Cockcroft: Open source from Big Tech makes proprietary software startups harder
Adrian Cockcroft · a16z Podcast | All About Microservices · Jan 2, 2019 · at 16:23
Adrian Cockcroft, former Netflix cloud architect, discusses how open-source software contributions from massive tech companies undermine proprietary software startups.
0:00 / 0:18exact quote · 18.5s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“So what you're seeing now is Twitter and Facebook and Netflix and Google and LinkedIn producing the stuff you actually want to use, which has already been tested at volume. And then it's actually much harder to build a proprietary software company because you're competing with these big end users and you've got this thing you've just built and it's flaky and don't quite work right.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Adrian Cockcroft
Cockcroft: Major tech migrations require a forcing function over incremental change
“And sometimes you find incremental change a good theory, but in practice, You have to have a big enough stick to hit everybody with, to make everything move at once.”
Cockcroft: Big banks maintain an illusion of cloud security compliance
“And a lot of what I'm seeing is a big banks and people like that. They have their existing policy frameworks and rules, and they're trying to apply it in the new world. And it looks the same. So they're happy because they're compliant, but they don't actually …”
Cockcroft: Quarterly software releases pose an existential threat to legacy companies
“There's an existential threat here that if you're doing quarterly releases and your competitors doing daily releases and continuous delivery, You're going to fall so far behind in the user experience that you're just going to suffer, right?”
Cockcroft: End-to-end tracing is essential for monitoring serverless systems
“You end up doing, figuring out how to do end to end tracing as the only way you can monitor things rather than being a special case like it is now.”
Cockcroft: Lower network overhead enables microservices 1/100th the size of SOA
“On relatively slow CPUs compared to what we have today on relatively slow networks, we were processing big fat lumps of XML and passing it around, and we were really only able to break the application into a few large chunks because the overhead of all of the …”