The Mechanics of Disruption: Adrian Cockcroft on Open Source, SSDs, and DevOps
The Interviewer
Mike Hall
Interviewer, community organizer at UGtastic
The Guest
Adrian Cockcroft
Microservices Pioneer and Former Netflix Cloud Architect
The Conversation
Mike Hall
Interviewer, community organizer at UGtastic
Hi, it's Mike with UGtastic. I'm here again at GOTO Conf 2014 and I'm standing here with Adrian Cockcroft, who gave the kickoff keynote talk here at the conference. Thank you very much for taking the time to speak with me. Can you tell me a little bit about what your talk was about and how you came to give it?
Adrian Cockcroft
Microservices Pioneer and Former Netflix Cloud Architect
Sure, thanks for having me. The talk really came from two pieces. The first part was about how to speed things up, the speed of innovation being very important, and how to think about what is innovation and what is disruptive rather than what the incumbent companies do.
Adrian Cockcroft
Microservices Pioneer and Former Netflix Cloud Architect
There's this phrase I hinged it around: 'It ain't what you know that messes you up, it's what you know that ain't so.' It's a Will Rogers quote. A lot of the disruptions that happen in this industry happen because an incumbent figures out how to optimize for a specific idea and builds a business model around it.
Adrian Cockcroft
Microservices Pioneer and Former Netflix Cloud Architect
Then somebody else notices that one of your assumptions is no longer true. You're optimizing for something that used to be really expensive, but now it isn't. The disruptor takes advantage of this thing that everyone else assumes is big and hard to do, but has now become cheap and easy. You end up wasting a lot of something and it looks horrifying to the incumbents—they couldn't possibly do that. But you end up disrupting industries that way.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, community organizer at UGtastic
The first thing I think about is databases. We have Oracle and MS SQL with big monolithic products, but then along comes open source like MySQL and Postgres running huge operations. They disrupt the business of Oracle.
Adrian Cockcroft
Microservices Pioneer and Former Netflix Cloud Architect
Yeah, the concept of open source—the idea that the best software you could buy is the stuff you get for free that's built by a community—is alien to traditional enterprise software businesses. Historically, you had a product manager who came up with an idea, worked on it for a few years, and then tried to sell it to you for a lot of money. I worked for Sun Microsystems for a long time and was part of that process.
Adrian Cockcroft
Microservices Pioneer and Former Netflix Cloud Architect
But what really happened was the best things you can get now are free, they are built by communities, and the best engineers don't work at those enterprise companies; they work for end users. The most interesting scale-available reliable software now is coming from open-source projects.
Adrian Cockcroft
Microservices Pioneer and Former Netflix Cloud Architect
Another disruption I mentioned was solid-state disk (SSD) replacing spinning traditional disks. If you look at a Cassandra-based deployment on AWS, there is no storage admin, there's no SAN. There's some SSD inside an instance and that's all there is. The person managing it is probably a Java distributed systems developer. The entire product category of SAN fabrics and storage arrays disappears. That's one of the most disruptive things going on right now.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, community organizer at UGtastic
When trying to change the mindset of people who've built their business on entrenched assumptions, it's a human quirk. You can't just say 'here is a fact, what you know is wrong.' Do you talk about how to approach those thought processes and address them?
Adrian Cockcroft
Microservices Pioneer and Former Netflix Cloud Architect
Sure, I talked about a few other things in the keynote. One of them was continuous delivery as another way of disruptively speeding things up. What it really comes down to is the DevOps approach where you're actually taking away the handoffs between teams.
Critical Insights
durable
"True industry disruption occurs when a competitor leverages a previously expensive resource that has suddenly become cheap and abundant, rendering incumbent optimizations obsolete."
durable
"The center of engineering gravity has shifted from enterprise software vendors (like Oracle or Sun Microsystems) to open-source communities driven by end-user organizations."
durable
"The rise of SSDs and cloud instances (like AWS) completely abstracted away the traditional Storage Area Network (SAN) industry, turning storage administration into a distributed systems software engineering task."
durable
"Continuous Delivery and DevOps disrupt organizational velocity by removing the bureaucratic handoffs between specialized teams."