Why does the Cloud Native Computing Foundation now host more than 30 projects? Why are cloud-based startups coming out of the woodwork with narrow point solutions? Mostly just so users can have a better time with an application. But it’s all getting a bit weedy. How can enterprises pick out the right technologies from the aisles of them?

“It’s really easy to forget that infrastructure is not a thing in its own right — it’s solely there to enable applications and to enable other things,” said Steve Herrod (pictured), managing director at General Catalyst Partners LLC.

The key, he advised: Keep the application’s real requirements top of mind when sorting through new infrastructure and tooling. Established enterprises, in particular, have compatibility issues that from-scratch startup don’t, according to Herrod. When they bring home a new baby, is the existing technology going to throw a hissy fit?

Herrod spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event in Seattle. They discussed the blessing and curse of the big, fat ecosystem around cloud and cloud-native technology. 

What’s the point of all these point solutions?

If enterprises bought each new product that scratched some mosquito bite in their operations, they’d soon be buried in them.

“This is chaos in terms of the number of startups doing very specific point solutions,” Herrod said. Companies have to think hard about how big (read: expensive) a problem is before they pay for a new tool. And does this product take a small bite out of it or obliterate it?

“Every single time I make an investment, I ask, how does this do something 10 times better than something else? And is that important to the company?” Herrod explained. They should look carefully at open-source tools from CNCF and others, he added.

But with the number of CNCF tools as large as it is now, some might wonder if another OpenStack has been created. That wasn’t the sentiment at the show, though. The tools all have a place; some are more enterprise-ready than others, and CNCF is making compatibility among them a priority.

“I look at, how are you going to digest this with your other tools and the other processes that you have in place?” Herrod concluded.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s extensive coverage of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon:

Photo: SiliconANGLE