Summer. For most of my life I lived in Texas, where the heat of summer melts your face off. Summer was fun because I wasn’t in school, not because it was sunny. Now that I live in a part of the world where summer is mild, I really like summer. I see what all the fuss was about! So, too bad it’s mostly over now.

On this week’s Software Defined Talk episode we discuss the effectiveness of reorgs, Meta’s new AI team, and the Google antitrust ruling. Plus, some strong thoughts on cold brew and bathtubs. Listen in, and you can also watch the unedited video recording if you’re into that kind of thing.

Wastebook

• “Buy once, cry once.”

• “My sister loves all orphans.” RotL, #592.

• “If you’re good at sleep, you like sleep.” Ibid.

• The reviews of this airport are amazing. As one “just fine” review puts it: “You have to have a good sense of humor and low expectations at this airport.” I’ve been a frequent business traveler for 20 years, and I like, and try to live, that idea: have a good sense of humor. If you have that when you’re traveling, you’ll have a good time. If not, you’re just asking to be upset. The people who left bad reviews of that hilarious airport are obviously not a golfer.

• “they are funny, shrewd and clear-eyed about aging, taking in the good (lunchtime drinking, caring less about others’ opinions) and the bad (everything else).” The Economist World in Brief, August 28th, 2025.

• “A demon buried in a glowing glass container.” Warren Ellis.

• An old Italian man at the beach standing, talking with his older friends - men and women - just lets out a huge, sonorous fart. Chao!

• “At least nobody gave him any solid gold statues this time, as far as I know.” With venom dripping. And:

• “Bill Gates was also there for some reason.”

Relative to your interests

• The Tanzu portfolio no longer includes Kubernetes. Hear an overview from the Tanzu GM, Purnima Padmanabhan. // Over the past, I don’t know, 4 or 5 years, the company and now business unit that I work in was the home of Kubernetes in VMware. This made “Tanzu” synonymous with Kubernetes. Now, the VMware Kubernetes products have been moved to the VMware group, out of Tanzu. And, that bundle of Kubernetes stuff is now called VMware Kubernetes Service, VKS. This brings the Tanzu business unit’s focus back to just platform for developers: the Cloud Foundry based PaaS, databases and data services, and now AI middleware. Also, check out Forrester’s portfolio overview.

• New VMware private AI infrastructure rethinks Tanzu, again - “If you want to use Kubernetes as Kubernetes, then VCF, which includes VKS, is what you use.”

• Private AI powers Broadcom’s vision for VCF 9.0 - “We shared we have more than 80 customers now,” for AI stuff, I believe he’s saying. // And: “The key thing with VCF that I think kind of gets missed sometimes in the conversations is everybody is claiming they can do sovereign cloud, but the details matter here,” Wolf said. “The difference with VCF is we run a fully air-gapped environment. The organization owns the control plane. That is absolute control that you have. No matter what happens in the world, you have ownership of the software stack and your intellectual property.”

• VMware Explore US 2025 Breakout Session URLs - William Lam makes a simple, nicely usable list of all Explore sessions and links to slides. Every conference should have a page like this.

• The Great Migration: Why Workloads Are Coming Home to Private Cloud - “55% of enterprises are already running GenAI in a private cloud – especially when it comes to use cases like inference, fine-tuning and RAG.”

• With AI Boom, Dell’s Datacenter Biz Is Finally Bigger Than Its PC Biz - “Thanks to the GenAI boom, Dell’s Infrastructure Solutions Group, which sells servers, storage, switching, and services into the datacenter, is finally – and very likely permanently – larger than its PC business for the first time in its history. (We are not counting the time a decade and a half ago when Dell ate Perot Systems and was also eating software companies to try to create a clone of IBM, much as HPE did at the same time.)” // Weird parenthetical?

• VCF And Private AI Take Center Stage At VMware Explore 2025 - “We believe that while the company has quietly designed and delivered the leading private cloud platform, it should be more vocal and direct in the market. While competitors claim to be the more affordable option, these claims are often based on upfront discounts that don’t fully account for cost over the long term. And while these competitors talk about vendor lock-in, they are in reality simply suggesting that customers move from one proprietary cloud stack to another.”

• Is Your IT Organization A Ponzi Scheme? - “The only way out is to stop borrowing against the future and start paying down the past. Escaping requires sustained platform investment — enough to reach equilibrium where debt stops growing. This means: Refactoring to improve code structure and reduce the cost of future changes. Refreshing technologies before they become emergencies. Rationalizing redundant systems to reduce complexity and risk.”

• Thirty Years On, the Californian Ideology is Alive and Well - The cycle of tech loosing its democratic morals in favor of tech innovation, and, of course, making money.

• China Has a Different Vision for AI. It Might Be Smarter. - AI applications outside of the consumer sector: “In February, the city announced the release of an agricultural AI model, using technology from the Chinese startup DeepSeek, which gives local farmers guidance on crop selection, planting and pest control, according to a local government report. The city’s meteorological service is using DeepSeek to improve the accuracy of weather reports. DeepSeek is also helping local police analyze case reports and decide how to respond to emergencies.”

• Five Vide Coding Lessons for the Enterprise - If you start with a garbage system, you end up with garbage apps. // ‘In an enterprise, the “context window” isn’t just a technical term; it’s the accumulated technical debt, undocumented tribal knowledge, and complex dependencies that hold your systems together. A new developer or a new AI tool can’t simply be dropped in and expected to understand this history. The leader’s job is to provide that context, not expect the tool to figure it out.’

• The End Of Business Apps As We Know Them Is Here - Kate Leggett (Forrester) has a go at defining the enterprise AI stack, bringing in the “fabric” notion.

• Seeing like a software company - When management meddling slows down the business because they need/want to measure and make decide. Also, good sub-plot on “the meeting for the meeting,” prep meetings and using the “back-channel” to get things done.

Conferences

VMUG London, speaking, September 18th, speaking. SREDay London, speaking, September 18th and 19th. Civo Navigate London, September 30th, London, speaking. Cloud Foundry Day EU, Frankfurt, October 7th, 2025, speaking. AI for the Rest of Us, London, October 15th to 16th, London, speaking. SREDay Amsterdam, November 7th, speaking.

I’ve got a 20% off discount for AI for the Rest of Us: SDI20. You should go the conference if you can, it’ll be good!

Logoff

I was on Cloud Foundry Weekly yesterday. I’ve been researching the role of platform engineers with respect to AI. There’s all sorts of things! Nick of the show put together a presentation of what he’s seen talking with our customers and also running AI services on his own. It was great, check it out if you’re interested in this topic.