Google Cloud sits a distant third in the cloud wars (ignoring the Chinese cloud companies, which are pretty much irrelevant to Western markets as they face a Huawei-or-the-highway reckoning). With a cloud infrastructure business generally estimated to be between a quarter or a third the size of Microsoft Azure, which in turn is about half…

“CAPEX rules everything around me…” Coming from a very asset-light software background (“You get a new laptop! You get a new laptop!”), I was enthralled by the very different set of skills and materials necessary to combine with software to build large scale data centers in the early 2000s. That fascination turned into an early…

A mighty albeit abstruse debate rages: whether commercial open source companies can withstand and/or deserve to withstand the immense and feature-crushing gravitational pull of the public cloud black holes. While others far more versed (or at least self-interested) in the metaphysical intersection of open source ideals and cold, hard economics furiously deliberate the stakeholders’ putative…