Suggested theme song.

Just links and fun finds today.

Relevant to your interests

• VMware named a Leader in the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant - Nice spot for VMware in the MQ. // This is a pretty small market! Hopefully the market is selling around container management, the stacks of app dev support above it, and filling in all the Kubernetes gaps. I mean, that’s usually exactly how the infrastructure market works. // “The container management market has seen accelerated growth of 28.6% over the past year with a market value of $1.6 billion in 2022. The market is forecast to exceed $3.6 billion in constant currency by 2027, with an 18% CAGR.” And: “The business and technical benefits associated with container deployments are still mostly centered around enabling enterprise business agility and speed. Recently, more enterprises have commenced container deployments while seeking cost savings and defense against vendor lock-in. Both of these goals are attractive, but difficult to achieve with container deployments. In many cases, container deployments increase costs as enterprises add additional staff and technology assets. And although most solutions are Kubernetes-based, vendors add other components that make the entire technology stack proprietary, which often prevents portability, thus enforcing lock-in.” Also, some thinking on multi-cloud and apps best suited for Kubernetes.

• Work From Home Works - The man gets more productivity per buck from wfh: “So, we were shocked to find a massive 13 percent increase in productivity…. The productivity boost came from two sources. First, remote employees worked 9 percent more in minutes per day. They were rarely late to work, spent less time gossiping and chatting with colleagues, and took shorter lunch breaks and fewer sick days. Remote employees also had 4 percent more output per minute. They told us it’s quieter at home. The office was so noisy many of them struggled to concentrate.”

• Accenture’s full year generative AI revenues come in at $300 million out of a $64.1 billion total. There’s a long way to go, says CEO Julie Sweet - Assuming that at least half, or even more are, like, actual AI projects and just ones that involve AI stuff as a tool, this is still a lot of money for a year-ish old, mostly not enterprise-governance ready tech category: “Accenture says that its generative AI sales have doubled in the last quarter, adding $200 million in revenue to bring the total for the 2023 fiscal year to $300 million. Total full year revenues across Accenture came in at $64.1 billion.” And, they say it is, like, actual AI projects: “When we give you gen AI numbers, we’re being very clear it’s pure gen AI, so we’re not sort of talking about data and all of those things. So the real gen AI projects right now are still in that sort of million dollar-ish on average range. And we expect that’s going to continue for a while, right? That’s what we’re seeing because there’s a lot of experimentation.”

• An AI-assisted cloud? It’s a thing now, and here are six ways it’s already made my cloud experience better.

• The potential gap - People don’t use all the features in your enterprise tools, and that’s weird and probably self-defeating: “Which is kinda weird! If we pushed these tools to their limits, they could probably solve a lot of stubbornly persistent problems. Instead, it’s as though we’re hungry, go into a buffet, and never bother to walk past the appetizer station. We keep complaining about how we haven’t had enough to eat; new entrepreneurs keep creating new buffets that reconfigure the stations; we keep only eating what’s by the door, and declaring the restaurant insufficient.”

Path to Production Talk Series

My colleague Bryan Ross and I are doing a series of three talks on, you know, doing software better. They’re spread out over October, and if you’re reading this, you’ll like them - right? You can watch live or catch-up on the recording, just register already!

I have a new theory on all this “digital transformation” advice and chattering that I get involved in: you should actually do it now. When you look at the rates of people using CI/CD tools and survey reports about deployment cycles, it’s pretty bad after, like, 20 years. So, you know, if you’re not doing the basics of automating your full “value stream” (CI/CD), stop listening to us thought-leaders yammer on for six to twelve months and just go do that widely in your organization.

So much of what we’re all talking about is just that. So much so, that we often don’t even stop to ask: wait, do you have CI/CD in place already?

Our first talk is that topic. Register to see it for free next week, on October 10th. You can watch the recording, of course, once it’s out.

Wastebook

• “Whatever works is fine.”

• I ate some P.F. Chang’s orange chicken first thing here in the Detroit airport. There is no American Chinese food in Amsterdam - that I can find. That chicken is now a solid bag of concrete in my belly. It was delicious. NO REGERTS.

• “Doubling down on parallel SSH.”

• “It’s supposed to be ‘how to be nice,’ and it ends up being ‘how other people can be nice to me.’” Here.

• Woke up 4am, 4:30am Uber to Schiphol. First through passport line, in airport at 5:10am! (Woke up too early.)

• “Premium poultry concepts.” Seen on semi-truck somewhere between Brussels and Amsterdam.

• What if I prepared just for the work I needed to do, instead of also inventing and worrying about all the phantom work I make up?

• Giving the presentation gets easier, often fun, and sometimes even cathartic. The waiting to give it never does.

Upcoming

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

Monktoberfest, Portland, ME. Oct 9th Spring Tour Amsterdam Oct 10th, 17th, 24th talk series: Building a Path to Production: A Guide for Managers and Leaders in Platform Engineering Nov 6th to 9th VMware Explore in Barcelona, speaking (twice!).

Logoff

I’m at the Monktober fest today and tomorrow. Portland is foggy: