Linked List: August 12, 2016

Friday, 12 August 2016

Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) 

My thanks to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. Are you running Docker containers in production? Ready to share your story with the industry’s top developers, end users, and vendors?

Cloud native computing uses an open source software stack to deploy applications as microservices, packaging each part into its own container, and dynamically orchestrating those containers to optimize resource utilization. CNCF hosts critical components of that software stack including Kubernetes and Prometheus and serves as a neutral home for collaboration. CNCF is looking for new members, and especially end users of cloud native technologies.

If that describes you, check them out and join today.

Jason Calacanis, 18 months Ago: ‘Apple Will Buy Tesla for $75B in 18 Months’ 

Jason Calacanis, 14 February 2015:

Apple will buy Tesla for $75b in 18 months — it’s a lock (in my mind).

Let’s use that lock to season the claim chowder on this one. (Yours truly at the time: “If Apple were going to do this they’d have done it years ago.”)

Update: Even more seasoning for the claim chowder — Tesla’s market cap today: $33.4 billion.

Symbolic Leadership 

Om Malik:

I think Gruber is missing the point — attending a game when a division you are responsible for is down for six hours is a clear lack of empathy for the customers, and also is a sign that standards are falling of what used to be an Apple Standard for building products of delight. Sure, things might have taken as much time to fix the iCloud, but the message you would have sent out to rest of the Apple team would have been different.

Let’s unpack this. First, it has nothing to do with “empathy for the customers”. 99.999 percent of the customers whose iCloud accounts were affected by the June 2 outage have no idea who Eddy Cue is, let alone care whether he attended the Warriors game.

As for the message to Apple employees, that’s really the only part of the “Eddy Cue should have skipped the game” argument that makes any sense to me. I disagree with it, but at least it makes sense. But it’s predicated on a lot of assumptions about Apple employee attitudes and morale, and Cue’s leadership and management abilities. Are the engineers and system administrators who were responsible for fixing the outage delicate emotionally fragile children who felt hurt when they found out Eddy Cue went to a basketball game while they were doing their jobs? Or are they mature professionals, who realize that the only thing that mattered was fixing the outage?

And let’s go further. Let’s say Cue did skip the game. How would the employees working on the outage know that he skipped the game? Should Cue have been calling them every 15 minutes to see how it’s going? Should he have made them feel small by screaming at them, telling them that they’re incompetent shitheads? Should he have made them feel guilty by telling them that he was missing Game One of the NBA Finals, because of this outage? Or, should he simply trust them, leave them alone and let them do their jobs — in which case, he might as well have just gone to the fucking game.

If we’re going to talk about symbolic leadership, I like what it says to Apple employees that Cue went to the game. It says having fun and a life outside work is good.