MongoDB Job Trends

Mongodb jobs

Mongo is the SF architect’s default database choice, and not surprisingly its trending heavily on Indeed.com. Other NoSQL technologies are seeing similar growth- interestingly Jan 2010 seems to have been the trigger when NoSQL become a significant job trend. The graph below isn’t a scientific or comprehensive list of NoSQL technologies- I just thought it made the point about the date inflexion point. Anyone know what happened that month to kick things off? I should also dig in on location – to see where these Mongo jobs are.

MongoDB, Redis, Cassandra, CouchDB Job Trends

Mongodb jobs – Redis jobs – Cassandra jobs – Couchdb jobs

At first glance OpenStack, the open source IaaS project for building private and public clouds, is an unstoppable juggernaut – everybody is doing it. Last week OpenStack took the important step of creating a Foundation to manage affairs without being too closely tied to one vendor – founding members are

• Platinum: AT&T, Canonical, HP, IBM, Nebula, Rackspace, Red Hat, SUSE
• Gold: Cisco, ClearPath, Cloudscaling, Dell, DreamHost, ITRI, Mirantis, Morphlabs, NetApp, Piston Cloud Computing, Yahoo!

But more members doesn’t automatically lead to more success. The more competing interests at a project the harder it is to get things done, especially when trying to establish a coherent open source codebase across multiple functions. Compare and contract with its competition- Amazon Web Services, where you have one vendor specifying and building APIs, and one licensed to support them on prem (Eucalyptus). AWS has proven itself to be a formidable engine in this space- it really is a juggernaut.

So the rest of the market all wants to gang up on AWS, which is impressively agile. Getting everyone to agree on stuff to compete is not impossible but it will be hard. The Eclipse Foundation worked because it started with a codebase, and an obvious key supporter in IBM, before opening up to the rest of the market. When I look at the OpenStack members one thing does strike me clearly… which is that these companies already have a track record of working together effectively- on Linux. Of course Linus Torvalds himself played a key role in keeping Linux together over the years, so it will be interesting to see whether an individual emerges as benevolent dictator.   But like I say – we know the vendors mentioned can work together, so this should be critical mass, rather than meltdown.

OpenStack has a ton of challenges to overcome, but fear of AWS should concentrate the minds of members.

disclosure: Canonical, Dell, Red Hat, HP, and IBM are clients.

Handing over developers to an SI. They promptly resign, and somehow you’ll maintain quality at cost. Good luck with that.

#newkingmakers, a follow up to Bjarne Stroustrup on Corporate Programming. Things Are Getting Better. New Kingmakers

IT is talent management.

“Corporate programming is often done to the point where the individual is completely submerged in corporate ‘culture’ with no outlet for unique talents and skills. Corporate practices can be directly hostile to individuals with exceptional skills and initiative in technical matters. I consider such management of technical people cruel and wasteful.”

Bjarne Stroustrup, the Father of C++

Another Robert Brook share. I think things are getting better for developers – or as we think of them at RedMonk – the Talent. If great engineers get treated like shit they can find a new gig. In the age of Github, open source, and the ongoing war for talent, opportunities have never been better. If you’re in an abusive relationship with your employer its time to make a clean break. If you’re a corporate IT shop get wise- the most important role you play today is talent management. Developers are the new Kingmakers. If you can’t keep your developer talent onside you’re not going to get decent business results and outcomes.

Related:  The Prisoner’s Dilemma and the Folly of Keeping Technology Adoption Secret, See also The New Patronage Economy.

If the use of leisure time is confined to looking at TV for a few extra hours every day, we will deteriorate as a people.

Actually, preparation for the use of leisure time should begin with our schoolchildren. The appreciation of many things in which we are not proficient ourselves but which we have learned to enjoy is one of the important things to cultivate in modern education. The arts in every field–music, drama, sculpture, painting–we can learn to appreciate and enjoy. We need not be artists, but we should be able to appreciate the work of artists. Crafts of every kind, the value of things made by hand, by skilled people who love to work with wood or clay or stone will develop taste in our people.

These are all things that can give us joy and many of us will find that we are capable of acquiring a certain amount of skill we never dreamed we had, which will give an outlet to a creative urge. But these things must be taught, and in the age now developing about us they are important things. For if man is to be liberated to enjoy more leisure, he must also be prepared to enjoy this leisure fully and creatively.

For people to have more time to read, to take part in their civic obligations, to know more about how their government functions and who their officials are might mean in a democracy a great improvement in the democratic processes. Let’s begin, then, to think how we can prepare old and young for these new opportunities. Let’s not wait until they come upon us suddenly and we have a crisis that we will be ill prepared to meet.

Eleanor Roosevelt, 1958.

Thanks Robert Brook for sharing that. Roosevelt’s words talk to joy. But we must be active, not passive, in order to meet the crises we face. Democracy can not simply be a consumer activity. Its about making a contribution.

I have been having a bunch of interesting conversations lately with the likes of Layer 7 Technologies, WS02, and SOA Software: companies that were built to tackle SOA governance issues but are now retooling to support Web style APIs, programming models and services.

Web services such as Google Maps have recently started charging for their API above 25,000 calls a day. API throttling remains an issue for startups small and exploded. Every startup has a story about a friend and partner they give API access to, only to find the friend/partner doesn’t stick to agreed load.

Other, “native web” API management players include our client @apigee, and the daddies of media content API-enablement Mashery. But the “enterprisey” folks are coming. What we learnt in SOA, and built for it, will be relevant in the new world of APIs and post WS-* stack. David Linthicum has been ploughing related furrows of late – see for example Perfect fit: The cloud and SOA — but don’t call it that. I am also happy to see the space coalesce because of my Predictions for 2010.

SOA without the SOA. The hard work done by Oracle, SAP and others will begin to bear fruit. Not in terms of the acronyms loved by Architecture Astronauts such as XML Web Services, WSDL, UDDI and other acronyms – but the componentisation of application suites into more modular services makes them far more amenable to web-based integration.

Anyway – if you’d like to know more why check out a webinar I am doing tomorrow with Layer7 on the subject. You should sign up here.

I have been on the road all week so I haven’t had a chance to write up the news about the launch of the IBM PureSystems converged infrastructure line. But I think its kind of a big deal.

PureSystems is a new brand – the first major new IBM brand of the Ginni Rometty era. As I understand it she was directly involved in deciding on the name, which is interesting. We’ve come a long way from calling servers RS/6000s.

Steve Lohr of the NY Times recently argued that IBM and Apple aren’t all that different. He has a point in that both companies believe in vertical integration and systems thinking. We should be careful of the parallels – the two are obviously incredibly different in terms of business model. But there is no doubt that IBM will have taken great heart from Apple’s destruction of the Wintel lock on the industry. Apple’s resurgence may have begun when it made the decision to adopt Intel chips in its laptops but new form factors – namely the iPod, iPhone and now the iPad have driven a fundamental break with the past. IBM wants to do the same thing in the data center – with a high margin high value integrated system which runs Intel or IBM’s own POWER chips. The margins are of course better the more IBM and less Intel gear is in the system. That’s where the Apple IBM  parallel comes into focus. Another similarity is IBM’s push to have application partners running on the new boxes at launch. The PureSystems site includes a catalog of third party apps customers can buy preinstalled. Unlike Apple, IBM doesn’t have a billing engine to support all this goodness, which I think is a bit of an Achilles heel, but enterprise licensing is not usually amenable to simplicity.

The excellent Timothy Prickett Morgan of El Reg talks to the technical details here.

Its worth noting that Cisco has been kicking ass and taking names against the traditional server vendors with its UCS converged systems, so there is clearly a market for this stuff, and IBM can’t afford to cede too much ground in this arena.

I will be keeping a close eye on PureSystems adoption and ecosystem. This may not be IBM’s iPad moment, but IBM has the bit between its teeth. Next step – integrating OpenStack, which IBM also announced it is supporting this week [that's another blog post on the todo list], into PureSystems.

related:

What if IBM Got Simple? 

IBM Systems and Technology Group: Redesigning for Developers.

How Tivoli Acquired IBM. On Pulse 2012 and Cultural Change for Smarter Computing.

Smarter Computing: An Agenda For (Re)Packaging IBM Software and Systems in the Age of The Cloud.

disclosure: IBM is a client. Cisco and Apple are not.

Last week I went to Eclipsecon 2012 in Reston, Virginia. I haven’t been to the event for a couple of years so it was great to catch up with so many friends and clients, and take the pulse of the ecosystem.

So what struck me about the State of the Eclipse Nation in 2012?

Firstly – the Asians are coming. The numbers are frankly pretty staggering. Over the last year Eclipse downloads have spiked, from 1.2m to 2m a year. Why? A lot of the new traffic is in Asia. While it shouldn’t surprise us that Samsung engineers are downloading Android IDEs like topsy, what did blow me away was a stat shared by Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director of the Eclipse foundation- when he told us that while Germany used to be the main country for Eclipse downloads, recently Vietnam had caught them up. That’s right- Vietnam is now downloading Eclipse as much as Germany is. What follows? I would say this sounds like a pretty good leading indicator for investments in Vietnam.

So I mentioned Samsung and Android – certainly Google’s embrace of Eclipse for the Android IDE and SDK has been a massive filip for Eclipse. Every time a developer goes to Google for the IDE it sends them to Eclipse. Whatever you think of Java, Android is clearly a hot and growing market, and while Google faces significant challenges managing the ecosystem, the growth is undoubtedly good news for Eclipse relevancy.

I look forward to seeing whether the Eclipse Foundation can turn downloads into engagement though – anyone for a trip to Saigon? ready to brush up on your Vietnamese? We have yet to see the level of IP sharing and contribution from Asian companies that we have seen in the US and Europe, but that could be a matter of time. The opportunity is there for Eclipse to engage.

In Virginia this year Eclipse introduced a new sister event- the Agile ALM conference. Some of the content was outstanding – notably the keynote by client and friend of RedMonk Mik Kersten from Tasktop Technologies. Kersten managed to tie together the management theory of Peter Drucker and Devops Borat, as well sa plotting animated graphs of the Mylyn committer community’s evolution over time. The theme for Mik’s talk was the Code Social Graph…

In my talk at the event I went over some of the same material but with a slightly different perspective. My argument is that for the next wave of PaaS, ALM will not be an option, but a core function. One of the most interesting companies in Java right now is Cloudbees (another client) precisely because its building out a PaaS based on Kohsuke Kawaguchi‘s Jenkins continuous integration server. We should use the opportunity of PaaS to kill Waterfall once and for all. While the Apache Software Foundation is making a play to be the natural home for NoSQL projects, Eclipse wants to bring the next gen ALM – which touches DevOps.

Check out the slides for my talk: Cloud First: On forking, forging and foraging

disclosure: clients mentioned, paid my own T&E

I have been very much enjoying robertbrook’s daily newsletter – in case you’re not on trend tinyletter is the new blogging. Talking of being on trend however, Robert’s newsletter today pointed to a wonderful blog called Vélo-City-Girl, which is described as

East London Girl on a Pashley, blogging about cycling & fashion. And anything that happens in between on two wheels.

So this is a crisply written blog, with great photos, all about looking fashionable while riding around East London. How cool is that? Its one thing to fashion blog about cycle clothing brands like Vulpine, wearing the looks you’re reviewing.

But Lady Vélo is all about cross-cutting. So for example, while H&M’s new collection has generated thousands of column inches in the press and just as many Tumblr tags, how many of those reviewers looked at Marni in terms of how its accessories would look while riding a bike?

 Those chunky bracelets, big statement necklaces, ribbons, wood, beads & acrylic magic… it was all there. The preview confirmed the capsule collection was gorgeous; and at a more affordable price, I had to have some of it. As I’ve been planning out my Spring Cycling wardrobe already (which consists of me spying random items I love and mixing them up with what I already have), throwing in some of the bobby-dazzlers from Marni would be perfect… the fact I could already see them going well with the black of the Pashley and catching the glimmer of the sun as I cycled through the city was indication enough of how much these were a “WANT”.

A story of small objects of desire, and enforced scarcity (the H&M website basically crashed under demand for the Marni) perhaps – but more than that a story about looking good on a bike in lovely Spring Weather. Like I say – what the web was made for. Blogging is now a staple, rather than a fad, and it will be around for a long time to come.

And of course it turns out that cycle fashion blogging is a rich subculture, as illustrated by Lady Vélo’s favourite blogs – such as Copenhagen Cycle Chic. and London Cycle Chic.

In all the excitement about Pinterest, or whatever new service is getting the most breathless coverage, its easy to forget how refreshing blogging was in the first place: voices from the grassroots, unmediated by PR, a place to celebrate and curate, without needing anyone’s permission.