Apcera's insightful discovery

This picture which I published on LinkedIn  had  quite a few "Likes"

From  Ogilvy and Mather Beijing

The Human Experience expressed here is insecurity, even fear. The word "code" normally people associate with devs. But in clouds, the devops must deploy the tens of thousands of smaller applications over a cloud infrastructure and this not easy.

Normally there is bottle neck when the devops must do their magic to place the assembled enterprise app in production from bigger and bigger volumes of smaller apps from devs.

Now that we have containers and microservices, this is truer than ever.

Notice the fear is not speed. The fear is not - not having magical tools and toys. Sure devops need those too, but are not the deciding factor.

Because the biggest concern they have, overriding any thing on their wish list,  is The Lack of Trust.

This very simple discovery is a miraculous insight of Derek Collison, the founder of Apcera, after nearly twenty years of experience. He himself was a coder, he himself was a devop. Some notes from my conversation with Derek

...after developing B29 - now called Cloud Foundry, - speaking to users and contributors, Derek realized the Cloud Foundry was designed to make the devops look smarter and give them all toys to deploy faster,  This was a real problem, but not the big almost show-stopping problem that needed solving..

When Derek had this epiphany, "the train already left the station". There is no way to go back and re-code Cloud Foundry. He decided in 2012 to start his own company and to call it Apcera.

Apcera is an unique word.  Acronyms  Abbreviations web site lists the definition of Apcera as

"Apcera is building the modern enterprise IT platform. Driven by policy, our solution delivers revolutionary technology along a customer’s evolutionary path, unifying IT to go faster, safely. All at enterprise scale."

This is true, but these words from their web site remind me of the the saying : Nothing clanks when he walks . You need to speak to Derek in person and hear all the clanks, the real substance of an extraordinary man who founded an extraordinary company.

Apcera’s motto must be  Trust, Trust, Trust.This is a translation of the well-known dictum in real estate: Location, Location, Location.

What really counts is that devs want is to program and forget about anything else. Derek founded Apcera to create this trust, by automating the task, and making it as transparent to devs and devops as much as possible.

 Apcera web site is somehow vague in wording. but  HCOS (the new name of product originally named Continuum) has only one interface, used by ITOps. Devs and Devops do not use any Apcera specific UI. The platform takes care of everything.

Whatever violent psychopaths are roaming  around, Apcera will implement policies to keep them at bay. 

Sample Apcera IT Ops management interface. See policies and permissions

Perhaps the guys at Ogilvy and Maher would like to look at Apcera, If they can wait a little bit, they can get an ERICSSON HDS 8000 –HYPERSCALE DATA CENTER SYSTEM  More about this in a future post

Disclosure

I don’t say anything online that I wouldn’t say in person. I am now an evangelist on contract to the Ericsson Cloud Product Team.  What I say are exclusively my thoughts, views, opinions or understanding of a topic or issue, and not my employer's. I can be wrong even though I try hard not to be. I will admit to mistakes, correct them promptly and even apologize where it is appropriate.