SaltStack was purchased (pending approvals and all that legal stuff) this past week by VMware. As has been a theme in my newsletters over the last few weeks you’re starting to see a lot of M&A’s happening. I imagine more will occur before the end of the year! Companies are trying to move fast and snap up hot technology so they can position themselves better for their enterprise customers in the next year. An exciting time to be in a Cloud-Native/centric startup for sure!
You can read more about the purchase here on SaltStack’s site and VMware’s post on it as well. Here’s a quote from VMware around one of the reasons for the purchase:
Once closed, SaltStack will allow us to deliver full-stack automation from infrastructure to applications with the ability to do software configuration inside VMs and containers. SaltStack has built a phenomenal open source community, which we will continue to grow and foster consistent with our open source strategy. And while our strategy has been one of supporting best-in-class choice of supporting configuration management, we believe many customers will want something simple and integrated.
For those that are not aware of SaltStack, they are an open-source automation and provisioning tool ala Ansible/Puppet/Chef/Terraform. I have never used it but am familiar with it from a competitor landscape and it looks to be an impressive set of tools and technology. If you’re familiar with YAML, Python, etc then leveraging a tool like SaltStack should be pretty easy to learn and use.
SaltStack is an open-source project with their GitHub page listing all their repos. Like a number of FOSS tools, they offer Enterprise features for pay whereas their community and open-source features are available for anyone to utilize.
Tech Geek Link of the Week:
I should leave it just like that. It’s an amazing tool and our Sales Architecture team is starting to use this for technical presentations, RFPs, etc. It is a gamechanger from a visual, tracking, and sales perspective.
A quick synopsis: Typically a lot of SOW’s are and technical reference/architecture proposals are sent over in a .pdf or .doc/.docx format. As great as those tools are they have limitations. PandaDoc is taking a different approach with how they format, track, and allow collaborative viewing/editing of these types of documents. By having templates, and being able to re-use content from previous documents in a simple manner it allows teams to rapidly build and send out these documents to customers and then track the open rate and interaction with them.
If you are involved with customers and sending out proposals, quotes, RFP’s, etc then take a look at PandaDoc.
[And no, they did not sponsor this message :)]
Tweet of the Week
Read the whole thread. I know it’s not K8S or even Cloud-Native related but awesome to hear stories like this. I wish Jessica’s friend well (no idea who she is) and I hope this spurs more mentorship with folks trying to re-establish their lives outside of <insert whatever here>.
Knowledge Overload
Few upcoming webinars, conferences, & tech articles around cool tech for those interested:
eBook: Kubernetes Security ~ Free
URL: DevOp’ish ~ Free. Great content around DevOps. Newsletter available as well!
Conference: Observability Con - [October 26 - 29] ~ Virtual, Free
Conference: HashiConf Digital - [October 12 - 15] ~ Virtual, Free
The Mental Break
(image courtesy of UncorkedAsheville.com)
So the apple part of this newsletter deals with the wonderful apples, apple cider, apple donuts, and more that are in abundance in Western North Carolina. South of Asheville, NC in the area of Hendersonville and Bat Cave (I love that town name!) are a number of apple orchards. This is the time of the year to head out to pick apples, get cider, eat delicious donuts, and fried apple pie!
If you’re near this area or have apple orchards neat where you live then go take a day and head out with the family. Enjoy those amazing apples! And our family favorite apple is the Mutsu variety!
Here’s a link describing some of the local orchards - https://www.uncorkedasheville.com/apple-orchards-in-hendersonville-nc/
Now to go on an apple overload for the next few weeks!
That’s it for this issue!
Thanks for reading! Love to get your thoughts, comments, and suggestions for improving the content of this newsletter.
Oh, and please share! :D