Walking Contradiction

GlueCon 2014 was held on May 21-22 at the Omni Interlocken Hotel in Broomfield, Colorado, and I was fortunate enough to be selected as a speaker there for the second year in a row. For those of you who aren’t familiar with GlueCon, it’s not quite an unconference, but it is a loosely-structured gathering of people working in lots of different technologies that drive the web today, with the focus on the “glue” that holds them all together: developers.

The morning of the 21st was a series of keynotes, and devops seemed to be the topic on everyone’s mind. There was one keynote in general that I strongly disagreed with: John Sheehan of Runscope claimed that “API SDKs Will Ruin Your Life” (the title of the keynote). The assumption, of course, was that the only reason that anyone would use an SDK is because the native API is terrible, and it is the reliance on SDKs that is causing API devs to get sloppy. While that might be true in some sense, the responsibility for creating a good API rests on the API developers, and if they are not professional enough to take pride in the quality of their APIs, I doubt that any SDK would change that. Creating good, consistent APIs is not easy, and typically shouldn’t be left to the the people creating the underlying product that the API is exposing.

The afternoon was broken into several tracks, with the idea that the talks in each track were related, and would happen one right after the other, with no break in between. This was when my talk was scheduled, and it was part of the Cloud track. The talk was titled “How to Leave Rackspace”, and no, I wasn’t encouraging people to leave Rackspace! (I like having a job!). It was about the realities of portability among clouds, and emphasized the importance of data gravity binding you to a provider. I also covered the importance of API compatibility, and how working with providers sharing a common API, such as OpenStack-based providers, won’t do anything about data gravity, but will at least allow your applications to run on different providers.

The script I showed used pyrax to transfer a running compute instance in Rackspace to the HP cloud, so that you could move an entire server with just a few lines of code. The overall lesson, however, was to take the time to choose your provider carefully up front, instead of relying on some promise of portability later. The audience seemed pretty engaged during the talk, but there weren’t many questions and what seemed like lukewarm applause afterwards. I was a little disappointed, but noticed the same pattern for the other speakers who followed me, so I thought it might be due to the format. Later on I did run into several people who attended my session, and their feedback was very positive, so that made me feel better about the talk. This was the first time I’ve given this particular talk, and so I was very appreciative of the feedback.

After my talk was an excellent talk by Cornelia Davis of Pivotal that gave us a peek under the hood of Cloud Foundry. I was familiar with what Cloud Foundry could do, but I hadn’t had any exposure to the underlying architecture, so this was very interesting. Following that were talks on OpenStack Swift and network virtualization, which were both full of useful information, and then there was a talk on “The New Development Experience” that had some good stuff on Bluemix, IBM’s implementation of Cloud Foundry, but was too filled with buzzwords to be interesting. For a sample of what I mean, here’s a sentence from the talk abstract:

“The cloud combined with the need-for-time to value is driving a movement toward a scalable and flexible cloud computing development model that provides application developers with the freedom to innovate rapidly, integrate with existing infrastructure, use or create APIs, and create cloud native applications”.

I spent the rest of the day working at the booth, and noticed a distinct difference in attitude from last year’s crowd. For some reason, the crowd last year was not only very pro-AWS, but actively hostile to OpenStack. This year I didn’t get any of that negativity; instead, I spoke with developers and business people who knew about OpenStack and Rackspace, and simply wanted more information. My favorite, though, was Atsushi Yamanaka, from IDC Frontier in Japan. He flew to the Denver area the previous day from Tokyo to attend GlueCon, and was flying back to Tokyo the day after GlueCon ended. Talk about dedication! He wanted to get a better idea of Rackspace’s presence in the Asia/Pacific area, both current and future, and unfortunately I had to explain that those decisions are made at much higher pay grades than mine!

The second day of the conference similarly opened with a series of keynotes. I had to work the booth and also work on some code, so I didn’t catch most of them. I did, however, catch the keynote by Joshua McKenty of Piston Cloud Computing, which I found to be equal parts entertaining and informative. I’ve known Joshua for several years now, since the birth of OpenStack, and know as well as anyone how he can tend to overstate things just to get a rise out of the audience. He also knocked SDKs, but made it clear that it was only when they were used as crutches for bad APIs, and I had to comment about it on Twitter. The example he gave was that if instead of a website, you had created a duck, when you create the duck API, it would be dumb to expose the gizzard and the inner workings of its circulatory system, yet developers do the equivalent of that regularly. When people want to use your duck, they are interested in its ability to fly or swim or eat or quack, and don’t really care about the incredibly complex implementation details that make those abilities possible. Developers, on the other hand, are so proud of their incredibly complex implementations that they tend to feature them front and center in their API design. This makes for an unwieldy API, which then almost forces users of it to rely on an SDK to be able to do anything useful.

There was another keynote by Julia Ferraioli from Google on developer outreach, and since that’s my job, I was interested to hear what she had to say. Unfortunately, the talk was really nothing more than the general knowledge stuff that people working in this field for any length of time already know; I certainly didn’t pick up anything new. I hope, though, that maybe some of the non-developers in the crowd learned something.

I wish I could comment on more of the talks, but again I spent a good part of the day either working the booth or writing code for work. I did see a couple of talks that revolved around novel uses of Docker to either speed up or reduce the cost of CI/CD enviroments; it certainly seems as though Docker was the new hotness among developers at GlueCon.

I can’t say enough good things about the event itself: the location, the organization, the food/refreshments, the attendees, and the quality of the talks were all excellent. If you get a chance to attend GlueCon 2015 next year, go for it!