I’ve had an unhealthy1 obsession with getting my kids to play D&D recently - they asked to! So, I haven’t had my usual liminal time to get a newsletter out.

To that end, my son wanted to make a harpy character. While there are home-brew (is that the right lingo? I stopped playing D&D in about 1993, maybe ‘92) harpy character races, we encountered a problem: harpies don’t have hands, really. Also, I don’t think it’s really so sporting to have a first level character be able to do a harpy siren song thing. So, I made up a “half-harpy.”

We haven’t actually played this yet, so I don’t know if it “works.” I figure what you do is run it up against some goblins in an ambush, maybe getting a blacksmith to send you on a mission to find a lost apprentice or, like, investigate a pie-shop robbery. At first level, it’s always those fucking goblins, right?

Doing this was a great, I don’t know, exercise in AI stuff. I didn’t use ChatGPT for the text (I didn’t even think of that until now!), but I used Midjourney to make the paper and the images. Some notes:

1. I sort of figured out how to use the give it an image thing to start with; I don’t really understand it. I bet Adobe’s Firefly thing would be better at prompts where you upload an image and say, like, “except use a human head instead of a bird one, and add in human arms in addition to the wings.” That one of the female crouched down under the combat page is as close as I ever got, and that’s still not exactly right. If you put too much vulture in, you get those vulture faces. That’s why I added the line to the text that faces can range from human to bird-like - at least I typed that somewhere. And also the part about having either human or vulture feet. I would have preferred just vulture feet. Maybe I can figure out the prompts.

2. It is incredibly hard to figure out the prompt for “make a human with bird feed, a human torso, a human head, human arms, and wings. Make the hands have long talons.” I’d also like to say “make the people look normal!” Instead, they all come out hella heroic, chiseled, and mid-driffy. I tried all sorts of things, but the only thing that would change it was to say “chubby.” “Zaftig” didn’t work, norHer did “stout.” And, “average” or “normal” definitely did. There must be some prompt tricks for “make them look like normal people, not super-models.”

3. Without trying, one time it actually generated full on breasts for a female harpy! I always thought nudity was programmed out. This sort of makes sense: that’s such a thing with harpies that it’d be hard to program that out. All the other times, the female harpies were either dressed or had those nipple-less bulbs like you’d see on a creepy robot.

4. If you do enough of these, you’ll see the humans arms softly stretched out…just like statues and pictures of angels! It took me a long time to realize that, but clearly “human with feathered wings” sends it right to the centuries of angels, all of who always have their arms spread out in that lazy, well, angelic way.

5. My son wanted his characters to be a cleric, so I tried to make some religious symbols. I dunno.

6. That one eating is great! I’ll throw in a bonus of the female version:

   

   Here’s a link to my Midjourney profile if you want to see all the others that I didn’t use.

I have a one to two player adventure thought up. The one that comes with the D&D starter set is a little too much.

Wastebook

• Do I make plans based on what I want done, or what I want to be doing?

• The number one, recommended cure for procrastination is to just actually do the task.

• “Nature doesn’t tell stories.” Here.

• This is a good tofu recipe, except you should deep fry it. Deep frying is super easy, it just requires an insane amount of oil. Fill a wok, turn up the burner, and the cornstarch breaded tofu cooks right up just like you’d get in a restaurant. Why did I wait all these years?

• Speaking of D&D: The terrans are suspicious and fearful of the half-harpies - the ability to fly, the taloned feet and lack of high-intelligence (they’re “bird brained”!), vulture-like eating habits, and behavior makes them weird to the terrans.

Logoff

See y’all next time!

We try the Marks and Spencer Roast Beef and Onion Crisps, or Chips as us Americans would say.

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Hunting for the cloud native and kubernetes pay-off

This is an excerpt from my talk yesterday with Bryan Ross, his theory here is fun, clever, and probably right:

Check out the full interviews, I liked it a lot. The podcast version will be in the Tanzu Talk feed tomorrow if you want to subscribe to that and catch it while you’re vacuuming the floors this weekend.

Container usage by workload in enterprises, share of wallet, and plans

You know I love getting more info on how much container usage (and, thus, an indicator of Kubernetes usage) there is in enterprises. IDC has a deck of charts out looking into what survey respondents say are good uses of containers and where they run containers. Here’s one chart. It shows which types of workloads actually run in containers versus what people think is a good idea:

Here’s a comparison of spend on “traditional” infrastructure versus containers. Spend doesn’t represent an actual count of applications running in containers (the pricing for each unit of infrastructure could be very different, all the way to free!), but it’s useful nonetheless.

What’s worth noticing here is (1) spend on virtualization has been flat. This suggests that, at least when it comes to share of wallet, virtualization is not being reduced by containers - though growth certainly is. That said, you could also say that containers are reducing virtualization, but that virtualization is picking up workloads from non-virtualized infrastructure. (2) More importantly, there’s a big growth in spend on containers (which we can feel safe in saying means a rise in importance of containerized workloads, and probably growth in those applications).

Software vendors - any company! - love and focus on growth, even if it’s in absolute terms tiny year/year of year. It sound much cooler to say that you’re involved in a market that has a 46% growth than, like, 0%…even if there’s shit-tons more money in the 0% growth company. But, you gotta chase those new dollar bills.

Finally, people’s plans. I don’t put too much stock in plans (as you may recall, moving all the workloads to public cloud has been just around the corner for about 10 or 15 years now). But, this is great for gauging people’s interest, especially for vendors who are hunting out what to sell, what to talk about, and how to drive interest for sales meetings. You know, and actual predicting about the future use of containerized workloads:

Again, the most obvious take-away is that there’s more growth in container usage, And, again, the important thing to temper your glee with is that the growth should be a combination of new workloads and migrating old works, i.e., this isn’t a “share” of containers versus traditional workloads.

Also, if you look at the charts, the container label is “Containers (Mounted in Virtual Machines and Bare Metal).” That’s a complicated! So, for some number of containers, we still have traditional infrastructure in use. The containers are more providing (yet another!) layer of packaging, execution, and management for apps on-top of already existing types of infrastructure.

As ever, we’re in the eternal first inning of cloud.

The charts have some further splicing up of the responses which is useful. For example, some of the charts separate out SaaS companies from others, which gives you a better picture of what “normal” organizations are doing (SaaS companies seem to use containers a lot more, as you’d expect). Also, there’s cuts on company size: companies with a 1,000+ people seem to use containers more than smaller companies. Check ‘em out if you have access (you likely do if you’re in a big tech company), or want to fork over $4,500.

Open source and security? The Conference!

Isabel Drost-Fromm sends me this: "in the wake of the Log4Shell kerfuffle I talked to several friends - all of them told the same story of professional engineering teams struggling to figure out whether or not they are affected back then. As a result with a few friends I started FOSS Security Campus, trying to address both, beginners through trainings and advanced engineers through the talk schedule. " It’s in Berlin, Sep 26th to 29th this year. Check it out!

Wastebook

• “I guess that’s the power of a good sandwich.” Here.

• “It occurred to me finally that I was listening to a true underground, to the voice of all those who have felt themselves not merely shocked but personally betrayed by recent history. It was supposed to have been their time. It was not.” The White Album, Joan Didion

• “To be clear, I think the paradigm of let[ting] people enjoy things was borne of good intentions, but it has demonstrably resulted in a deluge of crap. There’s good stuff in there, but it’s more jetsam than flotsam: hard to find, harder still to get a hold of.” Here.

• “Hah…I love that story…” Life-hack on how to make boring stories funny.

What replaces the smoke break?

Smoking used to be a little time for a break, often standing up and walking outside. A time to touch grass, in big cities, more often concrete.

I like the romance of the smoke break, also the relaxing feel of it. Almost an off moment of mindfulness.

Now, I suspect people "check their phone" is the little break. But that doesn’t seem the same.

I suppose you could have an espresso, or a quickly to make a small tea? Get a cup of one of those and go outside to drink it, looking around aimlessly and talking idly with whoever is doing the same?

It can’t be eating something, or, like “taking a walk.” Those are their own things. But, the Swiss have a culture of interstitial meals, one at nine between breakfast and lunch, another at four between lunch and dinner.

But all that doesn't seem exactly the same as a smoke break - healthier, sure. There must be something.

Having never smoked, I've never really experienced "smoke breaks," but it seems...nice?

Relative to your interests

• Fantasy Meets Reality - “If it looks neat, people will want to take a photo with it. If it looks comfortable, people will want to sit on it. If it looks fun, people will play around on it.”

• Shadow IT guidance - Advice from the UK government: “Though clearly not desirable, the existence of shadow IT presents your organisation with learning opportunities. If employees are having to resort to insecure workarounds in order to ‘get the job done’, then this suggests that existing policies need refining so that staff aren’t compelled to make use shadow IT solutions. Security people should focus on finding where shadow IT exists, and where possible, bring it above-board by addressing the underlying user needs that shadow IT is seeking to address.” // Shadow IT exists because people need something that IT is not giving them.

• The Super App Window Has Closed - “58% of online adults in metro China said that they trust the content that brands post on social media, compared with just 20% in the US” // As someone quipped on The Dithering Podcast, no one is going to trust their money to the Bank of Twitter, let along “X Bank.”

• Where’s Assaf? - Holy shit! That is scary to hear and I’m glad he is recovering.

• Paul Reubens, Creator of Pee-wee Herman, Is Dead at 70 - “I have loved you all so much and enjoyed making art for you.”

• Why haven’t internet creators become superstars? - “Internet stardom bestows no glamor.”

• What the New Relic Sale Means for SaaS - Time to go start Wily 3.0! (Well, in two to three years when the exec’s vesting wraps up.)

• Experts expect Sumo Logic match post-New Relic acquisition - I would not recommend “fusing” together any two software portfolios that are more than two - maybe three - years old. // “Further, multiple industry analysts predicted that New Relic and Sumo Logic will be fused under their new owners to create a broader set of products to better compete with vendors such as Datadog and Splunk.”

Upcoming

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

Sep 6th O’Reilly Infrastructure & Ops Superstream: Kubernetes, online, speaking. Sep 6th to 7th DevOpsDays Des Moines, speaking. Sep 13th, stackconf, Berlin. Sep 14th to 15th SREday, London, speaking (get 50% of registration with the code 50-SRE-DAY) Sep 18th to 19th SHIFT in Zadar, speaking. Oct 3rd Enterprise DevOps Techron, Utrecht, speaking. Nov 6th to 9th VMware Explore in Barcelona, speaking.

Logoff

se landscapes from Oswald Achenbach are amazing. I saw one in the Musee D’Orsay (used above), and, as with all paintings that play with light, you can’t really tell from the screen how magical it is. Here’s another one, you canost imagine what it’d look like in person:

What the New Relic Sale Means for SaaS - Time to go start Wily 3.0!

Why haven’t internet creators become superstars? - “Internet stardom bestows no glamor."

Shadow IT guidance - Advice from the UK government: “Though clearly not desirable, the existence of shadow IT presents your organisation with learning opportunities. If employees are having to resort to insecure workarounds in order to ‘get the job done’, then this suggests that existing policies need refining so that staff aren’t compelled to make use shadow IT solutions. Security people should focus on finding where shadow IT exists, and where possible, bring it above-board by addressing the underlying user needs that shadow IT is seeking to address.” // Shadow IT exists because people need something that IT is not giving them.

The Super App Window Has Closed - “58% of online adults in metro China said that they trust the content that brands post on social media, compared with just 20% in the US” // As someone quipped on The Dithering Podcast, no one is going to trust their money to the Bank of Twitter, let along “X Bank."

Experts expect Sumo Logic match post-New Relic acquisition - I would not recommend “fusing” together any two software portfolios that are more than two - maybe three - years old. // “Further, multiple industry analysts predicted that New Relic and Sumo Logic will be fused under their new owners to create a broader set of products to better compete with vendors such as Datadog and Splunk."

Suggested vibe for this edition:

The eternal principles of an (enterprise) app stack

These are not all of them, but it’s a start.

1. The function of an app stack is to allow your developers to be creative, use fast release cycles, and create software that can run in production: that stays up and meets whatever compliance (regulations, security, etc.) you need.

2. We keep trying to merge the dev tools stack and the runtime tools environment into one platform. The market rejects this over and over again. At some point, we should try listening.

3. It follows that: you will probably end up with a separate stack of developers tools, middleware, and runtime infrastructure. Perhaps our best bet is to focus on a common “API” (in the Kubernetes sense of that word, which, coming from a app dev background, I find an absurd use of that notion, but the street finds it’s own uses, etc.) that makes it easy to interoperate and integrate all those separate parts. Builders will build. At least give them some common set of patterns and interfaces.

4. Still, I think this assemble a best-of-breed pile of parts is, I don’t know, pretty stupid. You’ll always end up with an integrated, monolithic stack (a “platform” as we say now). Just make sure it’s not an accidental platform. Fully integrated platforms are proven to work. When you try to take them away from app developers who’ve finally given them a shot, the devs beg with you to stop standing up Kubernetes. (But, I have little credibility in my opinion here. I no longer do software, I just do slides.)

5. Building your own app stack is a bad idea 90% of the time. Everyone will think they’re in that 10%, but, do the math. If you build your own app stack, you now own it and have become a software company. Software must be a core part of your capabilities a. Is IT a “cost center”? Then this will hard to impossible. Buy an integrated platform and developer tools, whether that means committing to a public cloud or buying a layer of abstraction to layer on-top (“multi-cloud”).

6. Your app developers will dislike whatever you (the infrastructure people) do. They are wrong, if you do your job well. App developers always want to use the newest, most interesting thing. They will say anything to justify using it, and then they will hide using it. App developers don’t appreciate the need for long term stability, agility (you can change things, add new features quickly), and compliance/governance/security. App developers don’t care about the “ilities.”

7. Infrastructure people have the opposite problem: they overvalue the ilities and sacrifice app dev usefulness for them.

8. Of course, “the business” has one last “ility”: all for free, without changing anything…ility.

9. We tried service delivery to solve this, but despite intentions, it just created a wall of tickets that slowed things down and made stack evolution too slow. (How long does it take a brand new developer to make their first code commit? Even at Spotify, this is constant battle. Imagine what it’s like at a 80+ year old bank that doesn’t even track that metric!) Service delivery is very good at delivering a known and needed service, it is not good at building systems around constant change, i.e., software development and delivery. Otherwise: why would we be constantly talking about all of this? The system is defined by what it does, not what the builder’s intentions we’re.

10. Try something new! Try product managing the app dev stack. Talk with the app developers every week and follow a small batch cycle to improve the platform.

11. Technology matters a great deal. What also matters is that your process (how your work, how your organize, how you people manage - “culture”) adapts to the technology you’re using. You can’t force-fit technology into a culture. Try changing the culture to work with your technology. Change culture first. If you can’t change the culture, you need to change the technology. If you can’t change the technology, you have to change the culture.

12. The business does not want to be eaten by software. “The business” still doesn’t understand the value of software, that it can be the core enabler of the organization’s strategy, optimization, and growth/profit. I’m not sure they ever will, so you have to constantly prove this with metrics and success. “Speak the language of business” to the business. (It’s not like us tech people understand how “the business” functions either - we should do rotations, at least through the corporate strategy group…and vice-versa. Post-DevOps, the business/IT wall is the next wall to bring down.)

13. Above all else: (1) define what “working” is for you, and, (2) if your ability to build and run software to run your business and improve your business is working, keep doing that. Otherwise, change. Don’t keep doing things that don’t work for what you need.

14. Here is the obligatory common sense quote to put in big letters on a slide: “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all," Peter Drucker.

Vacation is unhealthy for work, work is unhealthy for vacation

When start a vacation, I have to quickly detox myself from the daily habits of work: seeking and executing tasks; an eye on long term deadlines; carving out a space to operate on a large, mature company; interpreting and responding to strategy and group think; valuing delivery, making things happen above all else. In short, thinking about work all the time, using constant scheming to hedge against uncertainty. This mindset can’t be turned off, it even invaded my dreams from time to time. There is no work/life balance, there’s only work/life interruption.

When I’m going on vacation I have to stop thinking about work and thinking in that get shit done mentality. I have to stop thinking.

I’ve finally gotten the time that that flushing out work-mind takes to about eight hours. It used to be two days or so!

Vacation mode has no goal, little planning. Just reacting to possibilities, or not. There is no constant business case evaluation that drives action. Perhaps I’ll think a few days ahead to book museum tickets or a restaurant, or know that on Monday many things are closed. But I might decide to just stay in the hotel room for the night and read a book, or just sleep. My goal is to relax, and to do things that are relaxing. My goal is not to maximize the ROI of time or money spent. My goal is not to produce or deliver.

When I come back from vacation, the shift back to work is jarring, and difficult. It’s like I’ve finally experienced what it’s like to “be normal”: to have life be your job rather than your job your life.

For a long time this was fine, mostly. My identity was so based on work enough (almost completely!) that it was easy to shift back. But, just like recovering from a night of drinking, as I age, it’s getting harder and harder.

Well.

Back to work!

Upcoming

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

Sep 6th O’Reilly Infrastructure & Ops Superstream: Kubernetes, online, speaking. Sep 6th to 7th DevOpsDays Des Moines, speaking. Sep 13th, stackconf, Berlin. Sep 14th to 15th SREday, London, speaking (get 50% of registration with the code 50-SRE-DAY) Sep 18th to 19th SHIFT in Zadar, speaking. Oct 3rd Enterprise DevOps Techron, Utrecht, speaking. Nov 6th to 9th VMware Explore in Barcelona, speaking.

Logoff

The weekend in Paris with Kim was great. We spent hours in the Picasso museum and the Musée d'Orsay. At some point, I want to figure out how to go to all of the little galleries in a town, the ones with new, contemporary art. I do not know how that “work,” though. How you find the “real” ones, what you talk with people about if you’re confronted, how you prioritize and choose them: how you succeed at it.

Kim helped me discover a pathology of mine: if I don’t know how something “works,” I am afraid of doing it. This is probably why it’s hard for me to learn new things, and, thus, change and improve. It also limits my, like, experience of the world. The negative effect is compounded by my living in Europe where I always don’t know the languages, cultures, norms, etc.

I used to have a set-piece with my therapist on this: going to the butcher. In our previous neighborhood here in Amsterdam, there was a much aclaimed butcher just down the street. We don’t have much butcher availability, really, in the States, let alone sprawling Austin, Texas. (Instead, the grocery stores have plenty of good meat.) I love meat, and the meat in The Netherlands grocery stores is, well, you know, not to my Texan liking. The butcher had the good meat though. But, because I didn’t know how “going to butcher” works and I don’t know Dutch, I never went. It was a double hump of not knowing how something worked. Kim once got me a t-bone for father’s day, and it was magnificent. Somehow, I could get over that double hump and start gettinggood steaks.

Hopefully I can get over this needing to know how something “works.” At this point, it’s what’s holding me back. Sure, what I need to do is instead crave “learning.” But we all know what we should be doing and thinking, the trick is getting there.

***

No links this episode. I barely read anything online since last time. Instead, I read A Waiter in Paris over the weekend. It’s fun to read a book set in the place you are, especially on vacation. It was a good book, you should read it if you like that kind of thing.

Fantasy Meets Reality - “If it looks neat, people will want to take a photo with it. If it looks comfortable, people will want to sit on it. If it looks fun, people will play around on it.”