Enjoyment: 20 Nov 2015

Where The Countdown To Structure 2016 Begins

November 20th, 2015 / by Tom Krazit

This week, we'll recap the week that was at Structure, the cloudiest tech conference this side of Colorado.

It's hard to believe it's over already, but Structure 2015 is a wrap. Over 600 people packed into the Julia Morgan Ballroom in San Francisco over two days of great discussions and talks from some of the leading minds in the cloud world.

These were just a few of the highlights:

THE GUY WHO PUSHED NETFLIX INTO THE FUTURE SAYS WE'RE STILL UNDERESTIMATING AMAZON

Adrian Cockcroft's "state of the cloud" presentations are always a highlight of Structure, and this year was no exception. While the best part was probably the IT-companies-as-battleships metaphor, Business Insider sums up several other predictions and observations from his talk.

HOW COREOS TOOK GOOGLE-STYLE INFRASTRUCTURE TO NEW HEIGHTS

Alex Polvi, CEO of CoreOS, made his Structure debut this year alongside Eric Brewer of Google to talk about container management and the future of app development. SiliconAngle caught up with him on the sidelines for a wide-ranging interview on this very interesting startup.

THE U.S. GOVERNMENT WANTS IN ON THE PUBLIC CLOUD, BUT NEEDS MORE TRANSPARENCY

If you needed any proof that the public cloud is practically mainstream, even the most security conscious parts of the federal government are eyeing these services. Arlette Hart, chief information security officer of the FBI (below right, with Barb Darrow of Fortune), likes much of what public cloud services have to offer but is quite concerned about the "trust me" approach to security often employed by those companies, as IDG News Service reports.

INTEL WILL SHIP FIRST XEON CHIPS WITH INTEGRATED FPGAS IN Q1 2016

First announced at Structure 2014, Intel's programmable Xeon chips are slowly winding their way to market but will arrive next year, Diane Bryant told Structure attendees first thing Wednesday morning. Amazon Web Services and longtime Intel buddy Microsoft are likely the first two customers, according to Venturebeat.

INSTAGRAM IS EYEING VIRTUAL REALITY TO LET USERS TELEPORT AROUND THE WORLD

One nice thing about having a parent company like Facebook is that it allows you to think quite differently about the distribution of your app compared to just about anybody else. Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger said Thursday that collaboration between his group and the Facebook-owned Oculus team could allow Instagram users to unlock some amazing virtual reality experiences, as Variety noted.

GOOGLE'S HÖLZLE ENVISIONS CLOUD BUSINESS ECLIPSING ADS IN 2020

As AWS continues its amazing growth and emerges as a more compelling business than Amazon's web store, Google's Urs Hölzle thinks his company might go through a similar transition. He reiterated a goal to have cloud revenue at Google outpace ad revenue by the end of the decade, as reported Wednesday by Bloomberg, but a lot is going to have to change at Google in order for that to happen. (More on that in a minute.)

INVESTOR KHOSLA SAYS DELL-EMC MERGER WILL "SET BACK INNOVATION," PARTNERS UNMOVED

Vinod Khosla's trademark bomb-throwing style made its return to the Structure stage this year, and his target was the legacy IT companies that his startups are hoping to take down. When asked about the proposed Dell-EMC merger, Kholsa said he believes the deal will actually retard innovation at the merged company, according to CRN. (Bonus points to CRN for a snarky follow-up line from a partner of Dell and EMC: "Didn't Sun (which Khosla co-founded) fail?"

INDUSTRY NEWS

GOOGLE PICKS DIANE GREENE TO LEAD ITS CLOUD BUSINESS

While most of the cloud-industry news of the week happened at Structure, as noted above, Google dropped a bit of a bombshell Thursday afternoon with the announcement (graciously donated to the New York Times) that VMware founder Diane Greene has been appointed as the new head of its cloud business. This is a bit of a re-org that will see all Google cloud products report into Greene, and likely paves the way for an eventual spin-out of the group under Google parent company Alphabet.

BIG PICTURE

After a whirlwind few days in San Francisco, it's nice to catch a breath. But seeing the Structure crowd back together and passionately debating the direction of this still fast-growing industry was a wonderful experience, and only the first of many such experiences that all of us at Structure want to continue to provide over the coming years.

There were definitely a few themes that emerged in the conversations both on stage and the equally valuable ones taking place over lunch and cocktails.

People are wary about lock-in. I'm pretty sure the phrase "vendor lock-in" wasn't mentioned once at Structure 2014, but this year, I heard it dozens of times. From what I gathered, no one feels currently locked into their cloud service provider, but they are watching closely to see if the new powers of this era fall to the temptations of the steady, bookable revenue and profits that defined the product-development cycles of a previous generation of enterprise software companies.
2016 is the year containers will be used on production workloads across a much wider range of companies. Depending on who you talk to, containers are either old news (Joyent's Bryan Cantrill's entertaining talk was well worth the price of admission) or The One True Path Forward for app developers. But I noticed a uptick in attendees who have played around with containers in test environments during 2015 enough to express confidence about making the leap in 2016.
Everybody either hates the Dell-EMC deal or finds it hilarious. What would be the largest merger in tech history was a running punch line during the show, as everyone from Khosla and Cockcroft to the very entertaining panel featuring Luke Kanies of Puppet Labs, Bob Muglia of Snowflake Computing, and Jay Rossiter of Yahoo got a few shots in at Michael Dell's expense. Should Dell find a way to pull this off by Structure 2016, there will be a lot of surprised folks in attendance.

We'll have much more to say about Structure 2015 in the coming weeks as we upload video of the sessions and have some more time to think about the trends and themes that emerged. This week was an excellent foundation for the new home of this vital conference series, and we'd like to thank everyone who helped contribute to its success.