Containers, cloud, blockchain, AI – it's all the same old BS, says veteran Red Hatter
- Reference: 1770553808
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2026/02/08/waves_of_tech_bs/
- Source link:
During a coffee break at this year's [1]CentOS Connect conference , The Reg FOSS desk paused for a chat with a developer who was surprised but happy to find us there. We won't name them – we're sure that they'd prefer to keep their job rather than enjoy a moment of fame – but we much enjoyed their pithy summary of how IT has faced repeated waves of corporate bullshit for at least 15 years now, and how they keenly and enthusiastically anticipate a large-scale financial collapse [2]bursting the AI bubble .
This vulture has been working in the tech field for some 38 years now, and the Linux developer we spoke with has been in the business nearly as long. We both agreed that the late 20th century – broadly, the period from the early 1990s onward for a decade or so – had mostly been one of fairly steady improvement. Then, they suggested, roughly following the [3]2008 credit crunch , we've had some 15 years of bullshit in tech.
[4]
They called out about half a dozen particular instances of what they considered to be bullshit technology. We were too busy laughing sympathetically to whip out a laptop to make notes, but as best as we can recall the sequence, they were:
Containers
Kubernetes
The "Cloud"
Anything at all "as a Service"
The Blockchain – anything, everything, based on it
And now, arguably the biggest and worst of all, "generative AI"
Adding back some of the rather invective-laden commentary…
Containers: Sure, yes, they work, they are handy for testing. But they aren't a deployment method. You shouldn't need them. Anything that you can run in a container, you can just run on the bare metal, and if you're not competent enough to get – and keep – that working, then you probably aren't competent enough to deploy a container either.
[5]
[6]
Kubernetes: If you don't need containers, then you don't need another vastly more complicated tool to deploy those containers. The chances are, you are not a vast multinational that must be able to withstand ten million potential new customers visiting your site all at once. It won't happen, so you won't lose any of that imaginary business.
(This is sometimes known as the [7]Use One Big Server approach, and in our humble opinion, it has great merit.)
[8]
The cloud: Nebulous by name and by nature. Who thought it was smart to take all your company's important data and hand it to some internet rando – probably the lowest bidder – trusting them to store the crown jewels, keep them safe, and never ever peek at them. If that sounds reasonable to you, maybe you should try selling [9]homeopathy .
[10]Study backer: Catastrophic takes on Agile overemphasize new features
[11]Microsoft spends billions on AI, converts just 3.3% of Copilot Chat users
[12]Blockchain is bullsh!t, prove me wrong meets 'chain gang fans at tech confab
[13]Admins wonder if the cloud was such a good idea after all
(This can be summarized as [14]There Is No Cloud – There's Just Somebody Else's Computer , and was being [15]spelled out in clear language in 2015.)
Anything "as a service" – it doesn't matter what: Infrastructure as a service – if you need servers, buy servers, or rent your own private servers. Nobody else will ever care as much about your servers as you will. Platform as a Service – now you don't even get servers, just OS instances. That's even worse. Software as a Service? Now you don't even know what the server is, or where it is, or what it's running; you don't get software, and you don't even know what data you have or how it's stored – you're paying for access to your own stuff.
(The problems with this entire concept arguably go back to [16]Peter Deutsch's Fallacies of Network Computing some 30 years ago.)
The blockchain, and anything built on the blockchain: the world's slowest and most-distributed database. Cryptocurrencies? [17]Hashcash on the blockchain. [18]NFTs – URL shorteners on the blockchain, only they're longer rather than shorter. [19]Worthless . Web3? [20]Get ripped off, as a service .
[21]
Which brings us round to "generative AI" or, as we prefer to term them, large language models, powered by the transformer algorithm. If The Financial Times can [22]explain how it works to a banker in a couple of thousand words and a few minutes, it can't be that complicated or hard to understand, and it isn't. It's predictive text [23]turned up to 11 . It can't even count. As Daniel Stenberg, author of curl, [24]caustically observed :
The "i" in "LLM" stands for intelligence.
(This vulture laid out some of his case against it when [25]Gentoo and NetBSD banned LLM bot slop in 2024.)
Honestly, we can't fault any of this reasoning. We've looked into the chronological sequence of the waves of marketing drivel, and it's not quite how we expected. Although the earliest [26]mention of Salesforce.com we can find on The Reg is from 2002, when we called it "relatively new," it was [27]founded in 1999 . Perhaps the first mass SaaS offering to the general public was [28]Google's Gmail in 2004 .
Cloud computing in the sense of automatic creation and deployment of VMs arguably dates to Amazon taking [29]Amazon Web Services live in 2002 .
Whoever "Satoshi Nakamoto" is or was, [30]their paper [PDF] introducing Bitcoin was published in 2008, although it didn't [31]come to The Reg's attention until 2011.
2008 was also the year that the first version of LXC (you can still find version 0.1.0 on the [32]downloads page ) was released. Docker [33]debuted in 2013 but your humble correspondent had predicted that [34]Linux containers would be the Next Big Thing a couple of years earlier, back in 2011. We reckon we called it.
[35]Kubernetes first appeared in 2014, although Google had been running "Borg" internally since around 2008. We still harbor a cynical suspicion that Mountain View threw it over the wall for no other reason than to distract the Penguinisti and keep them busy.
So in chronological order, those are:
1999: SaaS
2002: Cloud computing goes mainstream with AWS
2004: SaaS reaches the general public
2008: LXC frees application containers from FreeBSD's Jail and brings them to Linux… and Bitcoin delivers full industrial-scale mass-production of the ancient scam of the pyramid scheme
2014: Kubernetes is loosed upon an all-too-willing tech world
2022: ChatGPT opens to the public, or as The Reg calls it, [36]another AI to fill the world with kinda-true stuff
All right, yes, rather more than 15 years. "A century of tech BS" seems a bit over the top when it's only 2026, but it certainly feels that long.
Obviously there are many more potential candidates, but we thought this was an excellent top six. Some of the other contenders are more niche, from the [37]eternally awful Jira to the project managers' religion of [38]Agile . Which of your bêtes noires did we miss? ®
Get our [39]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/05/centos_coming_to_riscv_soon/
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/20/amazon_ceo_andy_jassy_ai_bubble/
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2008/03/31/small_biz_credit_crunch/
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2aYjBNc83fUqKMiMkGKODkQAAA8k&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aYjBNc83fUqKMiMkGKODkQAAA8k&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aYjBNc83fUqKMiMkGKODkQAAA8k&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://specbranch.com/posts/one-big-server/
[8] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aYjBNc83fUqKMiMkGKODkQAAA8k&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[9] https://www.howdoeshomeopathywork.com/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/07/agile_catastrophes_risk_undermining_the/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/02/microsoft_ai_spend_copilot/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2019/02/15/blockchain_week_2019/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/04/cloud_buyers_regret/
[14] https://thereisno.cloud/
[15] https://pocketnow.com/no-such-thing-as-the-cloud/
[16] https://web.archive.org/web/20070811082651/http://java.sys-con.com/read/38665.htm
[17] http://www.hashcash.org/
[18] https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/12/beeple_nft_sold/
[19] https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/21/95_percent_nfts_worthless/
[20] https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/15/web3_apparently_the_next_generation/
[21] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aYjBNc83fUqKMiMkGKODkQAAA8k&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[22] https://ig.ft.com/generative-ai/
[23] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/these-go-to-11-spinal-tap
[24] https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/01/02/the-i-in-llm-stands-for-intelligence/
[25] https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/18/distros_ai_code/
[26] https://www.theregister.com/2002/02/27/ms_takes_a_tilt/
[27] https://www.salesforce.com/news/stories/the-history-of-salesforce/
[28] https://www.theregister.com/2004/04/01/google_launches_email_takes/
[29] https://www.theregister.com/2002/07/18/amazon_opens_web_services/
[30] https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
[31] https://www.theregister.com/2011/06/08/bitcoin_under_attack/
[32] https://linuxcontainers.org/fr/lxc/downloads/
[33] https://www.theregister.com/2013/09/19/wtf_is_containerisation_and_why_are_red_hat_and_dotcloud_doing_it/
[34] https://www.theregister.com/2011/07/18/brief_history_of_virtualisation_part_3/
[35] https://www.theregister.com/2014/06/12/google_discovers_it_must_expose_itself_to_compete_with_aws/
[36] https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/03/in_brief_ai/
[37] https://ifuckinghatejira.com/
[38] https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/05/agile_failure_rates/
[39] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: "Which of your bêtes noires did we miss?"
The whole Devops thing and their "cattle not pets" saying. They're not pets, they're workhorses and like any workhorse, are valuable, looked after carefully and well fed because their work is valuable.
Re: "Which of your bêtes noires did we miss?"
> The whole Devops thing
And another worthy addition.
Re: "Which of your bêtes noires did we miss?"
In addition its how devops seems to think by saying that they can bypass change control. Same goes for security. The important thing about change control is that you get other eyes on the change, off load blame when things go wrong and more importantly deal with conflict management before sh*t hits the fan.
Re: "Which of your bêtes noires did we miss?"
> Internet of things.
Excellent point. Added to the notional list.
I think RH isn't really in that market -- yet -- but it's getting very keen on car OSes. It has a new offering called RHIVOS or something.
Saying that, and with my sceptical face on, if they want to lend me a review car, I probably won't say no...
The idea that Microsoft desktop products are still remotely safe?
My personal opinion is that losing Microsoft products from the desktop (as most of it is now cloudy anyway, but that's another problem) would not have the significant impact Microsoft cult members predict it to be, and would be a heck of a lot cheaper due to the lower impact on productivity that practivally ANY alternative has. But hey, manhours are a separate budget, right?
How could you forget
microservices???
Re: How could you forget
Serverless, Data lakes, Web3, Metaverse, Event-driven everything, Zero trust, Edge computing, Ajax...
betes noires
Deploy early, rely on the end users to do your beta testing and fix tge errors later if you can be botgered. If your bank deplyed barely tested crud that messed up your account you'd be livud so why is it OK for you to do it?
Full disclosure, I spent my entire computing career working on real time operational support systems for the blue light communitu. Every thing we deployed had to work as expected from day one and go on working 24/7 because sometimes luves really did depend on it. Our test cycle was two or three times longer than the industry average, but our error rates in deployed code were only one tenth of the average.
Metaverse
Metaverse: hardly a technical term in the industry jargon, but it certainly made a (thankfully, very brief) splash in marketing newspeak a few years ago.
I also hear that some company out there actually went and changed their name to "Meta".
That would be the IT equivalent of the guy down the pub with the "Exploited" tattoo on their neck.
"If that sounds reasonable to you, maybe you should try selling homeopathy."
More likely, if it sounds reasonable you'd be buying it. Selling it needs no more than keeping a straight face, a water supply and some bottles.
Aargh
I'm going to have to tear myself away and go do something else. i could spend all afternoon going dow the rabbit holes of all those links.
Containers
while I wholeheartedly agree with almost all the points, I have to put down the foot at containers. Argument that "you can run it as easily without them" quickly breaks apart if yoy try to run a bunch of services (for own needs, not some corporate bullshit that theys so much loath, where yoi can have "one service per machine deployment") that may have conflicting requirements.... "oh, your distribution updated / failed to uodated the database to version X that we supoort and require? tough luck".
With containers I don't have to give a flying Duck about those and not fear that one would break the other.
But I aldo like things nice and tidy and organised...
A counter-example?
I have seen it argued that containerisation can increase security. Each service runs in its own VM, so if one gets pwned then the fallout is limited.
OTOH all the extra complications add to the attack surface and patching burden, increasing the likelihood that something or other /will/ get pwned.
Thoughts welcome.
Re: A counter-example?
I think it's a problem when a service is delivered as a container, and that is the only way to deploy it. It's an issue when the design is so fragile that's necessary.
On the other hand, I've been fiddling around with jails under FreeBSD and they provide several advantages. It could be argued that jails are unnecessary if services were better designed - in particular being able to easily support multiple instances, and config files. However that's not the situation, so I have a number of different jails each running unbound and/or other services, each with a separate IP address and all running on a standard port.
It makes it much easier to manage, and the jail and all the services and configuration inside it can be easily brought up and down, so yes, I can see the advantages of some containerisation.
If I *had* to run a service that uses 15,000 python or other web components which are managed automagically by a dependencies manager it also seems safer to stick it in a container. Yes, obviously there are ways of sandboxing Python etc too, but that's also another level of hassle. Of course my preference is not to run a service where you can't easily monitor and check all the dependencies.
Re: A counter-example?
> Each service runs in its own VM,
Containers only feel a bit like VMs. Technically they are just groups of processes on your host (VM or bare metal) locked into specific cgroup environments.
However, used correctly containers can in fact improve security by restricting e.g. a shell session spawned by an RCE to that cgroup environment and a mostly virtual file system, preventing infection of the host or other containers.
Agile ?
As in "We have no idea which version you - or indeed we - actually had working. (If ever)"
Remote desktop
Hit in the early 00s, suddenly everything had to be remote. It was a relatively short hype cycle before things settled down, it started to be used properly, and the hype died.
The funniest part was some architectures where an application sent a huge print file up a not particularly fast broadband connection to the print server, which then sent the data back down the line to the local printer..
Second Life/Metaverse. More a consumer thing, but there was the first wave when everyone would supposedly spend all their time in a virtual environment, and it turns out the public don't actually want a permanently online avatar based cyberpunk existence.
Then VR hits, starts to get some actual traction beyond earlier experiments, and Meta think they can do Second Life but in VR, and that everyone will want to interact that way. Turns out again, they don't, and people fundamentally don't want to strap equipment to their head all the time.
JIRA
I used to think JIRA was the worst - but now I have to use MS Azure devops - which is so bad it almost makes JIRA look good.
Re: JIRA
Classic at morning stand up:
"Does the JIRA load for you guys?"
"Where is this ticket?"
"Could you let us know the ticket number? I can't find it!"
"It's in child tickets. Open this one and go down to list, 5th from the top"
"Shall I close the other two tickets as we seem to have duplicates?"
"Why these tickets are assigned to me?"
"Who moved that ticket?"
I totally agree
As a 55 years old linux admin, I totally agree to all of the points in this article.
The Cloud is just someone else's computer
My memory may be at fault here, but I have a strong impression Jon Honeyball over at PC Pro magazine was saying that regularly a long time before 2015. I guess nobody listened.
Browsers.
Browsers.
I hate browsers.
All of them.
They all have their own particular ways of irritating me but they all have them.
They all crash.
They're all vulnerable to thousands of exploits that we don't even know about until we read about them in el Reg.
I fucking hate browsers.
I know, I know, I'm using one now. It crashed yesterday for the first time in nearly a week (when I tried to look at the rainfall radar to see if I'd get wet when I went to the shop on my bike).
"Which of your bêtes noires did we miss?"
Internet of things. It is getting ridiculous the household appliances that are being hooked up to the internet with associated apps (and terrible security). e.g. dishwashers, fridges and toasters.