It's all sarcastic. It's poking fun at how trendy advances might not necessarily be better than what existed before, as well as how much complexity is involved in them. It makes the most sense if you're already familiar with the concepts in the article (Docker, Heroku, CoreOS, etcd, and so on), and happenings in the technology industry related to them.
As usual, if a joke needs to be explained (to a person) then it's not funny (to them). I found this amusing since it aligned with my experiences:
> -Since no-one understands Paxos, this guy Diego…
> Oh, you know him?
> -No, he works at CoreOS. Anyway, Diego built Raft for his PhD thesis cause Paxos was too hard. Wicked smart dude. And then he wrote etcd as an implementation, and Aphyr said it wasn’t shit.
> What’s Aphyr?
> -Aphyr is that guy who wrote, ‘Call Me Maybe.’ You know, the distributed systems and BDSM guy?
> What? Did you say BDSM?
There are several jokes here based on cultural references related to the aforementioned topics.
