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by Pablo Carlier.

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Uber’s Path of Destruction - American Affairs Journal

Since it began operations in 2010, Uber has grown to the point where it now collects over $45 billion in gross passenger revenue, and it has seized a major share of the urban car service market. But the widespread belief that it is a highly innovative and successful company has no basis in economic reality. An examination of Uber’s economics suggests that it has no hope of ever earning sustainable urban car service profits in competitive markets...

Via @stratechery

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Thread by @pablocarlier: "On : From 10y ago nielsen.com/us/en/insights… Recessions clean up the noise in the and are a great opportunity t

Thread by @pablocarlier: "On : From 10y ago nielsen.com/us/en/insights… Recessions clean up the noise in the and are a great opportunity t

Some day I’ll have time to write this properly.

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Etsy;

We recently announced that we have selected Google Cloud Platform (GCP) as our cloud provider and are incredibly excited about this decision. This marks a shift for Etsy from infrastructure self-reliance to a best-in-class service provider. This shift allows us to spend less time maintaining our own infrastructure and more time on strategic features and services that make the Etsy marketplace great.

Although we use the term ‘vendor’ when referring to a cloud provider, we viewed this as much more than a simple vendor selection process. We are entering into a partnership and a long-term relationship.

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Simon Wardley.

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Today, Cisco and Google announced a partnership that will enable organizations to extend their existing investments with innovative cloud services. The on-premises version of the Apigee Edge API platform will be a key part of the joint Cisco-Google solution.

This is a very interestig article in the light of yesterday’s announcement about Google + Cisco joining forces for hybrid cloud architecture.

Masking the monolith

APIs have emerged as the de facto mechanism for exposing data from on-premises legacy systems to workloads running in a public cloud. Apigee provides the capabilities necessary to modernize the core functionality in an enterprise’s mission-critical systems and extend that functionality into the cloud. More specifically, organizations can leverage Apigee to recompose and share their monolithic legacy applications into modern, container-based architectures as services.

With Apigee, application developers are presented with clean RESTful APIs that are secured with OAuth2, the industry standard for API security. Apigee transforms RESTful API calls into a format that the legacy backend can understand. This is true even for backend systems that require integration with existing enterprise identity management and other security solutions.

Take a look at that emphasized sentence. This is a key part. Some organizations (especially those in the finance sector) have critical services that were developed 30+ years ago, and nobody dares touch them. I’ve heard horror stories about companies losing all knowledge about how they work, even going as far as having lost the source code itself. They’ll never be refactored, never be adapted to a modern microservices architecture.

But they don’t need to if you can “mask” them, expose their functionality through a comprehensive API management layer, and integrate them with more modern services that surround them. Modern systems of engagement interacting with the traditional, core systems of record, in a modern, scalable and agile manner.

And now, there’s a way to make this hybrid as well. This is a sound value proposition that we should all learn to master.  

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Kubernetes, Istio, Hyperconvergence and Multi-Cloud capabilities for the Enterprise.

This is what you came for.

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Data leads to truth. But you know what happens in the absence of data? That vacuum gets filled with myths

https://twitter.com/tableau/status/917782591742238721

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The 12 Components of Google BigQuery – Google Cloud Platform — Community – Medium

Folks have been discussing BigQuery quite a bit these days, which is fantastic. But there’s a lot of STUFF to BigQuery — it’s a…

This feels like the 12 Days of Christmas, but for data analytics.

Must read.

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Wake up and smell the coffee

It was bound to happen as the first traditional IT Shops started moving to the cloud that they’d realize “moving” wasn’t precisely the right approach to doing cloud. Lift and shift offers very little benefit for the effort it takes if it’s not backed by a sound strategy of “what’s next”. But don’t take my word for it:

“In lift-and-shift, you can say with almost full certainly that you're not going to be cost-optimized," said J.R. Jasperson, chief architect at SendGrid. "If it's based on a legacy [colocation] model, then it's not built to leverage ephemeral compute and autoscaling. So, inevitably, there will be inefficiencies”.

See? I told you. The numbers will never work out by themselves. But it’s not all about the numbers, it’s about making the cultural transition and moving your data where it’s potential can be realized further down the road. It’s also about getting the right skills and habits in place so you can move faster in your market when you need it (which is yesterday).

So think about rearchitecting and refactoring to get the most value of this transition, and think further down the line about how new architectures like microservices and functions-as-a-service will change your dynamics even more.

Refactoring is one way to get the most out of the public cloud, but many industry observers see infrastructure as a service as merely the first step. Containers and microservices bring more agility to the cloud, but the next potential wave could take more of the underlying maintenance out of the hands of enterprises.

Such a great moment to experience! 

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Introducing Puppet support for Google Cloud Platform

How did I miss this?

The ability to control resources programmatically with tools they know and love can make a big difference for developers creating cloud-native applications. That’s why today, we released and open sourced a set of comprehensive modules to improve the ability for Puppet users to manage Google Cloud Platform (GCP) resources using the Puppet domain specific language, or DSL. The new modules follow Puppet’s object convergence model, allowing you to define the desired state of your GCP resources that our providers will enforce directly within the Puppet language.

The power of a declarative management model for your resources is a great asset when scaling and evolving your stack. Puppet has excelled at this in the past and now GCP resources can be leveraged by all Puppet experts around the world using the tools they know and love.

It’s important to note that Puppet is

not

a scripting language. Rather, it follows an object-convergence model, allowing you to define a desired state for your resource, which our providers make so by applying necessary changes.

In other words, with Puppet, you don’t say “run this list of commands to install Apache on my machine,” you say “Apache should be installed and configured.” There is some nuance here, but with the latter, Puppet handles verifying if Apache is installed, checks for the correct dependencies, upgrades it if it’s not at the correct version and — most importantly —

does nothing

if everything is good. Puppet already understands the implementation differences across operating system and will handle doing the right thing for your chosen distribution.

Following an object-convergence model has various benefits: It makes your resource manifest declarative, abstracting away various details (e.g., OS-specific actions); and it makes definitions simpler to read, modify and audit. 

This.

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After 13 years working with with traditional platforms, and 13 weeks working with ChromeOS and a Chromebook I can say the transition has been super easy, the experience superb. No VPN or altiris or bloatware.

This feels like the future.

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"We believe one day soon people will think of servers the same way they think of circuits now."

👍

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Continuing on the “Machine Learning for Infrastructure People” series, understanding cross-entropy is easier if you go through this good article :)

Be prepared, take a notepad or a have a whiteboard close: you’ll need it.