Coté
Gartner forecast dampens cloud repatriation outlook - Pretty thorough round-up of recent analyst stuff, and even the GIECO angle.
Private cloud is just fine, and here to stay, so build a great platform for yourself
I did a second interview with the GM of my division at work, Tanzu. The first one was about Prunima’s career in IT management and, now, cloud. This second one is all about private cloud. Here’s a video except:
Here’s a summary from our AI friend:
When it comes to cloud infrastructure, Purnima Padmanabhan, Tanzu GM, highlights that customers often require both private and public clouds, depending on their application needs. She outlines several reasons why people choose to maintain, even prefer private cloud:
Data Gravity - Applications running in private clouds often handle large volumes of data. Transferring this data to and fro other environments is challenging, and costly, especially when integrating advanced analytics or AI/ML capabilities. Keeping the data within the private cloud minimizes complexity and enhances performance.
Ecosystem Gravity - Applications frequently interact with other systems such as ERP, supply chain, ordering systems, and other applications and services. Hosting all these interconnected applications within the same private environment improves performance and reduces latency. It ensures seamless integration, as applications do not operate in isolation.
Control Over Governance, Privacy, and Regulation - Private cloud infrastructures offer greater control over data management, helping organizations comply with governance policies, privacy standards, and regulatory requirements. Customers feel more secure managing sensitive data within their own infrastructure, where they can enforce strict controls.
Effectiveness and Familiarity of Private Cloud - Many organizations find that their applications run efficiently on existing private infrastructures. Instead of migrating to public clouds, they can enhance their private environments by implementing platforms that make it easier for developers to build and update applications. This approach provides the needed flexibility without the complexities of a public cloud migration, often leading to better outcomes.
There’s more in my full interview with her in the Tanzu Talk podcast feed.
Relative to your interests
Customer-centric applications: Heroku simplifies deployments - "Heroku’s owned by Salesforce,” she noted. “Heroku’s philosophy is like, ‘Hey, you know what? The undifferentiated heavy lifting for a lot of people is building your platform. You should spend the time building your business, building your app.’ The integrations that we provide, we unlock a ton of capabilities for all the creators bringing business analysts like sales ops, marketing ops people together with developers to build the best workflows and automations”” // Here’s to the dream of hiding Kubernetes from app developers working this time! Not only working, but having the industry actually stick to it instead of tearing it down to the IaaS studs once some cool new IaaS layer comes along in 5 years.
Platform Engineering as a Service - It’s like DevOps, but you centralize and standardize the platform: ‘This is where Platform Engineering comes in. Rather than having each development team own their entire infrastructure stack, platform engineering provides a centralized, productized approach to infrastructure and developer tools. It’s about creating reusable, self-service platforms that development teams can leverage to build, deploy, and scale their applications efficiently. These platforms abstract away the complexities of cloud infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, and security, enabling developers to focus on writing code rather than managing infrastructure or “glue”.’
Red Hat to Donate Podman Along With Other Container Tools to CNCF - “Red Hat reports Podman Desktop has been downloaded more than 1.5 million times and like other Red Hat tools is currently optimized to be used in conjunction with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). The tools will now be further advanced initially as sandbox-level projects under the auspices of the CNCF.”
Alternatives To Typical Technical Illustrations And Data Visualisations - These look cool, but I had to spend a lot of time figuring them out. Bar charts are boring, but they’re efficient. Still, I want to try some of these.
Elon Musk hints at plan to sink DOGE’s teeth into legacy tech - List of old IT in the US government. // Escaping the legacy trap is hard.
Cloud market share shows vendors eyeing a $1T opportunity - “the revenue shares for our eight cloud companies in the combined IaaS/PaaS cloud market at nearly $300 billion projected for 2024. AWS has 36% of this combined market, Microsoft 23% and Google 7%. Alibaba, Oracle Tencent Huawei and IBM combine for around 14% of the market with “Other” (not shown) at 20%.”
Google Cloud growth - “Google Cloud now accounts for 12% of Alphabet’s overall revenue. That’s nearly double the amount from 4 years ago.”
What hacks/tips do you use to make AI work better for you? - "Treating [AI chatbots] like a coach - tell it what you’ve done and need to get done, include any feedback you’ve had, and ask it for suggestions. This particularly helps when you’re some kind of neurospicy and ‘regular human’ responses sort of escape you.”
IMG_0001 - Take a look into random videos from people’s lives from a decade ago: ‘Between 2009 and 2012, iPhones had a built-in “Send to YouTube” button in the Photos app. Many of these uploads kept their default IMG_XXXX filenames, creating a time capsule of raw, unedited moments from random lives.’ // Mesmerizing!
Wastebook
Ignorant urgency.
Some simple premature optimization.
“Give developers and engineers the terrifying responsibility of being in charge of their own spending. Let them enjoy both the upsides and downsides of being adults.” Justin.
“AI as an accountability sink.” Fresh in from Iceland.
“Calling in rich.” Brandon.
“DevOps Activist.”
People don’t like it when you raise prices. Often, they’ll like it less if you disappear.
Logoff
I’ve been working on a video for our annual sales kickoff (SKO). Doing SKO work is always weird. People have so many theories about how to communicate with sales people. Also, as with a lot of internal comms, you can end up with so many fingers on the film that end-up with a Homer Car.
Brandon’s number one theory is that you need to tell them how to make money. I believe this is the most important thing. You could do just the and be done.
There’s a common belief that you have to be brief and high-level, keep in mind simple.
Another one is that you need to speak to the benefit and outcomes of the product you’re highlighting - which is another way of going over he problems solved.
My theory is that you also need to tell sales people who to find in an organization, what their problems are, and how your product can solve their problem. If you do person-to-person sales (not just through the web, PLG, demand gen - whatever), you also need to give them some conversations to have.
We’ll see!
Outro: It’s Tuesday, all day today. I recommend this 39 minute 45 second track. And if you don’t have time for that, here’s what you want.
What hacks/tips do you use to make AI work better for you? - “Treating [AI chatbots] like a coach - tell it what you’ve done and need to get done, include any feedback you’ve had, and ask it for suggestions. This particularly helps when you’re some kind of neurospicy and ‘regular human’ responses sort of escape you.”
Red Hat to Donate Podman Along With Other Container Tools to CNCF - “Red Hat reports Podman Desktop has been downloaded more than 1.5 million times and like other Red Hat tools is currently optimized to be used in conjunction with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). The tools will now be further advanced initially as sandbox-level projects under the auspices of the CNCF."
Alternatives To Typical Technical Illustrations And Data Visualisations - These look cool, but I had to spend a lot of time figuring them out. Bar charts are boring, but they’re efficient. Still, I want to try some of these.
Platform Engineering as a Service - It’s like DevOps, but you centralize and standardize the platform: ‘This is where Platform Engineering comes in. Rather than having each development team own their entire infrastructure stack, platform engineering provides a centralized, productized approach to infrastructure and developer tools. It’s about creating reusable, self-service platforms that development teams can leverage to build, deploy, and scale their applications efficiently. These platforms abstract away the complexities of cloud infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, and security, enabling developers to focus on writing code rather than managing infrastructure or “glue”.'
Platform Engineering as a Service - It’s like DevOps, but you centralize and standardize the platform: ‘This is where Platform Engineering comes in. Rather than having each development team own their entire infrastructure stack, platform engineering provides a centralized, productized approach to infrastructure and developer tools. It’s about creating reusable, self-service platforms that development teams can leverage to build, deploy, and scale their applications efficiently. These platforms abstract away the complexities of cloud infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, and security, enabling developers to focus on writing code rather than managing infrastructure or “glue”.'
IMG_0001 - Take a look into random videos from people’s lives from a decade ago: ‘Between 2009 and 2012, iPhones had a built-in “Send to YouTube” button in the Photos app. Many of these uploads kept their default IMG_XXXX filenames, creating a time capsule of raw, unedited moments from random lives.’ // Mesmerizing!
Cloud market share shows vendors eyeing a $1T opportunity - “the revenue shares for our eight cloud companies in the combined IaaS/PaaS cloud market at nearly $300 billion projected for 2024. AWS has 36% of this combined market, Microsoft 23% and Google 7%. Alibaba, Oracle Tencent Huawei and IBM combine for around 14% of the market with “Other” (not shown) at 20%."
How to write better conclusions
Use the last paragraph for something fun
Watching the video is more fun, but here’s he transcript you can’t be bothered:
The way you learn to write a conclusion to an essay or a paper or whatever kind of text you're writing in school: just totally forget that.
What you want to do when you write a conclusion is not summarize what you've done, return to your argument, and say how you've proven it out or whatever. You do that before the conclusion.
What you want to do in a conclusion is introduce a new idea, a new insight. I think of this as a treat that you're adding at the end. You don't have to discuss it that much. You don't have to prove it out. You're just throwing something out there that kind of intuitively connects and makes sense, or that you're just gonna say and possit.
For example, let's say you just wrote some text arguing that the croissant is the superior pastry. What you might do is spell that out, reach the conclusion, summarize why it's done, state that therefore the croissant is the best.
But in your conclusion paragraph, you can say, Oh, and one last thing, if you're really in a hard spot and you don't have tacos available, you can also slice up a croissant, smash it on a griddle and make a makeshift quesadilla out of it.
This creates a memorable thing at the end, something that's fun, instead of just being kind of like an obligatory summing up of stuff. It makes your essay more memorable and also more enjoyable to write.
So next time you're writing some chunk of text, do your conclusion in the middle of the essay, kind of summarizing things, and add an interesting note, a little dessert item, a snack at the end.
Stay in the sandbox - Software Defined Talk #493
This week’s episode: “we cover OpenCost’s big incubation milestone, CNCF's graduation rules, and a flurry of tech acquisitions. Plus, some thoughts on teaching kids about passwords.”
You can listen to it, or watch the unedited video version if you prefer.
Relative to your interests
Moving off an AS/400 will take a couple years, discussion in reddit.
Twelve Factor project has been open-sourced by Salesforce - “Heroku is replatforming on Kubernetes.”
3 Hour Layover in Schiphol - My tips on what to do during a 3 hour layover at Schiphol.
Cooking eggs with an espresso machine - This looks like the creamy texture of hotel eggs, except with fresh eggs instead of powder. Also, finally a use for that wand thing on my coffee machine.
US presidential election impact: Region by region, from S&P Global - As it says for regions in the world.
Want ad in Twitter - This the most concise, accurate job ad for a VP of Marketing in tech.
Sovereign cloud provides CIOs with solutions to data management challenges
Spring Boot and Temporal - “46% of enterprise workloads use Spring…. That is 46% of the workloads. That means that nearly half the time when you are using your banking, insurance, medical records, telco and utilities apps, Spring is in play. Streaming? Yeah, Netflix is all in on Spring. ECommerce? Amazon heavily uses Spring” (based on JetBrains 2023 and Stackoverflow 2024 surveys).
Conferences
SREday Amsterdam, speaking, Nov 21st, 2024. Discounts! SREDay Amsterdam: 20% off with the code SRE20DAY. CfgMgmtCamp, February 3rd to 5th in Ghent. SCaLE 22x/DevOpsDays LA, March 6th to 9th in Pasadena, California.
Logoff
I haven’t actually had that croissant taco, I just made it up as I was walking. Maybe I’ll try this weekend and report back.