Thursday, May 1, 2014

Technology: It's Just a ... (Meaningful one of two sentence summaries)

One of the frustrating experiences in technology is trying to find out what some new thing is really all about and where it fits in. You can read tons of marketing materials and still not got the gist. Then sometime later when you are talking to someone else (with a deep technical background) who is familiar with the new thing, they say "Oh, it's just a foo with bar" or "It's similar to foo but does bar" and that causes a lightbulb to go off and you just grok what the new thing is and where it fits in.

I had one of those moments today, Slightly buried in the FAQ, for Red Hat buying Inktank, there was this two sentence summary that makes the relationship between Gluster and Ceph/Inktank clear:
Inktank has a more mature block interface and OpenStack integration, while Gluster has a more mature file system interface and traditional web storage integration. Therefore, the two complement each other very well and we believe the combination is a very attractive alternative to traditional proprietary storage.
To me, that was the Ah-Ha! description that I needed.   Sometimes I wish there was a place that had these sort of short nutshell summaries that was written by technical people for technical people.