I’m at Cloud Foundry Day today - travel, conference, etc. I realized I’m giving the last talk, which is kind of a good slot to have. I’ll have to do some kind of “end of the conference” commentary on life. It’s Germany, and it’s hot. People leave the doors open for a breeze, so there’s the light smell of cigarettes here and there. (The Texan in me is a bit mystified, even stressed out at seeing open doors when there’s air conditioning.)

Before there’s too many, it’s just a links catch-up today. People over in Mastodon really liked the first two links, a different set of people the Cloud Foundry community round-up from Nick.

Relative to your interests

• Why did the #TwitterMigration fail? - Difficulty crossing the chasm. But, come on: it’s been less than a year.

• Bluesky Has Problems - Me: there aren’t enough people and, thus, communities yet. Also: federation isn’t really anything people care about, and, thus, not a feature worth spending time on. And, the same as above applies: it’s been much less than a year, way to early to make condensing judgements.

• All those naked Greeks… - I think the conclusion is status, power, beauty, and sex.

• Rest for the restless - “Maybe it’s my low tolerance for boredom. I can’t help but do something, anything. If only I could embrace boredom, and just let myself be. I can do a seated meditation for 10 minutes with no big issue of fidgeting, just focusing on my breath. But that’s still doing something? Reigning in the monkey mind, trying to keep a straight spine. Not quite what I imagine a relaxed state to be.”

• Hacking through flashing LEDs on network cards - “The author’s show that these LEDs can bleed information about power consumption that can be used to deduce when and for how long a computer is computing cryptographic keys and that can be used to deduce the keys. For example, using a “hijacked” security camera the author’s were able to film the power LED on a smart card reader from 16 meters away and from that able to deduce the keys.” It has a link to the paper.

• Google: Reports of My Death Are Greatly Exaggerated - “Startups can move faster and be more innovative because they aren’t afraid to break things and disrupt existing business models. Large incumbents are historically slower to innovate and they resist disrupting their business model because they risk hurting their established profitability margins. They become addicted to their high profit margins and fear investor’s wrath for the perceived misallocation of capital, so innovation with large companies is typically much slower…. However…the innovation shift with AI will unfold a bit differently because the power of AI is universally accepted.”

• Open Source Platform Engineering: A Decade of Cloud Foundry - “I managed and maintained over 1,000 applications, which ran over 22,000 application instances across 26 deployments of Cloud Foundry. The platform served more than 1,000 developers, who deployed applications ranging from e-commerce, health care, logistical and highly compliant workloads.” And: “Our average customer PE efficiency ratio is one platform engineer supporting 190 developers, with an overall platform team average of six platform engineers supporting 1,200 developers. In some cases, we have seen an average of one PE supporting up to 500 developers within an organization. The platform engineering efficiency metric is a critical differentiating factor, as our user base sees a drastic decline in PE efficiency when evaluating alternative technologies.”

• Your mother taught you not to trust yourself when it’s exactly what you need the most. - ‘A mother can be a person who, as you grow older, shifts from telling you what to do next (wash your face, brush your teeth) to asking you to experiment and see for yourself what you like and don’t like. A mother can go from quieting your tantrums when you’re tiny to listening closely and asking good questions when you say “I feel negative” or “I feel lost.” A mother can encourage you to notice and pay close attention when you feel confused or uncertain without immediately trying to squelch those emotions because they make her feel anxious. When you’re upset, a mother can say, “These feelings aren’t ‘bad,’ they’re informative and worthwhile, because they’re telling you what you want from your life, letting you know which things bring you joy and satisfaction, what feels incomplete or unacceptable to you.”’

• Gartner Forecasts Worldwide Banking and Investment Services IT Spending to Reach $652 Billion in 2023 - Banks spending more money on IT. They’re planning to spend on: “cybersecurity, data and analytics, integration technologies and cloud.” // And, keep moving to (public?) cloud: “More than half plan to increase investments in cloud, while reducing IT spending in their own data centers. This is reflected by slower growth in data center systems spending from 13.2% in 2022 to 5.7% in 2023.” // ‘Worldwide banking and investment services IT spending is forecast to total $652.1 billion in 2023, an increase of 8.1% from 2022, according to Gartner, Inc. Spending on software will see the largest growth with an increase of 13.5% in 2023…. “Current economic headwinds have changed the context for technology investments in banking and investment services this year,” said Debbie Buckland, Director Analyst at Gartner. “Rather than cutting IT budgets, organizations are spending more on the types of technologies that generate significantly higher business outcomes. Spending on software, for example, is shifting away from building it in-house, in favor of buying solutions that generate value from investments more rapidly.”’

• Guillermo Del Toro on His Future: “I Only Want to do Animation. That’s the Plan” - “[Why] does everything act as if they’re in a sitcom? I think is emotional pornography. All the families are happy and sassy and quick, everyone has a one-liner. Well, my dad was boring. I was boring. Everybody in my family was boring. We had no one-liners. We’re all fucked up.”

• The EU Digitalisation Strategy for the Financial Services Sector is put to the test - It’ll take awhile, but I think the multi-factor nature of a smart phone ads a lot of identity verification, governance (tracking and transparency), and other capabilities that’ll drive all sorts of yet to be known new features in banking. Just having a super reliable form of identity verification(way above, you know, what a piece of paper or little card with your picture on it can do) seems huge.

• Kubernetes flexes open-source muscle as it transforms enterprise IT - in the chart below, “beyond cost savings, the chief motivations for using open source in EMEA are the ability to customize software (50%) and avoidance of vendor lock-in (48%)” // Most of the piece is a lot of commentary on the kubes community, circa 2023.

  

Wastebook

• “The elephant in my room.” RotL #502.

• The past is not what's normal, the present is.

Upcoming

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

June 21st Making digital transformation stick in government agencies, online. June 22nd to 23rd DevOpsDays Amsterdam June 28th, July 4th, July 11th Cloud Native for Financial Services talk series.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

As much as I love traveling for work, in the past few months I’ve grown to dislike it. This is weird! I mean, I’ve done it since 2006, so it’s been part of my life for 17 years. I enjoy being home and with family, of course, but that’s not the issue: over those 17 years I’ve figured out how to make that all work out. It’s more that I don’t seem to be getting enough out of it for both work goals and my own, compared to those outcomes if I just stay at home.

Somewhat related to this is a sort of writer’s block when it comes to conference presentations and something else odd for me: a sort if disinterest in the same old shit over and over. I need some new talks! New ideas!I’ve been looking at the talks accepted at conferences by my peers (and, sure, others). None of them seem too inspiring. They’re either the usual DevOps-y things, or those 200 slide performances with one word on each foul…that often amount to simply saying “try harder, this time.”

I’m trying to give this whole “platform engineering” thing open mind, but my brain is starting to fray like a person who’s been staring at Azathoth too long and can’t get those pipes out of my mind. We pile Confluence and, at best, CI/CD on-top of DevOps…and that’s it? Plus, here at Cloud Foundry Day I’m reminded of the trend that we’re ignoring a perfectly good, mature, proven, and useful PaaS in favor of building out a brand new stack from scratch on-top of Kubernetes is gnawing at my old man yells at cloud demons. I go back and forth on all of this a lot: it’s good because we incrementally improve and expand the original ideas, it’s bad because we incrementally forget and dispose of the past.

This seems to be what people want, what is. The rest of the industry seems to want to revisit the, meant as understandingly as possible, same old shit over and over, rebuilding from the start once again.

The effect was that of a Cyclopean city of no architecture known to man or to human imagination, with vast aggregations of night-black masonry embodying monstrous perversions of geometrical laws and attaining the most grotesque extremes of sinister bizarrerie. Here.

Perhaps the travel isn’t helping. (Or maybe there’s not enough of it!) Just like most everyone else in the tech world, we have dramatically smaller budgets for travel this year. So I’ve been traveling less which, I suppose, has forced that idea and experience on me. You don’t notice something until it changes, and all that.

And, indeed, once I get back from Cloud Foundry Day, I don’t have any work travel planned until August when I’ll be going to VMware Explore/SpringOne. There’s innumerable online things and projects, just not travel. (Of course, there’s family/vacation travel.)

We’ll see what that’s like!