In technology, we often use the term “dogfooding” (or “eating your own dog food”) to mean that we should use the products we make, in order to develop empathy for our customers and expedite fixing problems. In other words, we fix the pain we inflict on customers because we are inflicting it upon ourselves. This concept has been described by many writers; if you’re not yet familiar with the concept, I invite you to check out the Wikipedia page. I want to spend some time now talking about when dogfooding is appropriate and when it is not. Continue reading →

I recently installed XenServer 7.0.0 to check out its capabilities around unikernels & running native Docker containers. Unfortunately, one major limitation — at least for lab use — is that XenServer does not let the administrator create a storage repository (SR in XenServer terms) right on the machine, to store ISO images for the various operating systems you’re going to install. Normally it requires that your ISO SR live on either a CIFS or NFS share, which is impractical for the home hobbyist who doesn’t want to maintain yet another piece of infrastructure.

Fortunately, there’s a way you can hack a local ISO SR onto the server. The directions have changed a little bit for XenServer 7.0.0, since by default it sets the LVM groups’ metadata as read-only, which inhibits you from adding a volume group to store ISOs. So, in between steps 1 and 2 on the instructions page, you need to edit /etc/lvm/lvm.conf and change the metadata_read_only setting from 1 to 0. Then, after performing step 6, change it back.

Dear “Dear GitHub”,

Thanks for your recent open letter about GitHub’s shortcomings. As an occasional contributor to Chef, a large open source project itself , I completely empathize with your position. It totally sucks, for example, when an issue is DoSsed with a wall of unhelpful +1’s, especially by people who think open source creates a contractual obligation of free support and instantaneous bug fixes. I also agree that it sucks that GitHub hasn’t provided you with timely responses about your feedback, even if it’s to tell you “no”.

However, as a product person working for Chef Software, Inc., the company backing the aforementioned open source project, I feel obligated to inform you that, if I were the product manager for GitHub, the answer to your requests would probably be “no”. That’s not because I think your feature requests aren’t legitimate. It’s because they don’t impact paying customers very highly. And as a company whose developers have to eat, GitHub is probably going to prioritize those customers first. Sorry!

I could delve into a detailed analysis of why each feature you’ve asked for doesn’t matter much to GitHub’s paying customer base, but I think it’s pretty obvious. Paying customers use private repositories and/or GitHub Enterprise, and the wild[er]-west aspects of an open-source ecosystem simply don’t exist inside a company. You’re unlikely to see +1-DDoS-type behavior inside private repos, for example.

Don’t get me wrong. GitHub’s success has been built upon its popularity as a platform for open-source collaboration, and part of creating a commercial business upon an open-source foundation involves maintaining a fine balance between paying customers and open-source users. We have the same challenges at Chef. We’re a bit luckier, actually: we’re not trying to directly monetize our product, so we can afford to make the source code available to both our client and server so that anyone can contribute to it. But GitHub’s trying to sell the code behind the site as GitHub Enterprise, so that’s not a viable option for them.

In summary, I think you’re right to highlight GitHub’s lack of response to your feature requests. That’s just not nice. However, I don’t think they’re going to prioritize your actual requests highly. After all, what options do you have? Move Selenium, ember.js, and every other project the open letter signatories work on to BitBucket? Just the fact that you posted your missive to GitHub itself shows how attached you are to the platform. The only reason GitHub will work on your requests is if the media attention over your open letter gets too hot.

Well, I guess maybe your open letter isn’t such a bad idea after all. Carry on?

Signed,

Your local friendly product guy, Julian

As many of you know, adoption of containers has skyrocketed over the last year or two. Thus far, containers have been used mostly by early adopters, yet over the next several years we can expect widespread enterprise adoption. In fact, I expect the rate of adoption to exceed that of cloud (IaaS services), or virtualization before that. While it took enterprises perhaps a decade to fully plan and implement their virtualization initiatives, we can expect many enterprises to have production container deployments within three to five years. I fear that many of these implementations will have serious problems. Worse still, container technologies, when misused, inherently force us to own bad solutions for far longer.

Bear in mind that I am definitely not calling enterprises out specifically for misuse of container technology. Dismissive sentiments like “and that’s why we can’t have nice things” are not what I’m after. Enterprise adoption merely amplifies, by virtue of scale, the effects of anti-patterns in any technology, and containers are no exception. I am also not here to make fun of Docker for being on the Gartner hype cycle and being just short of the peak of inflated expectations. Container technology is sufficiently mature to be useful today and runtime environments like Kubernetes or Mesosphere are well on their way to becoming widely usable. In a couple years, they may even be classified as “boring technology” so that nobody, even the late majority or laggards, would feel it risky to use any of this technology.

Rather, this post is simply about the horrifying realization that containerization opens up a whole new playing field for folks to abuse. Many technology professionals in the coming decades will bear the brunt of the mistakes people are making today in their use of containers. Worse, these mistakes will be even more long-lived, because containers — being portable artifacts independent of the runtime — can conceivably survive in the wild far longer than, say, a web application written using JSP, Struts 1.1 and running under Tomcat 3.

Here are a few antipatterns I see out in the wild as container adoption spreads. Continue reading →