From 451’s report on Google Next: Google believes that a hybrid architecture will persist in the coming years as enterprises continue to migrate workloads to various clouds. Its hybrid cloud architecture revolves around its virtual private cloud. Google VPC is an instantiation of GCP that can dedicate compute, storage and network resources to an enterprise. It is built upon Google's proprietary private global network designed for high reliability, low latency and hardened security.

Can we take that governance and work with the platform team to codify, to automate that which they were doing on a per application basis - that's, quiet frankly slowing down the delivery of the software - can we take that governance and can we have them work with the platform team to codfiy, to actually automate on a per application basis, have them expose that as a service on the platform -Cornelia Davis on governance and cloud-native, “Who Does What?

If there’s one complaint that I hear consistently in my studies of IT in large organizations, it’s that government IT, as traditionally practiced, is fucked. Compared to the private sector, the amount of paperwork, the role of contractors, and the seeming separation between doing a good job and working software drives all sorts of angst and failure. Mark Schwartz’s book on figuring out “business value” in IT is turning out to be pretty amazing and refreshing, especially on the topic of government IT.

I started a new booklet project, the Cloud Native Cookbook. The premise is this: The premise of this book is to collect specific, tactical advice transitioning to a cloud-native organization. The reader is someone who "gets it" when it comes to agile, DevOps, cloud native, and All the Great Things. Their struggle is actually putting it all in place. Any given organization has all of it's own, unique advantages and disadvantages, so any "

In a report giving advice to mainframe folks looking to be more Agile, Gartner’s Dale Vecchio and Bill Swanton give some pretty good advice for anyone looking to change how they do software. Here’s some highlights from the report, entitled “Agile Development and Mainframe Legacy Systems - Something’s Got to Give” Chunking up changes: Application changes must be smaller. Automation across the life cycle is critical to being successful.

At first, you’re like, “oh, another piece where someone makes fun of us nerds and misunderstands our damagingly sarcastic way of saying everything that belies the privilege we all live under.” Then you’re like, “oh, this is actually a good piece.” E.g.: Human rights work attempts to prevent the abusive deployment of power against those who have little of it. While technology might disrupt some power structures, it might also reinforce them, and it is rarely designed to empower the most vulnerable populations.

Less than 5% of white men surveyed said they considered a lack of diversity a top problem. Three-out-of-four respondents were unaware of any initiatives to make their companies or portfolios more diverse. And 40% of male respondents were sick of the media going on and on about it. Meanwhile, in political land: the more privileged you are, the less that oppression personally affects you, the less urgency you perhaps have to get involved in the fight.

Today, nearly 45 percent of trading is done electronically, according to Coalition, a U.K. firm that tracks the industry. Pay: Average compensation for staff in sales, trading, and research at the 12 largest global investment banks, of which Goldman is one, is $500,000 in salary and bonus, according to Coalition. Seventy-five percent of Wall Street compensation goes to these highly paid “front end” employees, says Amrit Shahani, head of research at Coalition.

Some intersting history of how Facebook grew users. Of course, this the case study is for a free service, that focuses on a high volume of users. I.e.: not an enterprise sales business that charges $3m+ per user-cum-customers. Contextualizing aside, there’s some good product thinking: Better know what your product is good for: Knowing true core product value allows you to design the experiments necessary so that you can really isolate cause and effect.

A few weeks back my book review of two “the robots are taking over” came out over on The New Stack. Here’s some responses, and also some highlights from a McKinsey piece on automation. Don’t call it “automation” From John Allspaw: There is much more to this topic. Nick Carr’s book, The Glass Cage, has a different perspective. The ramifications of new technology (don’t call it automation) are notoriously difficult to predict, and what we think are forgone conclusions (unemployment of truck drivers even though the tech for self-driving cars needs to see much more diversity of conditions before it can get to the 99%+ accuracy) are not.