For Private Cloud, No Pain Means Big Gains

When virtualization took the data center, it offered huge cost savings for IT ops and zero migration pain for developers. Coming at a time when IT was being pressed by the business for savings, vSphere took the data center by storm.

This example is instructive when trying to consider why private cloud has had a slower adoption. The short answer is that cloud offers fuzzier benefits for IT ops while forcing a lot of pain on developers.

The lack of a smooth migration path for existing workloads to the cloud goes a long way to explain the relatively bumpy growth of the private cloud market itself.

For example, the latest craze for “cloud native” apps seems like an explicit acknowledgement that vendors are giving up on minimizing cloud migration pain. Rather than focusing on simplicity, the cloud native initiative seems to make a virtue needing to rebuild existing apps for the cloud.

Of course, for greenfield apps, cloud native and 12 factorapps make great sense. But for the enterprise, greenfield is a small part of what they do (like less than 10%). There is still a big white space in the market for a vendor who can provide cloud benefits for existing workloads.

This may be the reason for the buzz behind next generation cloud companies like Apcer,  Mesosphere and Google's Kubernetes who offer ways to support existing Windows and vSphere workloads. The idea of getting improved automation and security while having a migration to new technologies like Docker gives enterprise the best of both worlds.

Of course it is early days for these new cloud technologies, but my bet is on whichever vendor can duplicate the original VMware offer of  max cloud ops gain for minimum dev pain.

Entrepreneur’s Note to Self - Don’t Die

“Note to self: don't change for anyone / Note to self: don't die / Note to self: don't change for anyone / Don't change, just lie” - Ryan Adams

 If Woody Allen is right that 80% of life is just showing up, then the bulk of an entrepreneur’s job is keeping the company alive long enough to succeed. That in turn means constantly scanning the horizon for what is most likely to kill you next.

It turns out, this is how NASA trains their astronauts to stay alive in the unforgiving environment of space. The singing astronaut Chris Hadfield gave an interview where he described this approach:

“Half of the risk of a six-month flight is in the first nine minutes, so as a crew, how do you stay focused? How do you not get paralyzed by the fear of it? The way we do it is to break down: What are the risks? And a nice way to keep reminding yourself is: What's the next thing that's going to kill me?”

In the startup world, death comes most quickly through failing to grow rapidly. That means the two most critical tasks are keeping current customers happy and getting new ones. Growth is the bait that attracts capital and capital is oxygen for a startup.

Once a startup company is funded, there is an immediate desire to draw a huge sigh of relief and think about how to fix everything that is wrong with the product, starting with a ground up redesign. However, startups are fragile creatures. Customers pay for solutions - for them, elegance is secondary.

A company can easily die while it is “fixing” its product. A better approach is to prioritize resources guarantee growth and approach product redesign in a modular fashion that still enables a steady stream of customer-facing enhancements.