…right?

I’ve been looking around for estimates on how many custom written apps run on private vs. public cloud. There’s a lot of coverage and estimates of people using multiple clouds, but finding breakouts is tough. IT IS VERY HARD TO FIND!

Here’s what I’ve found recently:

• "According to Forrester’s Infrastructure Cloud Survey in 2023, 79% of roughly 1,300 enterprise cloud decision-makers surveyed said their firms are implementing internal private clouds.” Here. // This doesn’t answer my question, but is useful.

• Spend is a bad proxy for workload placements, but: "IDC forecasts that global spending on private, dedicated cloud services — which includes hosted private cloud and dedicated cloud infrastructure as a service — will hit $20.4 billion in 2024, and more than double by 2027. Global spending on enterprise private cloud infrastructure, including hardware, software, and support services, will be $51.8 billion in 2024 and grow to $66.4 billion in 2027, according to IDC." Ibid. // Spend isn’t a great proxy for actual usage, but there’s that.

• IDC Cloud Pulse from last year: it’s something like 40% to 50% public cloud, but this also includes SaaS, which is not exactly what I’m interested in. (See the chart.)

  The IDC numbers are pretty good. I’d want to redo them and throw out COTS apps and SaaS, but good enough.

  So, what’s the split between public and private cloud? I don’t know: 50/50? But, again, this doesn’t track organization’s custom written apps. I could see that it’d go more in either direction.

  Furthermore, if you went off what the Goldman Sachs CIO surveys imply (mentioned last episode), it’d be more like 70% private cloud, 30% public cloud.

  I think I’ll start going with mildly uncertain 50/50 with a percent or so going to public cloud each year.

  Still, if I were to say “half of the enterprise IT world is largely ignored by the chattering class,” you’d hopefully think “well, that’s weird.”

  

  Software Defined Talk #475

  This week, we discuss Mary Meeker's AI & Universities report, the CD Foundation's State of CI/CD Report [see below], and share a few thoughts on DevRel. Plus, Coté gets fiber and is forced to watch soccer.

  Listen to it now! (You can also watch the unedited video recording.)

  Wildly Different Version Control Usage Results in Developers Surveys

  Speaking of estimates and surveys, a tale of being careful with surveys:

  • Slashdata’s survey reports that 30% have used “source code management” in the last 12 months. This means that 70% of people haven’t checked inter code for a year or more, or at all? There is more nuance to it than that, but that’s what’s implied.

  • The 2023 JetBrains survey reports that 76% of people “regularly” use a “source code collaboration tool.” This means that 24% of people don’t “regularly” check in code?

  • The Stackoverflow 2022 survey says that 95.69% of people use version control (it doesn’t say the frequency of interaction). This means that 4.31% people do not use version control. They didn’t track this in the 2023 survey.

  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

  ---

  You should watch this talk I’ll be doing in a few weeks, FREE in the comfort of your own home/RTO-job!

  

  Register to watch it for free here, or in LinkedIn. Also in YouTube, if you prefer that.

  ---

  Wastebook

  • “Clicks to Bricks.”

  • “IDC Links & IDC Blinks.”

  • “Beloved Austin local Leslie Cochran.” Here.

  • I used to listen to The Lounge Show every Saturday morning. It’s still there! Also, archives here and here.

  • “An enquiy, based on the author’s intimate diary, into the conditions for obtaining happiness and person start of values.” Here, for this.

  • If not better, at least the same. The enterprise software buyer’s lament.

  • “the riffiest of the raff.” Here.

  • I’m usually not “chill out and watch video of people just doing random shit” guy, but I’ve really been liking MrT’s breakfast service marathons. He makes an English breakfast burrito, which I do not agree with, but I’m not here to yuk your mums.

  Relative to your interests

  • Understanding the Rise of Platform Engineering and Its Relationship with DevOps - Printer-friendly - US50199923 - Platform engineering definition from IDC: ”the discipline of designing, building, and maintaining a platform of curated tools, services, and knowledge, called an IDP, that enables development teams' self-service access to the resources needed to build, test, and operate digital solutions. Platform engineering aims to optimize software delivery by removing friction from the developer experience by offering blueprinted, supported approaches to building and deploying software. The platform team, made up of platform engineers, is responsible for building and maintaining the IDP.” // A key point is self-service, you know, less tickets. // This seems like a lot for one team to take on.

  • Does Social Media Cause Anything? - It’s difficult to collect data about social media’s effects (good or bad). // “the ever-present spiderweb of the social graph, the network of accounts, RTs and likes that lets me understand not only what someone thinks but what everyone else thinks about them thinking that.”

  • The Product Model in Traditional IT - ”Outcomes vs Predictability” is good framing for switching from traditional IT to “digital transformation.”

  Conferences, Events, etc.

  Talks I’m giving, places I’ll be, and other plans.

  Our analysis of the State of Cloud Native Platforms 2024 survey, online, speaking, July 24th, 2024. SpringOne/VMware Explore US, August 26–29, 2024. DevOpsDays Antwerp, 15th anniversary, speaking, September 4th-5th. SREday London 2024, speaking, September 19th to 20th. VMware Explore Barcelona, speaking(?), Nov 4th to 7th.

  Discounts. SREDay London (Sep 19th to 20th) when you 20% off with the code SRE20DAY. And, if you register for SpringOne/VMware Explore before June 11th, you’ll get $400 off.

  

  Logoff

  I’ve been thinking about an addition to my Bullshit Business Dictionary entry for “executize.” Maybe something like “the pre-read.” In theory, you put together a memo, document, maybe slides, that you send to an executive ahead of a meeting or for planning. You’ll put a lot of work into this, often with an executized summary at the front (bullet points), and then many pages of longer notes, research, etc. Or, you know, a “slide-bank” after the closing slide.

  In my ~30 years of experience, the pre-read is actually read only 30% to 50% of the time. There are many executives who will never read it. They want to a sort of “have the meeting in the meeting.” It’s “sort of,” because if you’re doing that you will have read the pre-read so that you can discuss your reaction to it, ask questions, and focus on making a decision.1

  You may think this means you don’t need to do a pre-read: who knows what the executive wants, what they’ll ask for, what will be in their head at the moment. Why waste time on things that never get used. However, I think do an extensive pre-read is important so that you know what to say and suggest during the meeting, at the very least so that you have context and can form opinions.

  Also, there’s a chance that your pre-read will be converted to a “post-read” if the executive ends up being interested in the topic.

  All that said, if you’re operating an unread pre-read environment, what’s more important is to be spontaneous and use improve tricks to kick around ideas - the old “yes, and” thing. There’s a view that working for an executive means you’re helping them solve the problems they have, no steering them towards the problems they should be focusing on and the solutions you think are right. I think that’s mostly right; it’s a hard thing for nerds to reconcile.

  In the “my job is to augment the executive, not help the corporate achieve outcomes/etc.” mode of operating, you might want to save your energy and time for the post-meeting work, and just do a small amount of pre-read work. Indeed, if you keep things unclear/high-level, you can likely achieve that “executize” level of bullet points right away.

  1

  There’s other executives who will read the pre-read and/or expect a very direct, structured in-meeting “read out.” These executives usually follow the American-style of just wanting to know the conclusions, the exact actions to take next. “Application-first reasoning,” they calls it. They may or may not care why, and will instead use intuition (or trust in the process) to know that something good will happen as a result of taking actions. (The opposite of this is “principles first,” where you build up a case right-side up pyramid style.) Anyhow: figure out your executives style, there are many types.