Of late, the newsletter has turned into me linking to longer posts on my blog. There’s the usual links and wastebook as well. This makes it more of a digest than a stand-alone item. As you can tell by the volume of blog posts below, I like blogging though and I’m glad I’m doing I do it more! Original contentSpeaking of, several little things on the blog: The ultimate bike-shedding story, and, always make your own slides.

3 factors is all you needIn this Tanzu Talk interview, Coté talks Brian Friedman about his extensive experience working with Pivotal, Tanzu, and Broadcom. They discuss the intricacies of modernizing enterprise applications, the relevance of .NET in the current tech landscape, and the role of platforms like Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes. They also explore using AI, the challenges of application transformation, and the importance of leveraging the right tools and methodologies to drive successful tech modernization initiatives.

Relative to your interestsI’m posting a lot more regularly on my weblog , most of the links below, and some content that doesn’t show up in the newsletter. Apologies if you’re living with duplicates. “CMDB” Is Dead — Long Live The IT Management Graph - What’s wrong with the CMDB concept, especially how it’s applied and managed. Apple Loses Landmark U.K. Lawsuit Over App Store Commissions - “When is the last time an investigation regarding the legality of the App Store’s dominant market position went in Apple’s favor, in any country?

Here’s my talk from Cloud Foundry Day. It’s four stories of large organizations using Cloud Foundry: Three are banks, and one is a German tax accountant and back-office SaaS. I start talking about the value of case studies for enterprise software. The opening keynote was from the German police, the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA). We used to have a lot of case studiess in the Cloud Foundry world and interest in PaaS in general, but that dropped off during The Great Kubernetes Distraction of the 2020’s.

SoraI have a Sora account. The take is that people like it because it lets them make videos of themselves and their friends seems right. It’s also scary good at cheese-marketing and ads, even for the thrilling world of PaaS (see my post in LinkedIn or Bluesky, then come back here for more examples). You can also get it to make videos that’d be perfect for generic ads. You can imagine this one being of any number of things like flights, hotels, eSIM cards for travelers:1

Cows, IoT, and MLOn this week’s Software Defined Interviews, Whitney and I talked with my friend Saad. We mostly talked about the irresistible topic of monitoring cows, which he did at his previous startup: In this episode, Whitney and Coté speak with Saad Ansari, a product manager at Databricks, about his fascinating journey from working at Microsoft to co-founding a startup focused on creating sensors for monitoring cow behavior. They go over the challenges and rewards of transitioning from large corporations to startups and back, the differences in company scales, and the various lessons learned along the way.

Tips on running AI on your private cloudSome brief comments on using Tanzu Platform to run your private GenAI stuff. If you’re interested in more than that short clip, check out my co-worker Nick’s talk on this topic. You can check out the Tanzu Platform more at TryTanzu.ai. Relative to your interestsTwo strategies to succeed when AI seems to be eroding jobs around you - 🤖 Technical writers are shifting from writers to content directors, steering and editing AI output.

Recording of my AI platform engineering talkThis is a new talk of mine going over how platform engineers can support AI. Well, it’s more about how we don’t exactly know, but we can speculate based on a handful of early use cases. Here’s the slides if you’re into that kind of thing. Here’s the 🤖 on my key points: Platform engineering for AI is mostly running another middleware service - same infrastructure tasks as always, plus model registries and figuring out who handles AI safety evaluations.

The Golden Era of PaaS is Still HereI’m playing around with trying to, I don’t know, re-introduce the notion of PaaS to the platform discussion. I don’t think what’s going on now is as good as it could be. I mean, yeah, I’m biased. But, you know, also biased to awesome. As you may recall from last episode, I cleaned my desk. You can see that in action here. My audio there was crap, but I wanted to get onto my weekend.

Getting over the AI policy board bottleneckAlso, people have suggested that have just two roles on the AI Center of Excellence Gatekeepers Guild is a good idea. Those two roles being security and legal. The theory is that the security people are used to this kind of thing and have processes in place. Also, that they are narrowly focused on a handful of things. You need the lawyers for all the whacky IP stuff.