Forrester more forthright on such methodology, however, and this may be a good reminder that Forrester here is not a transparent, peer reviewed journal and doesn't have to show their homework.

AzureStack presumably runs AKS, the same as the Kubernetes service that runs in Azure, which is totally different.

The market size can't be attributed in any way to Azure Stack which is why I was surprised you mentioned it was heavily used. Gartner talks to a wide range of companies usually.

> "We did not evaluate native public cloud container or Kubernetes services."

In which case AKS doesn't show up because the report intentionally excluded it.

Again, I don't understand anything about the methodology of this report, it's very clear it's designed to present some bias, but there isn't enough transparency on what/why/where, and every time I skim it I come up with other questions as to the validity of this report towards any market size determinations whatsoever.

I have another comparison sheet for those if anyone is interested.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1U0x4-NQegEPGM7eVTKJe...

The report is from Forrester. I hardly ever read them but Docker has it posted all over its website so I was curious.

Forrester and Gartner seem too high profile to be biased. This one isn't sponsored so the researchers will have had free reign over what was added. If Azure Stack is really in use by many companies I'd be surprised if they missed it.

http://venturebeat.com/2017/04/10/microosoft-acquires-kubern...

We compete with Red Hat in on-prem and hybrid scenarios but we're also cooperating with Red Hat, Google, IBM and SAP on Knative.

Podman is looking better and better every day.

However, I am not optimistic that a Glorious Future will be the outcome from the RedHat acquisition;

While at Mirantis, I was assisting in RedHat's implementation of OpenStack with Intel/IBM and it was a nightmare.

OpenStack, at that time was very difficult to implement with smooth success (much like a JBOSS / WebObjects / Tomcat nightmare implementations back in the early days) -- and the BigCo process-procedure-competency-silos that goes along with it...

I can only expect that adding more layers of abstraction and ambiguity of ownership will make for headaches.

Here is to hoping that my pessimistic outlook is proven wrong.

OpenShift, on the other hand, is a breath of fresh air (k8s in general is - the quality is so much higher). Things just work and the docs don't conveniently leave out all the important details.

I was the lead PM responsible for managing the implementation of the OpenStack on RedHat+IBM with Intel TXT being the premise of the implementation such that RH could go back and replicate into their own thing...

It was a nightmare project, but on no part, individually of RH, Intel or IBM or Mirantis...

Openstack just was NOT READY for production secure workloads.

The project was just a bunch of people trying to do their best with shitty tools...

But, openstack/shift/the-current-marketplace wouldnt be without the sacrifice of crap on the battlefield.

So, at the end of the day, just hope that all your failures are something that others can trample to make-the-world-a-better-place...

Who is fooled by this anymore, really? Non-technical middle managers who read a bunch of marketing materials?

You can pry k8s from my cold dead hands.

What they are is slow moving and hidebound. I think that at some level they understand that, and at other levels they don't. They have an amazing asset in their labs where they can put 1,000 of some of the smartest people you might ever hope to meet on to a problem pretty much instantly.

In my short time with them post acquisition I found a company that was very slowly losing its calcified husk and becoming more agile. It had some blind spots but when you replace enough people that can be fixed. As Gerstner showed in the 90's, as Satella is showing at Microsoft, what Welch showed at GE. Put the right leadership team in place and you can do amazing things with that power.

There can be no growth because contractors don't scale. They bring a fix percentage of their day rate.

There could be some products with great people lost in a corner of IBM. However, they will remain a negligible fraction of the company and they won't have the power to turn it around.

If AWS/Microsoft makes a new product or service, they can roll out instantly everywhere and capture clients. If IBM does something new, they couldn't begin to sell it, they'd sell you a contractor.

Except of course that when you employ 300K of them it does scale. The mistake many software people make is that only software scales, but IBM (and others) has successfully built a scalable model around consulting.

IBM's revenue growth over at least the last three quarters is due to its mainframe business and the launch of the z14.

Sure, but that's the thing: IBM doesn't have the right leadership team in place, and hasn't since Gerstner left. It shows no sign of having learnt from its mistakes.

Fundamentally, IBM is a sales company, not a technical company. For a long, long time its marketing department was able to sell the fiction that it was a technical company, and use that reputation to sell, but folks realise now that it's just not.

I thought his contribution was "rank and yank" and financial services, both dubious to say the least. Have I been misled?

They're also roughly 100 years old (depending on definitions). They're reinvented and reshaped their business many times. "Two new broom handles, two new brushes" but it's still the same company, as they say. I'm afraid I find it ludicrous that IBM would actually end up in anything resembling financial failure.

People were saying the same thing of Sears 10 years ago...

Also, unlike IBM, Sears has very little of worth which would uniquely identify it as "Sears" after asset sale. It's all fungible land, rent, concrete store walls, and staff. They have many competitors with practically identical overlap in business. IBM is not like at all like this.

Ermm yes it is. What do they do that HPE, DXC, Accenture, Crapita, Fujitsu, TCS, Infosys, Wipro yadda yadda don’t? All IBM had left is the rapidly tarnishing prestige of their once mighty brand.

Well, imagine I am somebody at the target market of IBM (whatever that is), why would I want to hire them?

They don't worry about new customers when the largest companies in the world have gone through months or years to get them as preferred tier one vendors.

Sears on the other hand did not serve large Enterprises and were generating revenue mostly from retail. Consumer vs. Enterprise is like Apples and Oranges guys.

I just can't imagine anything we could hire from IBM.

https://www.nytimes.com/1991/01/28/business/big-change-is-ex...

It is the last stage of any large company anyway: IP vulture.

Support is expensive, but worth it. It's not unheard of to get custom kernel patches mere days after you reported an issue.

Well, that and the ecosystem of enterprise software which refuse to run on anything but RHEL.

And Ubuntu's failure to establish their home-grown stuff: Upstart, Unity, Mir, Ubuntu One, Ubuntu Phone, Juju...

That being said, 18.04 is a lot better than 12.04 or 14.04. I'm a Red Hat fan, but I hope Canonical succeeds - the more independent companies there are, the better.

Ubuntu doesn't really have that distinction. Shuttleworth is also kind of a character, and it's hard to rely on him keeping Ubuntu fixed on a particular use case. It's been desktop, then mobile/desktop convergence, and now containers and Kuberentes. Think startup vs big business.

With: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Samba/SambaServerGuide

The docs are just that much better. The server packages are much more reliable. If you want specific software versions, and you're not on docker, you get those versions. It's a breeze to sysadmin a centos machine. An Ubuntu machine is a pile of nightmares.

(Also, very few people actually run RHEL with the support package, most run CentOS, which is patch-compatible but has all the trademarks removed.)

You can't really hide your lack of R&D or missing long term vision with numbers like that.