When we started Rancher in 2014, our vision was to enable enterprise IT to procure and utilize computing resources (“cattle”) from any infrastructure provider. We were extremely lucky to be able to leverage wonderful technologies like Kubernetes which made computing resources consistent across all infrastructure providers.

I fly a lot. Mercifully, not as much as your typical road warrior type, but enough where I’ve developed a routine on travel days. If it’s a good weather day, then I’ll hear the pilot announce, “We’ll be cruising at 33,000 ft. and expect clear skies all the way to our destination.” And if there’s lots of clouds? There’s auto-pilot, air traffic control and radar available to do some of the heavy lifting. That got me to thinking.

Gartner Catalyst Conference 2019 is consistently a great venue for learning, sharing, and connecting. OpsRamp was a silver sponsor at this year’s event and our seven-member contingent had a wonderful time meeting with industry thought leaders, demoing OpsRamp to senior IT executives, and having fun in the streets of San Diego. In this post, I will summarize the most interesting themes that stood out from the conference keynotes and sessions, as well as other key takeaways from the week.

Containers and serverless computing are two of today’s hottest technologies for application deployment. When used the right way, they both help DevOps teams to deploy applications faster and more cost-effectively. Although the features of containers and serverless architectures overlap in some respects, they are not interchangeable technologies. Containers work better for some use cases, while in others, serverless is what you need.

If anyone asks: what is a patch? we have to abandon the semantic field of piracy and go to serious and technical things, so to speak.