Mostly links today. I’ve been traveling this week and preparing and bunch of stuff to publish in the future. Tragic for the desire to publish now, now, now…

How I Travel

Relative to your interests

• Maximizing value, controlling cost with cloud FinOps - “Among current users, 56% report that spending on public cloud was significantly over budget (by 30% or more) or somewhat over (by 10%-30%) in 2022, compared with 45% of respondents saying the same in 2021. Multiple factors cause organizations to overshoot their budgets for public cloud services (see Figure 2). The need to scale up resources to address unexpected demand emerges as the chief culprit for cloud budget overruns (cited by 29% of respondents, up from 22% in 2021). Other factors include overcommitting to resources (16%), lack of governance/usage guardrails (14%) and lack of pricing transparency from the cloud providers (10%).”

• Do You Shop Online? So Do Your B2B Buyers! - “75% of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free experience, and 68% made a recent significant purchase using digital commerce”

• Planck’s principle - “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it…”

• Kubernetes flexes open-source muscle as it transforms enterprise IT - There’s a great description of what a cloud native environment is like in here. It’s missing the “middleware” and frameworks app developers would use, but I think that’s fine. It’s not to much covering what an appdev platform is.

• Identity Crisis - A Tale of DevRel

• Seth Godin on Marketing, Meaning, and the Bibs We Wear - Seth Godin begins many answers with asking the question “What is X?” Good for reframing the question, also buying time to think! Big on stories, of course. Whole Foods answer early on had core marketing strategies in it: “Since Amazon has taken it over, I think what we’ve seen is, they’re not exactly sure what they are measuring. Are they measuring convenience? Which is what Amazon wants to stand for. Or are they measuring uniqueness? Or are they measuring creating surprise and delight? They alternate between all four of those things.” Need to look up some of his talks to see what his technique again. He describes that at about 35:00.

• Recent quarterly PE tech M&A activity way down: “The increased stress in the US financial system has made M&A way too stressful for a lot of private equity acquirers. Unsettling bank failures, nonstop rate hikes and the still-unresolved debt ceiling brinksmanship have all heaped additional uncertainty onto an already-troubled financing market. As a result, current spending on tech transactions by buyout shops is trending to its lowest level since the Great Financial Crisis.”

My content

I’ve been busy this week with the opaque media:

• Fireside chat with the GM of my business unit at VMware, Purnima Padmanabhan, Senior Vice President & General Manager of VMware’s Modern Apps and Management business. See my remote recording studio above.

• Cloud Native Security & Compliance, with David Zendzian - If you’re like me, you’re always wondering what exactly “security” means when it comes to cloud native apps - or just apps in general. Everyone is always freaking out about it in surveys and people are always like, “yeah, but is it secure?” I this interview with Cora Iberkleid and me, David Zendzian explains what all that actually means in very practical terms. We discuss regulations as well and how large, global organizations have unique challenges there. David is incredibly passionate and fun to talk with. You’ll like this episode.

• We spent a lot of time talking about Salesforce on this week’s Software Defined Talk. I think it was…entertaining?…nonetheless. Every Salesforce is a Snowflake - The week we discuss Enterprise Software hiding data, corporate status reports and a quick update on New Relic. Plus, Coté records using an ironing board from a Renaissance Hotel in Brussels. Listen in!

Upcoming

Talks I’ll be giving, things I’ll be doing, places I’ll be going.

June 7th State of Kubernetes overview, online. June 8th to 9th PlatformCon, online. June 21st Cloud Foundry Day, Heidelberg, speaking. June 21st Making digital transformation stick in government agencies, online. June 22nd to 23rd DevOpsDays Amsterdam August 21st to 24th SpringOne & VMware Explore US, in Las Vegas. Sep 6th to 7th  DevOpsDays Des Moines, speaking. Sep 18th to 19th SHIFT in Zadar.

Logoff

I’ve been playing around with “day notes” on my blog. They’re like week notes. Except…you know..day notes. I (re-)noticed Dave Briggs doing them, and they’re delightful to read. I subscribe to about five or so of the week notes blogs. They’re, oddly, mostly UK people. Also, Warren Ellis does a form of it on his blog that’s relaxing to read. So, if you’re starved for true microscopic details, there’s now some more available in the world.