We are entering a period where custom, highly-optimized, vertical solutions are becoming viable option again. This is a good news for ISVs with proven domain expertise and skilled development resources.

Why do I think so? We now have:

1. Plethora of feature-rich developer frameworks, message queues, scalable data stores, and even lower-level components in the OSS community with great documentation and a large number of use-case validation
2. Growing number of custom solution companies (more than just ISVs) with existing deep vertical/domain expertise who are also increasingly now investing in hiring and training strong development teams
3. Virtually every Cloud provider offering either a raw Kubernetes service or managed container execution platform which (regardless how you feel about these technologies) creates ubiquitous surface area that can be addressed with a single solution

Yes, there still are many ways in which these custom development efforts can fail. Still, as one who has started their professional career developing custom software, I’m glad to see how these kinds of efforts are becoming cost effective again and increasingly represent a viable option for differentiation and real business value delivery.

When dealing with file permissions in a non-root image or building apps that include static content (like css or templates), I sometime get an error resulting from the final image content mismatch with my expectations.

Most of the time the errors are pretty obvious, simple fix and rebuild will do. Sometimes though, you want to take a look into the image and understand what the actual layout looks like in there.

While the idea of a serverless platform and long running workloads does seem somewhat “unnatural” at first, smart people are already working on that (looking at you @Knative community). In the meantime, a simple approach is sometimes all you may need.

A co-worker recently told me about flic.io buttons. These button caught my attention because they can include triggers for single, double, or hold click and can be easily wired up to all kinds of actions.

I instantly thought of of a few really interesting applications. To start with though, I wanted to create a simple service that would allow me to push the custom data defined on each button over HTTP to Cloud PubSub. That in turn would then connect me to the many more actuation options through GCP APIs and services that connect to Cloud PugSub.

Next week, April 9–11, Google will be hosting this year’s Cloud Next Conference in San Francisco. The conference is already sold out, but there will be a livestream from keynotes and video available shortly after the sessions.

This year, we have a lot of content to share, and I have the privilege of presenting in four sessions — and hope to do at least six live demos.

I had a chance to speak at the Cloud Conf 2019 in Turin, Italy. The conference has double its audience from last year, had a spectacular venue, and large selection of topics. I spoke in the #serverless track on using Knative as a means to serverless where you want it and on your own terms. Stressing the importance of portability and demonstrating the key features that the Kantive community has already delivered.

I wrote a new post on Google blog on the momentum behind the Knative project. How it the community reached another adoption milestone, doubling the number of its contributors. Also, another data point underscoring the Knative momentum is the month-over-month contributions which have increased over 45% since the 0.1 release, now representing more than a dozen of different companies.

I had an opportunity to keynote at this year’s SpringOne conference in DC on Serverless, Kubernetes, and more specifically Knative.

I also covered the great work our open source team at Google been doing, making Spring 1st class citizen on Google Cloud Platform. On a personal level, it was good to reconnect with some old friends from Pivotal, and, community at large.

Ville and I did a session at Google Cloud Next 2018 in San Francisco.

I also published the slides as well as the repo containing all the demos I used in this session in my repo here.

By now, Kubernetes should be the default target for your deployments. Yes, there are still use-cases where Kubernetes is not the optimal choice, but these represent an increasingly smaller number of modern workloads.

The main value of Kubernetes is that it greatly abstracts much of the infrastructure management pain. The broad support amongst virtually all major Cloud Service Providers (CSP) also means that your workloads are portable. Combined with the already vibrant ecosystem of Kubernetes-related tools, means that the experience of the operator, the person responsible for managing Kubernetes, is now pretty smooth.