Structure News: Is a fork in Docker's future, right as containers get huge?

Your weekly tech news roundup, with a little bit of Structure. Where When We Come To A Fork In The Road, We Plan A Conference September 2, 2016 / by Tom Krazit This week, we'll talk about what might prove to be a crossroads for one of the most exciting infrastructure projects to date, why containers are so important to security, and why the FBI is still gearing up for a fight about encryption. BIG PICTURE Although I understand Linus Torvalds likes all kinds of F-words, one of most consistent ways to get a reaction from an open-source community is to invoke the prospect of a fork. The notion that some members of the Docker community might consider forking the project to create a more stable container implementation provoked quite a bit of discussion this week about the conflicts that can arise when an open-source project and a for-profit company that owns that project appear to be moving in different directions. The New Stack kicked it off earlier this week with an article entitled "A Docker Fork: Talk of a Split Is Now on the Table." Docker is arguably the hottest company in enterprise tech over the last few years, and it got that way by making container-based software development easier for developers to use. As a result, a cottage industry has sprung up around container implementation, most notably around container orchestration, in which Google (through Kubernetes), Mesosphere, and Docker itself are scrambling to make their products the standard by which companies manage container-based development. The problem, according to some of those folks, is that Docker is moving too fast and breaking too many things for enterprise customers to keep up. As you might guess, Docker isn't exactly sorry for the rapid pace of improvements it has made to the core Docker product, but people like Bob Wise of Samsung have seen enough: "It is now critical to the success of those building boring infrastructure systems to openly and transparently collaborate on a minimum essential container implementation," he wrote on Medium. Them's fighting words, and much of the debate that followed was predictable: old-guard vendors threatened by the success of a younger company, large organizations standardizing on containers starting to worry about maintenance, and whether open-source projects and for-profit companies that develop those projects will always be at loggerheads. This is all just talk until somebody actually starts a formal process to create a forked boring infrastructure project. But it shows that Adrian Cockcroft's prediction at Structure 2015 that 2016 would be the year companies got serious about containers in production was dead on. And it gives us a juicy topic to kick around at Structure 2016. STRUCTURE NEWS WHY CONTAINERS WILL ALSO BE A BIG PART OF STRUCTURE SECURITY Regardless of what happens with the Docker project, container security will be a big topic at Structure Security this September. Alex Polvi, CEO of CoreOS (pictured) will be on hand to talk about the state of container security and why reluctant CIOs and CISOs might find themselves better off adopting containers in their organizations. We'll also hear from Jay Leak of Blackstone and Bob Lord of Yahoo on how exciting new technologies like containers are adopted at large companies with a lot to lose. Structure Security will take take September 27th and 28th at the Golden Gate Club in San Francisco's Presidio District. Now is a great time to buy a ticket before signing off for your holiday weekend, and you can do that here: use our special discount code "LABORDAY" to save $300 before midnight Sept. 5th. INDUSTRY NEWS GE, THE 124-YEAR-OLD SOFTWARE STARTUP We've showcased several times how one of America's oldest companies is transforming itself in the cloud era, featuring GE's Chris Drumgoole at Structure 2015 and getting ready to host GE Wurldtech CEO Tom Le at Structure Security. The New York Times had a great in-depth examination of GE's progress over the last few years, and it's worth your time if you're considering a similar transformation at your company. GOOGLE PARTNERS WITH OKTA TO ENABLE SECURE MULTI-CLOUD DEPLOYMENTS Okta (whose CEO, Todd McKinnon, will be at Structure Security) held its big Oktane conference this week, and one of the highlights was a deal with Google to use Okta's single-sign-on technology inside Google Cloud Platform and Google Apps. ZDNet reports that the deal is a further sign of coziness between the two companies, who share a common competitor in Microsoft. BAIDU AND NVIDIA TO BUILD ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE PLATFORM FOR SELF-DRIVING CARS Baidu's Andrew Ng told Structure Data 2016 attendees that he thinks self-driving cars will be in mass production in five years, and if that's going to hold true, Baidu will need some help. This week the company announced a deal with Nvidia, whose chips appear to be the early front-runner for AI and machine learning research, to build a platform that can be used by Chinese automakers to deploy self-driving cars in China, according to Fortune. CLOUDERA ASKED INTEL FOR $1 BILLION TO BUILD A CLOUD SERVICE Structure Data veteran Cloudera might be looking to build a full-fledged cloud service for its big data customers, if a report by Venturebeat is correct. The report suggests Cloudera asked Intel, one of its major investors, for an additional $1 billion to start the project, but it's not clear if Intel followed through or if Cloudera is actually working on such a project. HOW TECH GIANTS ARE DEVISING REAL ETHICS FOR ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE Can we trust the tech industry to self-regulate when it comes to artificial intelligence? We're going to find out, as The New York Times reports on a partnership between several leading companies -- Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook, IBM, and Microsoft -- to make sure AI is used in ways that help people. Profitably help people, of course. FBI DIRECTOR WANTS 'ADULT CONVERSATION' ABOUT BACKDOORING ENCRYPTION Don't miss the subhead on this story from The Register about a speech that FBI Director James Comey made about encryption that's sure to once again rile up supporters of the technology. In case you didn't see what Comey did there, implying that concerns about backdoors over the last several months have been childish hardly furthers the debate. QUOTE OF THE WEEK Enterprise adoption, not enterprise vendor complaints, should be the litmus test for Docker standardization." 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