I was once a system programmer in a Unix world. Brilliant OS. The first version I got to know really well (and I mean, deep down really really well) was System V. Later on, I worked with (Open)VMS and also spent quite some time porting stuff to Linux (Redhat). I mean, communication protocols, compilers, etc. The really hard stuff. And fun it was. Getting stuff to work was really very fulfilling. Especially in a time where you had to build your own “platforms”, like 4GL, RDBMS and integration middleware in order to provide your internal consumers with better solution building productivity. Building all this stuff was awesome!

And then I was introduced to Windows. Lipstick on a pig it was. And in quite some cases still is. We were serving 8 developers on a 486 with Redhat Linux and with Windows 3.11 on the same machine we only got to serve 1. Aaaargh. But hey, developing really visual stuff was a nice change as well.

But the best thing today is: we don’t have to care anymore, because we’ve got PaaS now! Who cares about servers? We just want to run our workloads serverless. Let the hardcore developers build this cool platform stuff (and make it very very easy for us), that we ordinary folks can just use to deploy everyday workloads.

But, lately I got introduced to this relatively new phenomenon of containers. I think that’s a step back. At least, for us people who just want to deploy common workloads. I understand that for architects and developers working for large scale B2C companies (Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc.), containers and K8S and stuff like that is great. But for the average company, it’s overkill. And overly complex. And back to virtual machines, but just a bit smaller and more contained. And somewhat easier to deploy.

But, we don’t need that (in our platform). We just want less complexity. And more less. Serverless. Basta!

Just my 0.02 Q* of course.

Cheers, Gijs

*Want some for free as well? Just register here through my personal invite link.