> In what New Relic executives described as adjusting to a “sea change” in open source adoption
Am I missing something or did this statement strike anyone else as wildly bizarre?
I feel like open source has been the default for the client side agents and libraries of SaaS products for 10 years. Microsoft, once the strongest opponent of open source, changed its tune like 5+ years ago. What could possibly be the “sea change” this executive is referring to?
I've mostly worked for companies that were all in on things like open source and cloud my entire career, but it's easy to forget that there are huge companies that just recently replaced their tape drives.
If I were to guess at the "sea change" discussed herein I'd say it's probably the explosion of tech around Kubernetes and the CNCF, as that created a very sudden and urgent need for better observability tooling.
- I typed these words all by myself and they are not official New Relic words, you can tell because they're not terribly well-formed and they aren't surrounded by logos and trademarks and buzzwords. Using the haphazardly spewed opinions of strangers on the internet as investment advice is a really, really terrible idea; like "open source is a virus" level of bad. Don't do it.
Open source was taking over enterprises long before k8s. There was OpenStack, Hadoop, and obviously Linux itself has been widely adopted since before New Relic’s founding (2008).
Arguably micro services have increased the need for observability tooling, but even that “sea change” is years long in the tooth. Sure large enterprises are slow to adopt such trends, but it’s been happening and is hardly a sudden shocking development.
Maybe I’m just being pedantic or nit picky, but it does seem extra worrisome when the executives for a struggling company say something that sounds dramatically out of touch.
"Open source was taking over enterprises long before k8s"
True, also not related to the point I was trying to make. Executives tend to be handwavey and vague sometimes but I'm pretty sure the "sea change" they're talking about in this case is about containerization and the rapid evolution of open source projects in that space, many of them related to observability. Kubecon had 500 attendees in 2015 and 12,000 in 2019. It's hard to deny that the popularity of that community will sway popular opinion about what technologies to embrace moving forward. I think (and again, I am guessing as I have exactly zero information that the public does not have) that New Relic and other companies are in part making decisions like this because it's becoming clear they will be left behind if they don't, and quickly.
I bet the first post-covid Kubecon will have 20k attendees and be taken over by the execs and VCs who've realized that's where the devs are, just in time for the devs to stop going and start the next thing á la reInvent. Wish I had gone before it blew up.
I also feel like "struggling" is a bit of an overstatement for a company with a $4B market cap, but maybe that's just me. I'm sure most FAANG4LYFers look at that like a lemonade stand.
Am I missing something or did this statement strike anyone else as wildly bizarre?
I feel like open source has been the default for the client side agents and libraries of SaaS products for 10 years. Microsoft, once the strongest opponent of open source, changed its tune like 5+ years ago. What could possibly be the “sea change” this executive is referring to?