Where are people putting their modernized apps? Here’s a recent survey chart on that topic from 451:

Recent Content

Three things for you today:

1. The private cloud equilibrium - my most recent attempt to figure out how much private cloud is out there.

2. Platform Engineering and UK Digital People, with Abby Bangser - this week’s Software Defined Interviews: As if platform engineering and expat'ing in the UK weren't enough, Whintney and Coté discuss the forgotten technology of business cards wih Abby Bangser.

3. The most honorable of mentions - This week’s Software Defined Talk: we discuss the relationship between DevOps and Platform Engineering, Gartner’s take on Distributed Hybrid Infrastructure, and Nvidia’s search for new use cases. Plus, a listener chimes in to clear up some Podman misconceptions.

Relative to your interests

• DORA Report 2024 – A Look at Throughput and Stability - Developer productivity is fine, but: “We thought the bottleneck was developers writing code, but in fact the bottleneck is putting good code into production.” // Maybe the current trend in DevOps/platform engineering/cloud native to to stop caring about developer productivity, rather, re-silo and let them care about it, and instead focus on operations productivity. Definitely that re-eval of how silo-busting has been going. https://redmonk.com/rstephens/2024/11/26/dora2024/

• The Rise of AI Agent Infrastructure - We’re all figuring out what “agent” means in AI land. It’ll probably end up meaning nothing if us marketing people do our jobs of claiming that we all do it.

• AI is reshaping call center work in the Philippines - ‘“AI is not to replace people but to help people become more productive,” she said. “If you needed 10 team members before, maybe now you only need five.”’ // Hmm, those two statements don’t seem to go together.

• China tech tariffs: Which countries will be affected - Round up of how current tariffs are going, and what they are.

• Rewiring the way McKinsey works with Lilli, our generative AI platform - “30% time savings in searching and synthesizing knowledge.” // Worth reflecting on how much of this is pulling together all the stuff for monthly status updates to management, a huge time suck for office workers. Much of it is probably bullshit work, but why not let the bullshit artist do it?

• Magic Quadrant for Distributed Hybrid Infrastructure - I’d call this something more like “multi-cloud platform.” A sub-set is cloud native, Kubernetes, really. A further subset is private cloud. As always with critiquing Gartner work, unless you have full access to related PDFs and have read them, be careful with assumptions and scorn.

Logoff

Not much this episodes! I’ve recorded 6 podcasts this week, with one more coming this afternoon. I’ve also been working on that same internal video for our Sales Kick-off. You could say I’m multi-media brain-dead. Still, it’s been fun having “content” to focus on with little time to do so: it allows me to ignore all the daily bullshit work.1 Perhaps there’s something to learn there! Of course, it being Thanksgiving week in the US helps: most people are also ignoring daily bullshit work.

//

Just two more weeks left in my work-year. How did this last year go? My work made a dramatic shift in strategy, focusing just on private cloud. This is probably good.

I didn’t speak at as many conferences as I usually do. I do a little bit more internal facing work, and I’ve done a lot more “on brand” work. This is sort of weird. I’ve run out of things to say at conferences.

Since platform engineering decided to murder DevOps and just start that whole thing over from scratch, the conversations has turned into the same old shit we’ve been talking about since at least 2015. I spent a lot of 2022 and 2023 saying as much. It gets really, really boring talking about “how to do software better” over and over after 10 years, especially when the industry decided to reboot it. It’s like watching a really shitty remake of a classic movie you grew up with. This means it’s difficult for me to come up with anything interesting and entertaining to say.

Nonetheless, I had a few new talks - arguably just twists and updates on the same old shit, but fun to do nonetheless. I have one new talk that’s been accepted for new year building on my ongoing hunt for coverage of private cloud usage. And if the KubeCon London 2025 people are into it, there’ll be a new panel.