Did not see that coming

10/28/2018 6:40:41 PM

i feel bad for red hat employees

i bet a spinoff competitor comes out of this

10/28/2018 8:14:01 PM

Solaris suffered when Oracle bought Sun. I don't see how RHEL doesn't get the same treatment. AIX sucks and I hope IBM doesn't try to make RHEL more like it.

10/28/2018 9:42:20 PM

Quote :

"i feel bad for red hat employees"

Anyone work for IBM on here? Specifically IT... I'd like some connections at my new tech overlord while figuring out wtf is happening

10/28/2018 11:39:58 PM

Kinda sucks for Raleigh Red Hat employees because there really aren't that many comparable companies in the area if they don't like the direction IBM takes things. Red Hat, despite significant organizational flaws (or at least, as has been described to me), does offer something unique.

10/29/2018 6:43:44 AM

I have some friends that were at EMC before it got gobbled up by Dell. In less than a year Dell had turned it into a shitshow. One couple that worked there had the wife in software development laid off shortly after. Husband is in backup and storage and he's still sticking around but actively looking.

Thoughts and prayers.

10/29/2018 10:53:59 AM

Best case for RH is probably that they are more or less left to run on their own and just have to funnel money back to IBM because this does seem like a real bad culture mix.

10/29/2018 11:05:50 AM

It really does suck for RH employees. The IBM culture, at least what I was exposed to, was about every three months, watching friends and acquaintances getting laid off and then everyone else wondering if they were next. Seemed like a dismal place to be. I don't know if RH ever goes through rounds of layoffs, but I suspect that they will mostly be left alone as far as an HR perspective.

My bigger concern is what implications this has for the tech industry as a whole. RHEL is a good OS. AIX sucks. I hope they somehow end up replacing AIX with RHEL, rather than making RHEL more like AIX. I don't see how they could do that, but it is IBM. And there are sooo many IBM competitors that deploy hoards of RHEL servers and VM's....I just don't see how this doesn't affect that type of relationship.

10/29/2018 2:22:09 PM

IBM will swallow OpenShift, the cloud service platform created by Red Hat and IBM Cloud will become bigger than ever before.

10/29/2018 3:26:44 PM

Quote :

"Solaris suffered when Oracle bought Sun."

Solaris was kind of shitty to begin with though. Surprisingly good driver support for graphics back in the day when *nix driver handling was atrocious and ZFS before it was open sourced but not much else going for it.

10/29/2018 4:39:04 PM

Heard in the all-hands announcement they were very adamant and repeated multiple times that nothing would really change at RH.

The lady doth protest too much, methinks.

10/30/2018 9:14:33 PM

All my friends are basically planning on jumping ship..is that the general mode over there?

10/30/2018 9:22:59 PM

nothing will really change at RH

10/31/2018 8:12:42 AM

Quote :

"All my friends are basically planning on jumping ship..is that the general mode over there? "

It would be foolish not to be prepared for the worst and prep for a jump (or to be tossed overboard). The odd thing for me is the focus is trying to be pushed to "WE DID IT, We're a super-successful open source company! This validates us!!!" and "IBM is buying our people"... when in reality a large portion of the Raleigh offices are corporate functions like Finance, HR, IT, and tons of middle management (also sales & marketing). The first 4 have little to do with open source daily - Red Hat could be selling "thingamajigs" and those functions would be essentially the same... and I'm pretty sure IBM already has pretty robust HR, IT, management and Finance. So a "cost synergy" would be likely in those areas sooner than later. Most may wait a year or two to see what happens (or more specifically what the severance packages look like), some are already shopping, and a handful are blindly excited (thinking we will now take over IBM and change its entire culture somehow....)

10/31/2018 12:54:30 PM

Team server admin read the news and came straight to my desk asking when he could start testing Ubuntu Server. He and his wife came from IBM, he doesn't have confidence this will end well

Best of luck to everyone. Luckily the market seems decent right now. We have lost several people to local companies gobbling up talent.

11/2/2018 9:51:57 PM

Gonna accept offer from IBM for an one-year contract. I feel like it's good timing!

11/3/2018 9:44:09 AM

^What will you be doing?

11/3/2018 9:48:33 PM

Technical consultant, Java developer.

Quote :

"The IBM culture, at least what I was exposed to, was about every three months, watching friends and acquaintances getting laid off and then everyone else wondering if they were next. Seemed like a dismal place to be."

Is it true?

11/4/2018 9:11:15 AM

Quote :

" and a handful are blindly excited (thinking we will now take over IBM and change its entire culture somehow....)"

oh no

Quote :

"i feel bad for red hat employees"

11/4/2018 10:05:59 AM

^^If you're on a one year contract, I don't think I would worry about it.

11/4/2018 8:12:38 PM

most of IBM's core functions are probably outsourced internally anyway (IT, prod support, HR/recruiting, legal) so probably a shit ton of redundancies in Raleigh. I'd get thru Christmas with a smile on my face then Jan 2019 be out.

11/5/2018 6:05:37 AM

Those in customer support roles should be fine, since RHEL makes most of its money on support bundles. As ^ said, those in RH's IT, HR and Finance roles should be updating their resumes. IBM will take some folks on from HR and Finance I suspect.

11/7/2018 11:19:49 AM

Red Hat has acquired a lot of my customers (and is a customer themself), while IBM is maybe the company I've had the worst experience working with... ever. So in my current role not the best. Plus, it's like a running joke that I will jump to Red Hat because they're the best local employer in my ecosystem... not so sure about that now. I have a feeling that the marketing group at Red Hat is going to be a mega bloodbath. Most services teams are too valuable, but IBM has a bad history with how they treat marketing teams, and Red Hat's brand has never necessarily been the result of a particular marketing campaign as much as it is their internal culture.

I work in tech media so literally this has been 24/7 talk since the announcement.

11/7/2018 2:56:28 PM

https://www.wraltechwire.com/2018/11/08/cisco-partners-with-amazon-as-hybrid-cloud-wars-heat-up/?ssid=119754944

Prepare for the cloud war!

[Edited on November 8, 2018 at 4:29 PM. Reason : Cisco+Amazon VS IBM+ Red Hat]

11/8/2018 4:29:14 PM

gee, i wonder who'd win that

11/9/2018 1:43:31 AM

Google? They are pushing super hard in the space--probably why Red Hat sold. War was being waged on too many fronts.

I migrated to GCP at my last job and really like the platform overall, especially the Kubernetes option. Their support sucks, but before you've signed the contract they really lay out the red carpet.



[Edited on November 10, 2018 at 1:58 PM. Reason : a]

11/10/2018 1:56:01 PM

after using GCP for a couple weeks in kubernetes training, I must say it's SO FAR behind aws it's not even close. its more reliable and performant than azure, but the tooling is way worse and the service offerings are too. there's just so much aws offers as platform services that I don't have to roll myself like on azure or gcp, on top of more options for just about everything, I can't imagine ever choosing gcp or azure unless one of them was offering it close to free, which is basically how MS ELAs work to make azure look like people are actually using it

[Edited on November 10, 2018 at 7:43 PM. Reason : i think k8s is garbage too, but that's another discussion]

11/10/2018 7:42:13 PM

Quote :

"probably why Red Hat sold. "

Eh... Not anything Red Hat can do with that offer but accept it, even if it is not good for the business. It's good for the shareholders and leadership is legally obligated to accept an offer at such a premium on their behalf. The deal could potentially fall apart for various reasons (though unlikely) or if another company jumps in with a bid (and pays IBM a near $1billion penalty to cancel the deal). This all can happen to any publicly traded company, even if they would never seek to be bought

11/10/2018 10:06:18 PM

^^ what pieces did you have to roll your own? I found the kubernetes pieces to be straight forward. I replaced an analytics and ELK stack with BigQuery and StackDriver. Got profiling and error reporting for free and didn't have to configure anything myself to get the access logs streaming into BigQuery. The Load Balancer is a bit of a disaster.

The fact it has more limited offerings was part of my decision. The other was internal politics.and less about the technical reasons.

[Edited on November 10, 2018 at 10:42 PM. Reason : A]

11/10/2018 10:37:38 PM

route53's latency based routing for global apps is HUGE and part of nearly everything I build.

not having a way to build self healing into my apps: for instance with aws, I can use cloudwatch to metric my application. I can define an alert condition for the metric data (failing to get data, values above or below acceptable numbers, regex filters for log streams) and when that alert is hit, I can have it trigger a lambda function to remediate whatever the problem is and as complicated as this sounds, the integration is first rate, you can click buttons to set this up.

nothing like cognito, where I can federate existing directories with infrastructure controls around my app. google forces me into oauth everywhere, which doesn't really work.

and last and probably least important for greenfield stuff is there are no OS level integrations. ir you're all in on docker, great, but if you need to push bits, validate your os/application layer against compliance standards you're stuck setting up chef/puppet or writing your scripts. on aws I have code deploy and inspector

11/11/2018 10:53:15 AM

^ I set most of that up with StackDriver. The alerts can trigger many types of events to PagerDuty, Cloud Functions: https://cloud.google.com/monitoring/support/notification-options

Route53 is my favorite part of AWS.

11/11/2018 11:40:32 AM

maybe im missing it, but i dont see how to trigger cloud functions from notifications, unless you mean webhooks

11/12/2018 12:40:07 AM

What about Azure and Xamarin? Is Microsoft gonna join the war?

11/12/2018 9:34:16 AM

ms is only "competing" in that they give away azure to customers that have existing ELAs. they get to count it on the books as azure sold and azure growth, but if you look at their datacenter utilization, its pretty shit. their service offerings have major engineering flaws in critical areas like availability and disaster recovery

11/12/2018 11:42:22 AM

Amazon offers free trial of a whole year using AWS already.

11/12/2018 12:00:55 PM

Well if this comes true then this is a fantastic deal

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-dell-tech-ipo-icahn/icahn-says-vmware-should-be-worth-300-per-share-cites-red-hat-deal-idUSKCN1NH1HE

11/12/2018 3:30:51 PM

lol do people still use vmware tho?

11/14/2018 8:42:27 PM

^Sadly yes

11/15/2018 9:33:19 AM

Dell acquired EMC in 2015 paying $67B already.

11/15/2018 11:35:26 AM

dell, ichan, emc, and vmware are all dying companies (or people). they'll be out of business in 10 years if they don't become almost 100% consultation companies like rackspace.

[Edited on November 15, 2018 at 2:03 PM. Reason : .]

11/15/2018 2:03:17 PM

migrating from vmware to hyper v is too easy. Vmware I agree will be dead in about 10 years.

11/15/2018 7:25:02 PM

Don't agree with the predictions for Dell and EMC tbh

[Edited on November 15, 2018 at 11:15 PM. Reason : ]

11/15/2018 11:14:33 PM

Yeah, companies still buy a fuckton of servers from Dell.

11/15/2018 11:43:22 PM

#1 if VMware dies, Hyper-V sure as hell won't be the reason. #2 we still have PLENTY of mainframes in use today. VMware will be around for quite a while.

11/16/2018 6:37:15 AM

well AS400 is still around running critical financial apps so something will always live on i guess

11/16/2018 9:34:38 AM

This deal is similar like Microsoft acquired Github for $7.5B early this year-----A giant absorbs an open source company.

Quote :

"Microsoft has completed its acquisition of GitHub. Nat Friedman, former CEO of Xamarin (acquired by Microsoft in 2016), is taking over as GitHub’s CEO, reporting to Scott Guthrie, Microsoft Cloud + AI Group Executive Vice President. GitHub will retain its developer-first ethos, operate independently, and remain an open platform. Together, the two companies will work together to empower developers to achieve more at every stage of the development lifecycle, accelerate enterprise use of GitHub, and bring Microsoft’s developer tools and services to new audiences."

11/16/2018 10:29:03 AM

^As much shit as MSoft gets (deserved or not) I do feel it still has certain what I would call aspirational areas to it where they still like to innovate and try to make good interesting products (actual success being hit or miss).There is the cold business side of course but not to the same extreme level of IBM.

11/16/2018 3:02:18 PM

I know many of you oldies don't feel the same, but I trust Microsoft with open source more than IBM despite the fact that IBM has certainly contributed more. But when IBM talks about their open source history, they don't shut up about all the assets they donated to create the Eclipse Foundation.

Whoever it was earlier, I think Cael, that mentioned Google motivating Red Hat sale — not an exact reason why, but there was actually a pretty big rumor about Google moving to make an offer earlier in the year, and whether or not that's true, it helped accelerate the discussion at IBM leadership level.

11/16/2018 4:28:02 PM

It's not a rumor. It's a fact. Red Hat rejected offer from Google and married IBM.
Nowadays, everyone claims he/she is open source. AWS too.

11/16/2018 4:45:02 PM

GitHub isn't just open source, they have a fairly large enterprise services business which I feel goes well with MS's core business.

I also trust MS more than IBM, they seem to be making the right moves. If they buttoned up Windows with even more developer friendly (Unix-y) tools, which they've been doing--NodeJS support for example and bash support.

All it'd take is them to make a high-end aspirational developer laptop that also did games and people would probably jump from the Apple Republic.

11/17/2018 12:32:20 PM