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.

• Traveling back home, to Amsterdam, today.
• Yesterday’s VMUG Belgium talk went fine. Since it was to VMware admin types, I positioned my platform talk as a glimpse of their future. Whenever the infrastructure changes, you can use new application architectures…and then that drives new types of infrastructure and management needs…and so forth. It means that the people building and running infrastructure need to update their tools and how they work. For “traditional” ops, that means shifting from a service delivery mindset to a (app dev) platform as a product.
• I’ve been liking the Tetragrammaton podcast. It has a delightful, spegetti western kind of theme song. The conversations are interesting. The topics are usual a person’s craft, how they came to think of something, or as in this episode, a certain commentary or how to “just be.” I’m obviously a big podcast fan, and most of the interviews do one thing I like a lot: they model a way to think, and in this case, a way to experience just taking the dog on a walk, for example, or looking at trees. Owen Wilson is as super chill as you’d expect. On the other side of chill, but with the same “how to be” vibes, is this episode.
• I’ll put links to things I’ve published this week (a couple podcasts, a live stream) in the newsletter (probably out tomorrow), maybe pulling in some of the asides from these daily notes as well.
• I found several Garbage Chairs of Amsterdam in Brussels, so I’ll have a good queue over the next week. Here’s the first one:

• The day’s not over yet, but I’ve got two but things coming up the rest of the evening and will probably want to zone out after them:
• I’m hosting a fireside chat with Purnima Padmanabhan, the GM of our group at VMware (streamed in LinkedIn). She should be fun to talk with. And then I’ll go almost straight into this week’s Software Defined Talk (podcast here, watch here for the live stream).
• I’ve got a kookie setup for this (see pictures below), using my road A/V kit. This is the second time I’ve used it and I think it’s almost perfect. It’s a Rode NTG shotgun mic, a SmallRig iPhone stand, and then using my iPhone with continuity camera as the camera. The “secret” to that whole thing is that you can use the Rode as a normal USB mic. Thus, you have a dual purpose mic: for doing videos out and above, and then just a desk mic.
• What I really need to a separate tripod for the mic. What I have is OK, but I prefer to have the mic right up on my mouth. One day, if I get some new iPhone and an attachment to stick it to the back of my laptop, I think that’ll solve it.
• I had a long discussion with two colleagues, separately, about “strategy” today. “Strategy” is such a situational context per company, level in company, and just your personal opinions. I don’t think the basics of strategy (your classic Michael Porter stuff) are really sufficient to be useful. In the same way that programmers don’t like to be told how to implement something, in strategy, you’re not supposed to get too specific. But, I think this is usually a huge mistake. If you’re setting corporate strategy, you should have at least one (if not many!) detailed ideas about how it would actually get done. You’ll have to delegate it to someone other group to actually do it, and, sure, they might change it…but you can’t send them off on an impossible task to “figure it out.”
• The days are very long in northern Europe now. The sun comes up around 5:30am and doesn’t seem to go down until 9pm. In an adult daily life, this is mostly comical. But, that much light is really weird when you have kids that need to get to school. Getting them to start going to bed when it’s mostly daylight seems weird.
• I suffer through all the too much thinking that Dave Briggs does about blogging and social media - all the content holes. I’ve managed to string together some actions in Drafts to accomplish most of the cross posting and reformatting that he worries about. Also, I’ve tried to really consolidate down my long form content to my newsletter, coupled with putting in a dump of links. I use micro.blog and you can see I link-blog a lot here (that’s an action in Drafts). I roll those up (also in Drafts after using an action to convert the links to markdown) into one big chunk that I put in the newsletter. The bigger issue is, I think, that Twitter is all messed up - more accurately, that there are too many options to post to and you have to build back up your audience on those new platforms. I’m not really sure any of it is worth it. LinkedIn is actually the most solid, reliable one of all social things if you operate in the kind of “business, business, business” world that I do. Even then, I’m starting to think that most of my audience in LinkedIn are my co-works. That is fine for my own glory, but not great for promoting content among “buyers” of my company’s stuff.
• I have a Drafts action to post to micro.blog, of course. I’m using it to post this!
• Connected: I’m pretty serious into the deleting Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky, and LinkedIn apps on my phone. I found myself just loading the web pages, but then I caught myself. What I’ve started asking myself a lot if: sure, I will promote my stuff there, but am I ever happy after reading other posts on those sites? No, not really.

Travel Video Studio

I took the phone out to take the picture. Normally, the phone would be camped right under the mic.

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%)."

Identity Crisis - A Tale of DevRel -

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”

• I recorded a podcast today on security in cloud native. Security can seem like an incomprehensible complexity from the outside, but when you ask an expert to break it down, it’s simple. Sure, lengthy and tedious and precise, but not impossible. I’ll post it in the Tanzu Talk podcast feed sometime this week.
• I spent a lot of time prep’ing for that podcast: mostly reading a PCI document. I’m not sure when this happened, but my confidence-to-ease in doing live conversations, presentations, and otherwise “public speaking” comes from over-preparing.
• I have an early flight tomorrow to go to Brussels. There’s a live LinkedIn stream in the evening (it’s with someone in California), so I’m leaving early to make sure things work out. I’ll also go to the VMware offices near the airport - not as thrilling as downtown Brussels but reliable for Internet.
• I’ve got my portable steaming kit - a Røde shotgun mic, small tripod, and my phone. I think I’ve finally got the perfect A/V go bag.
• I love reading week notes and Warren Ellis’s daily updates. So, here I am!
• I’m doing it in Drafts and can’t be bothered to add a lot links. See my newsletter here today for links to the live steam mentioned above and the reason I’ll be in Brussels, doing the opening keynote at the VMware User Group on Thursday.

Just links this episode.

Some fantastic #gartnercore

Relative to your interests

• Thinking Strategically About Software Bills of Materials (SBOMs) - As with most things, the whole SBOM push is probably a lot simpler to solve than it seems. Also, a delightful “old man yells at secure software supply chain hype” vibe as only Jon could do well.

• Can Watsonx Rebuild IBM’s AI Relevance? - Analysis of IBM’s AI stuff. Also, a good side point: no one really knows anymore what IBM does.

• A framework for council technology planning – SensibleTech - “We don’t have much – if any – ‘legacy’ code running on old virtualised mainframes like bits of central government do. In fact, a lot of what is called legacy in local government is anything but – it’s regularly updated and kept working and in line with statutory requirements. So it’s not legacy software. It’s just bad software.” // Getting a common language of digital transformation, a shared model of all the capabilities a local government needs, and an understanding of how all the tech works so that non-technical people can manage it and set strategy.

• Touchpoints, coalescence and multi-platform engineering — thoughts from Kubecon 2023 - A sum up of the trends and state of the kubernetes/cloud native community, but an even better picture of the setting and tone.

• Gartner Forecasts Worldwide Government IT Spending to Grow 8% in 2023 - “Worldwide government IT spending is forecast to total $589.8 billion in 2023, an increase of 7.6% from 2022, according to Gartner, Inc.” And: “57% of government CIOs plan to increase funding for application modernization in 2023, up from 42% in 2022.”

• Retrospective of 10 years of digital in the UK government - Great overview of the past ten(?) years of digital transformation in the UK government. I must say: this exact analysis probably applies private sector companies worldwide.

• Manage process before people - File under “must be nice…”

• Majority of Americans have heard of ChatGPT, but few have tried it - “Just 14% of U.S. adults have tried ChatGPT” - until that gets up to 50%, a lot of the freaking (& hype) is like fearing necromancy. Once you use it a lot you’re like “oh, I see. Not a threat. That dumb-ass box can’t even tell me how to get my kids put their shoes on for school.”

• Extending the Pivotal Labs Way: How Tanzu Labs Helps Organizations Deliver Great Software - All about Tanzu Labs, the consulting group at VMware that helps your org get better at software. Their approach is very human centric, very pragmatic, and very effective.

• How Ecosystems Are Changing Insurance CX - An example of using digital stuff to improve insurance, here car insurance claims. Also, not the point of needing to integrate with all sorts of third parties and systems: “Vehicle claims are often complicated, involve several parties, and take a long time to resolve. Each participant in the claims process, including carriers, loss assessors, vehicle repairers, diagnostics technicians, and so on, has distinct needs and requirements. An emerging technology ecosystem, consisting of various linked and interdependent technologies, is developing to meet those needs. For example, emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and, more specifically, computer vision technologies (CVT) can meet the needs of carriers (assessing the circumstances of the accident and the extent of the damage) and vehicle repairers (diagnostics to repair the damaged car). There was plenty of evidence of such solutions during the conference, which might make the dream of zero-touch automobile promises a reality.”

• The Pessimism Problem Continues to Grow - It’s 60% now: ’Back in 2020, I wrote a post titled “The Pessimism Problem.” We had completed a survey where 54% of respondents agreed with the statement “We regret nearly every purchase we make after the subscription agreement is finalized.”’

• An Infinite Game: Interview with Laurel Schwulst - “when I use ChatGPT, I’ve noticed that I’m getting better at talking to a computer. To me, it underscores how amazing the ability to simply have conversations is. And if you’re someone who enjoys having conversations with yourself, I think it helps if you personify the different aspects of your personality.”

• The Forbidden Zone - ’Back then, you were a webmaster, doing it all.’

• SRE as She Is Spoke - Here’s the bit about “you build it, you run it” actually meaning you have a big platform to support most all of the ops stuff, as told by Andrew Clay Shafer.

• European HVAC - Air conditioners to be big in Europe?

• Why Don’t Rich People Use Phone Cases? - “It’s the whole idea of comfort. Minimal objects contribute to a comfortable life.”

Upcoming

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

May 31st Fireside chat with the GM of my business unit at VMware, online. June 1st VMUG Belgium in Brussels, free. 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.

Are.na

I’m having fun with Are.na. It’s like Tumblr. But, when you put a tiny payment requirement up (it costs $7 a month to post more than 200 items) you get an amazing editorial effect. Here’s my profile.

Logoff

I’ve got a busy week ahead, sort of. Two speaking events and then working forward for a bunch of webinars.

Kim rented a boat this weekend. It was super fun to slowly putter around the canals in Amsterdam. Highly recommended!

See y’all next time.