Coté

Always talk salary first - working with tech recruiters

Whitney has a LinkedIn problem

Our second episode of the Software Defined Interviews reboot is up:

Whitney and Coté talk with Sidney Miller about tech recruitment. They talk a lot about the process from both sides: people hiring and people looking for jobs. Plus, some thoughts on working at Neiman Marcus. Find Sidney in LinkedIn.

More details:

They explore effective strategies for both the hirer and the job seeker. Key topics include the comprehensive role of tech recruiters, tactics for handling diverse skill sets, inclusion efforts, unbiased interview practices, and the significance of empathy and transparency. They also cover personal strategies for successful job applications, the emotional aspects of career transitions, and networking tips for long-term career growth. Additional insights highlight challenges faced by artists and musicians transitioning into tech roles and the importance of leadership in fostering a positive workplace culture.

You can listen to the interview on the World Wide Web, and/or watch the video version in YouTube. Make sure to subscribe to the podcast too so you just get it every two weeks.

Windmill Lidar. This is the only windmill in Amsterdam. Well, that I know of.

Have any internships?

Speaking of, my nephew is looking for an internship to wrap-up his college studies. His name is Caleb Marques, and would love to join a great team. He's studied all the thrilling IT stuff at Texas A&M: Unix sysadmin'ing, cybersecurity, networking, python, Business, and all that kind of stuff. He graduates in August 2025 and needs an internship to finish up his business and cybersecurity degrees. He'll move where ever, so location is not a problem. Tell me if you're interested, or know someone who's got an IT, especially security internship. He's fun too! :)

Check him out in LinkedIn, and contact him or me if you’re interested in seeing his resume, talking with him, etc.

Garbage Chairs of Amsterdam.

Relative to your interests

Conferences

If you’re going to explore, be sure to pre-register for my two sessions. It helps! Check out all the poop at cote.pizza.

VMware Explore Barcelona, speaking, Nov 4th to 7th. GoTech World, speaking, Bucharest, Nov 12th and 13th. SREday Amsterdam, speaking, Nov 21st, 2024.

Discounts! SREDay Amsterdam: 20% off with the code SRE20DAY.

Logoff

Here’s another overview of how I play D&D with ChatGPT (and the other AIs): use a PC journal that’s mixed in with other PoVs, meta-notes, etc. The audio in the video is sad, but the content is great!

Three fun fonts and stories of enterprise data integration

Let’s start with some YAGV (yet another goofy video):

Relative to your interests

  • Spring AI: An AI framework for Java developers - No python? No problem.

  • The Great Data Integration Schlep - ‘Every company has something fucked-up and dumb going on somewhere, no matter how admirable they are in other respects, and if they’re facing an existential crisis there’s definitely something going badly wrong that somebody doesn’t want to face. If you ever want to get all your data in one place, you need to figure out some of the shape of the Badness, in an environment where most of the people you meet are presenting as “reasonable and highly competent professionals” and everybody’s got a different story about the Badness and why it’s unavoidable or someone else’s fault.’

  • Via: Reflections on Palantir - There’s a lot going on here, from small tactical points (much of the work in enterprise software is just meetings and “politics” to get access to enterprise data and systems) to complete world views (always questing for the most optimized, quickest, and profitable solution that actually works, no matter the cost). Counter arguments: how would one live like this with three kids, even one kid? // There’s also the mystery of why the thought leaders and executives of this world are so weird.

  • Warren Buffett’s GEICO repatriates work from the cloud - “Ten years into that [cloud] journey GEICO still hadn’t migrated everything to the cloud, their bills went up 2.5X and their reliability challenges went up quite a lot too – because if you spread your data and your methodology across so many different vendors you are going to spend a lot of time recollecting that data to actually serve customers.” And: “Most engineers I talk to are [also] excited…when ‘Big Tech’ is enforcing less flexible working conditions, coming to a place where we want to build together [without those conditions – she is hiring for jobs that include the option to be fully remote] then that’s very attractive…”

  • The Scapegoat by Lucy Hughes-Hallett review – James I’s beloved bedfellow - ‘Buckingham initially consulted Lambe, whom he called “my devil”, about his “mad” – probably bipolar – brother, but retained him as an adviser, perhaps to use his love potion-making skills or his curses, practices for which Lambe had spent time in prison.’

  • What Message Queue-Based Architectures Reveal About the Evolution of Distributed Systems - There’s not a lot of buzz and chatter about message-oriented middleware (MOM) anymore (remember the Kafka craze?), but is one of the most common workloads running in containers. One of those “boring” states: when a technology is ubiquitous enough, just works, and therefore is a well oiled wheel that gets no thought.

  • Related: Tanzu Postgres for Tanzu Platform for Cloud Foundry adds new features - Faster, incremental backups using pgBackRest, AI/ML support with Pgvector, and streamlined restore options with adbr

  • Relatable, not louder - “More generally, what persuades people is new information – ideally information that is relevant to their lives and that comes with someone who they have something in common with.” // How devrel works. More broadly, of course: marketing.

  • A History of Microwave Ovens - As it says.

  • I’m Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is - “The primary use of ‘misinformation’ is not to change the beliefs of other people at all. Instead, the vast majority of misinformation is offered as a service for people to maintain their beliefs in face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.”

  • The XOXO 2024 Talks - People keep raving about these talks.

  • Internal Developer Platform: Insights from Conversations with Over 100 Experts - Looks comprehensive!

  • The Evolution and Expansion of IT FinOps - Overview of current needs and possibilities in enterprise-y FinOps, I assume.

  • Risks vs. Harms: Youth & Social Media - “Do some people experience harms through social media? Absolutely. But it’s important to acknowledge that most of these harms involve people using social media to harm others. It’s reasonable that they should be held accountable. It’s not reasonable to presume that you can design a system that allows people to interact in a manner where harms will never happen. As every school principal knows, you can’t solve bullying through the design of the physical building.”

  • Are Kids Screenable? - New screen time app. It sounds like it actually integrates with iOS stuff, which I didn’t even know was possible.

  • Why Retail Health Clinics Failed - I wonder if failure is rated by profitability or by the improvement in the amount and quality of care given to people. In medicine, those are probably two different things that don’t often work together.

  • The Real Impact Of Return-To-Office Mandates On Productivity At Work - “Not surprisingly, research by Upwork showed that 63% of C-suite leaders whose companies implemented return-to-office mandates say the policy has led a disproportionate number of women to quit. In addition, more than half agree that the loss of female talent resulted in a serious decline in productivity. In addition to women, a Gartner survey revealed that millennials and high performers are the most likely to quit when companies enforce return-to-office mandates. Among high-performing employees, their desire to stay dropped by 16%. And among millennials, the largest generation in the U.S. workforce, the intent to stay declined by 10%.” // RTO is dress-code.

  • The Cloud Foundry Renaissance, Julian Fischer, CF Day EU 2024 - This is a good talk, content wise and also structure wise. It has a point of view, a vision, finds a problem, and then launches a product.

Lots of fonts this round-up, so I’ll cluster them:

  • Eldritch Art Nouveau: Lovecraft at Ballantine - “This kind of Art Nouveau styling doesn’t really suit Lovecraft either, the design being more a result of Ballantine following prevailing trends than anything else. You could make something like this work for Lovecraft if you were determined, with a border design and font choice more suited to the subject.”

  • Typefaces of the occult revival - Back in the 80s, I went to the occult shelves first thing when I’d goto in Half Priced Books. I found a copy of the Necronomicon once! Also, clearly one of the horn-doggest sections of the used bookstore.

  • Nick Cooke’s Exentrica - “it seemed as though it were a bridge between Jugendstil and Art Deco — the missing link, so to speak.”

Wastebook

  • “Broken steering is a metaphor for that feeling at work where your actions seem to have no impact. Turn the wheel, car still goes straight. This is rare in blue collar work: the car got assembled, now you have car. It is common in knowledge work: you sent some email, so what?” Here.

  • “I’ve been married to you long enough. I know you like warm biscuits.”

One of my daughter’s characters. “I call him Happy Flappy.”

Conferences

If you’re going to explore, be sure to pre-register for my two sessions. It helps! Check out all the poop at cote.pizza.

VMware Explore Barcelona, speaking, Nov 4th to 7th. GoTech World, speaking, Bucharest, Nov 12th and 13th. SREday Amsterdam, speaking, Nov 21st, 2024.

Discounts! SREDay Amsterdam: 20% off with the code SRE20DAY.

Logoff

I need a haircut and will be getting one soon.

Avoiding all the usual, boring app development problems with AI

Most of the generative AI applications we'll see in the coming years will be just new features added to existing applications. Even more pragmatically, simply improving how existing applications work will drive a lot of the AI benefits. When it comes to applications, this means we should manage AI like we would any other service, both in process and how we run it. That's my prediction at least. I'm as enamored with AI as anyone else, trying out plenty of experiments and ravenously hungry for any real world case studies that are more complex that chatbots, sophisticated search, and (re)writing.

The reality of AI roll-out in the enterprise is creeping in. That reality is: it’ll be slower than we were promised. For example, Battery Venture's recent enterprise tech spending survey says: 

The AI wave is still building, but the future has been slower than anticipated. Today only 5.5% of identified AI use cases are in production, a sobering reality check on respondents’ Q1’24 projection that 52% of identified use cases would be in production over the next 24 months. 

As Benedict Evans put it "the future can take a long time."

My point is not to dampen the enthusiasm, but to make the timeline more realistic and, thus, the chances of success much higher.

In enterprise software, sanity is valuable because it introduces stability and reliablity. I'm not sure I want my bank working at break-neck speed, applying new ideas this way and that before figuring out what works and, even, what's valuable for me. As with any highly regulated business, I want to trust my bank, and that trust comes from knowing they're operating in a consistent, proven way. I want my bank to be a lot more sane than whatever services I use to share pictures of my sandwiches or listen to Yacht Rock.

There's years of AI-driven benefits in our future, especially in large organizations and businesses. AI stuff could, indeed, be a silver bullet: something that didn't previously exist that lets us solve problems faster and cheaper, and even better than what we previously had.

But, how you achieve those goals is likely immune to silver bullet dreams. This is especially true when it comes to applications. The practice of creating, evolving, and maintaining good applications will remain the same as they were in the pre-AI era. If we mess around with and ignore those practices, just as we found out when Kubernetes up-ended all the progress we made with PaaS, we'll have to start all over again, losing time, progress, expertise, and trust.

In the enterprise, just like the rest of the world, great ideas are a dime a dozen, in a good way: there's lots of options for improvement. In a large organization, three hurdles stand in the way of transforming good ideas into code and ultimately into production: (1) neglecting product/problem fix, (2) "politics" due to silo-defending cultures, and, (3) fear of releasing due to lack of trust in resilience, reliability, and sometimes cost.

When enterprises try to spin up AI projects, these three barriers will come into effect just like they would any new IT services. Let's look at each.

Garbage Chairs of Amsterdam, Karlsruhe, Germany edition.

Most IT projects fail because of neglected product/problem fit 

I'm sure you've used many applications and thought "do the people who build this software actually use it?" That's the first layer of the problem: the app is poorly designed and doesn't actually help the people using it do their job better. The second is that the application is just solving the wrong problem. "Wrong sounds" judge-y. What I mean there is that there were better problems to solve first. Of more vexingly, better ways to solve the problem. 

AI projects will have to solve this product/problem fit. Worse, that product management labyrinth is even more dangerous when it comes to hot new technologies because we get so torqued up that we lose sight of basics. We assume that these new silver bullets will remove the need for all that tedious process stuff we’re currently putting up with. 

I like how Jürgen Geuter put it recently: 

[W]ith every new technology we spend a lot of money to get a lot of bloody noses for way too little outcome. Because we keep not looking at actual, real problems in front of us - that the people affected by them probably can tell you at least a significant part of the solution to. No, we want a magic tool to make the problem disappear. Which is a significantly different thing than solving it. Because actually solving a problem includes first fully understanding the reasons for the existence of the problem, reasons that often come back to an organizations’ structure, their – sometimes inconsistent – goals and their social structure in addition to actual technical issues.

The antidote for this is consistently applying product management. Well, applying it at all for most enterprises.

Product management brings a cool-headed approach to all that "magic." The good news is that product management is one of the more understood, more developed and real-world tested software practices out there. And, if you follow the frequent weekly or fortnightly release cycles that people who follow the Tanzu Labs model do, you introduce a data-driven method of planning and improving your apps. I've seen this done at numerous large enterprises. You can read more about it in my book Monolithic Transformation and the Tanzu Labs Product Manager Playbook.

5 Türen, Gerhard Richter, 1967.

Culture

To me, "politics" is whatever noise, sandbagging, and (selfish) behavior people in an organization do that prevents you from doing "the right thing." No one likes "politics": it's always bad. Otherwise we'd just call it "work." It's grit in the system, often put there by other people in your organization who want to protect what they have, hoard budget and the rewards that come with success.

For the most part, it's not so much the grit-throwers fault, but management's fault for setting up and sustaining the system to work that way. People are rational, they figure out "the game" and play it.

When it comes to initiatives like the magic of AI, politics shows up in maximum force. People either want to hoard the benefits and attention, or they want to defend themselves. Is it taking a long time to get access to the infrastructure you need to run AI models? That's probably politics. Are you trying to find time for yet another meeting to get access to the manufacturing quality data you need? I bet it's "politics."

The fear that AI will eliminate jobs will compound this problem even more: people will be reluctant to give you access to their data to automate analysis because "then, what will I do?" After all, employees rarely get the benefits of “productivity,” speeding up work by 20% doesn’t mean workers now get Fridays off.

There's absolutely nothing about the magic of AI that will solve these culture problems. To adapt what one of my team-mates once said: "AI will not fix your broken culture."

Solving culture problems is difficult, but, again, we have decades of experience learning what works and doesn't work. There's a lot of "it depends'ing" to it, yes. But, as with product management, that's why you start with a system and rigorously apply it.

Lack of trust in process and platforms

I mentioned that I want my bank to be sane. This is because, you know, they have all my money. If that money just disappeared overnight, my life would get very difficult. It'd be a major bummer!

The financial sector hasn't exactly behaved rationally during my years as an adult, and there's a whole generation of people who were born into bad financial times. That is, banks have earned that need for trust. 

Similarly, IT has earned a need for trust. Just as with banking, in aggregate, things are fine. I still have all my money after all these years! And, IT keeps running businesses. But, when big problems happen - delays, growing budgets, ineffective apps, and security breaches - all of IT gets blamed. People forget how valuable most all IT is. In short, IT needs to constantly win and maintain the business’ trust.

When it comes to software, this lack of trust feeds delays by adding in endless governance and process. But it also injects fear into the people doing the work. If things go poorly, if we're not 100% correct and successful, we will be punished. For applications, this means you have a bias towards taking fewer risks. For organization, this means you're afraid of releasing your apps. 

It all comes together in a cultural malaise - a fog of timidity and lethargy that stifles innovation, slows down decision-making, and encourages risk-averse behavior. Here again, the people are acting rationally within the system that management has built and continues to maintain, if only through neglect.

In applications, the first step to solving this malaise is to get a reliable, proven platform in place, changing how operations works to be the product managers of that platform. The second step is to change how developers write applications to take advantage of that platform.

This is where platforms and platform engineering come in. I'm, you know, reticent to hand over the torch from DevOps to platform engineering - the PE crew has done a good enough job just swiping it - but platform engineering has a lot going for it when it comes to building trust. Of course, you need a platform too - culture without technology is just delightful conversations.

What I'm talking about here is a baseline of trust in application development and platforms, nothing to do with AI. But, AI will need that same amount of trust. And that trust will come from being "just another service" in a reliable platform. You're not going to want AI to exist on its own as a weird service held together by newly typed up python, you'll want it supported by platforms relying on the same old, boring but “enterprise grade” components that run the world day in and day out.

This means putting in place the SRE-smells in platform engineering, the product management in platform engineering to make sure the AI services are useful and used by developers, and then the actual platform stack itself, hopefully one that you didn't just paste-pot together out of parts.

People probably trust AI now because it seems like magic, because they haven't used it day-to-day to know how finicky it is, and because not many AI apps have been put into production yet. But, as with any new software, the more it’s used, the more you'll notice the failures and start to build up mis-trust.

We know how to run, program with, govern, and secure any old type of "service," and I don't think there'll be much different with AI services if we treat them as such. You need an AI platform strategy.

How to eat silver bullets

Does this seem to slow? Unrealistic in the face of boards and CEOs hungry for those AI silver bullets? It can, and we see this over and over. You can achieve those stupendous results, but your biggest problem is going to be figuring out what exactly to do and how to organize your teams to do it.

If you have those parts right, you've got a good chance of getting that AI magic. You'll certainly have a better chance than people who follow the fire-aim-ready approach to strategy. Seemingly contradictory, the most important thing is to start right now: assess your software capabilities. Do you have product managers? Are you able to release software every week or two to actual users? Can you gather feedback about what works and doesn't work so you can refine your app? Maybe you can, but most organizations don't have the basics of that loop in place.

Adding product-thinking and frequent releases to your organization and culture takes a long time, but it will take even longer if you don't start. Put that in place, and then you'll be on your way. Set realistic expectations and then you'll benefit from another theory of applying IT magic to your business: "Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years."

I’ll be in two talks on these topics next month at Explore in Barcelona, November 4th to 7th.

I’m really interested in a panel I’m moderating with a platform engineer from Mercedes-Benz, Benni Miano, and what I’m going to call our chief AI architect (in Tanzu-land), Adib Saikali. I’ve been really bored with enterprise AI for awhile, and talking to those two has gotten me interested in again. Adib had some interesting thoughts on roles and responsibilities in the enterprise AI stack.

There’s another one on platform contracts that I’m helping out with. It’s based on some work that we’ve done with NatWest to get developers to shift to cloud native applications - that whole point above of changing how your developers work to take advantage of your platforms.

And, of course, there’ll be all sorts of talk about how we think about adding AI to your platforms. Plus, Barcelona in November - what’s not to like! Check out the two talks, and tell me if you’re coming.

Logoff

I’ll save up the links and weird finds for next time. If you’re into my experiments using generative AI to play solo Dungeons & Dragons, here’s a new technique I’m working on and recommend.

How I got 8,700 views for my talk about developer productivity.

The recording of one of my talks has 8,400 views. That’s a lot more than other talk recordings. How does YouTube work, I sure don’t know!

Confusing it more is that the same talk given at a different conference has 85 views. At least I wore a different shirt each time.

Oh, and while I’m promoting myself, here’s my lighting talk (5 minutes) from DevOpsDays Antwerp pondering if DevOps is successful.

Internship

My nephew, Caleb Marques, is looking for an internship in IT and would love to join a great team. He's studied all the thrilling IT stuff at Texas A&M: Unix sysadmin'ing, cybersecurity, networking, python, Business, and all that kind of stuff. He graduates in August 2025 and needs an internship to finish up his business and cybersecurity degrees. He'll move where ever, so location is not a problem. Tell me if you're interested, or know someone who's got an IT, especially security internship. He's fun too! :)

Somewhere in Karlsruhe, Germany.

Relative to your interests

  • Developer Relations Foundation Aims to Clarify Role - Hopefully it’s good for enterprises too, big organizations that need internal-facing devrel.

  • California Becomes the First State to Ban Sell-By Dates on Food Labels - I think we all knew these were bullshit. // “Sell-by dates are a slightly ironic, and unnecessary, cause of food waste, because they’re not intended to ever be used by consumers. Instead, these dates are meant to indicate to store employees when stock needs to be rotated, and are not accurate representations of freshness or consumability.”

  • Viktor Farcic: There is no such thing as a DevOps engineer - Platforms bundle services developers use to make it easier and faster for them. // Viktor’s platform engineering definition: “In practice, certain experts are codifying their experience into services. Hence, if you’re a database administrator, you’re an expert. Instead of waiting for somebody to ask you to create a database for them or to configure it, you can codify that knowledge, transform it into a service and plug it into that platform so that everybody else can do it themselves instead of asking you to do things for them. Click a button, fill in some fields, and create some YAML; whatever the system is, should be the mechanism for others to create and manage that database without you. And you should focus on managing those services instead of managing requests from people to do something.”

  • Continuous Authorization to Operate (cATO) needs a DevSecOps platform - This is written in US Federal government speak, but the same benefits apply to commercial enterprises. If you use a centralized PaaS for your apps instead of customized infrastructure per each app, you can certify the layers below the application as compliant to use. Then when you put new all code on it, you only need to certify a thin layer of new code. The more traditional alternative (a customized infrastructure stack per app) means you have to certify the whole stack for each new app version. That takes a lot more time than the wafer thin layer of app.

  • Departure Mono - This font from Tobias Fried, Departure Mono, is amazing. Well, amazing if you remember dot-matrix printers and the screens in the Aliens movie. What’s even more amazing is the website: be sure to scroll and keep scrolling.

  • Parents' Earnings and the Returns to Universal Pre-Kindergarten - “parents work more hours, and their earnings increase by 21.7%. Parents' earnings gains persist for at least six years after the end of pre-kindergarten. Excluding impacts on children, each dollar of net government expenditure yields $5.51 in after-tax benefits for families”

  • Cave Oak - Wow! This is fun.

  • Writing Examples - Good for itself, and probably good for instructing The AI.

  • Desperately seeking AI ROI as IT budgets tighten - ”As we show above in red, at least 44% of the respondents indicate that gen AI is funded by stealing from other budgets. We’ve seen that number hover around 40% to 42% in previous surveys, and it pops up to at least 55% in the Global 2000.” // Also, one tactics for general IT cost savings is vendor consolidation.

  • Sorry, GenAI is NOT going to 10x computer programming - People have been using generative AI to help with coding for a couple years now. Is it making 10x developers? This guy tries to make the excitement more realistic by pulling together research on the topic.

  • How to Choose the Architecture for Your GenAI Application - I should read this!

Wastebook

  • “Today I am the man in seat 61 on the Eurostar from Paris to London.” Here.

  • “It’s clear they’re not used to halflings wandering into their midst, offering strange pockets of extradimensional comfort.” ChatGPT in D&D mode.

  • “Not sure when I started eating like a country hermit.” Here.

  • “salt libertarians” Here.

Conferences

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

If you’re going to explore, be sure to pre-register for my two sessions. It helps! Check out all the poop at cote.pizza.

VMware Explore Barcelona, speaking, Nov 4th to 7th. GoTech World, speaking, Bucharest, Nov 12th and 13th. SREday Amsterdam, speaking, Nov 21st, 2024.

Discounts! SREDay Amsterdam: 20% off with the code SRE20DAY.

Logoff

I’ve been at CF Day in Karlsruhe, Germany. It was great seeing the CF people. There were some great talks, especially on the topic of Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes co-existing in a useful way. They’ll be up on their YouTube channel sometime soon. Also, there was a live recording of Cloud Foundry Weekly, available now.

No travel until Explore, which I guess is actually soon-ish. Hopefully that means I’ll get some content out.

Here’s some good advice on how to eat Dutch food:

Meanwhile, at Schiphol.

(I actually like stamppot a lot, and, now that I think of it, I’m not really sold on hot pot yet. But, you know: ha hah. Good one.)

"a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity"

My daughter’s opinion of platform engineering is “cool story, let’s go get that kibbeling.”

Relative to your interests

This time you’ve gone too far, Captalism. I don’t even want to know.

Wastebook

  • If this is GChat, Slack must be OGChat.

  • “Creighton lives on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and he is not planning to voyage far.” Aspirations!

  • The sunw dress code: “You must!”

  • “What I want is trousers, that merge into shoes.” The good ol' days.

  • “We used to work together at Target. He would walk around humming, singing and making weird noises. One day he quit, no one heard from him. Three years later I’m still working at Target and he’s in Amsterdam rocking this crowd. WTF.” Here.

  • “It is about Family, Nature, red bricks and the charm of industrial style.” #CaroLife.

  • “The Golden Ditch.” James.

  • “Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on.” Steinbeck. // Perfection is procrastination.

  • “And the Police don’t like poetry.” Rands.

Logoff

The Broken Column, Frida Kahlo, 1944. My 4.5 year old daughter has been obsessed with this picture for about three days now. She asks to look at it before bed and right away after getting home from school. She calls it “the lady in the bus crash.” And she just stares at it for a long time, asking “why” about every detail.

"Make content about what you're curious about, not what you know."

Our new podcast is out, Software Defined Interviews, with me and Whitney Lee.

For the first episode, I interview Whitney. I’ve known her and worked with her now for, I don’t know, three years? She’s so great to talk with and so smart on all the cloud native stuff. In our episode, we go over her background, of course, but also plenty of “how you work” type stuff. For you nerds out there, we also talk about the evolution of the Kubernetes community and why security is always such a pain in the ass. Plus, at the end, you get the hear the discussion The Deep Dive crew would do.

Listen to it here, and if you want to hear more, subscribe to the podcast. I’ll also put the videos in the Software Defined Talk YouTube channel if you prefer that kind of thing. We’ve been circling around doing this for a year or so. We started with an idea for a show called “I didn’t read the book” (or something) where we’d interview authors about their books…which we hadn’t read. Maybe we’ll do that from time to time. Anyhow, then we just switched an interview show. There’s all sorts of people I’d like to interview, but never really do. It’ll be fun to see what Whitney asks them.

Listen to it now!

(Well, sure, it’s more like a re-boot of a defunct podcast, but just consider the episodes in the archive a fun find in the attic.)

Tamale House, Tim Doyle 2015?.

Relative to your interests

  • How much would it cost to fork WordPress? I make a wild swag at doing it as a commercial venture.

  • Croissant - Good looking cross posting app for Mastodon, BlueSky, and Threads. Adding in Shortcut support would be awesome.

  • Shambles, But Make It Digital - School IT is a mess. As with enterprise IT, I bet it could be better by just choosing one platform, no matter the compromises. My kids have three or four systems (ManageBac, Google Classrooms, also email). They haven learned the corporate skills of keeping up with all of this, and it shows. If the school had a semester long course on “office work,” it might be OK, but they don’t.

As read by the AI

Tell me how you like this! Here’s some things I’ve “read” via perplexity.ai summaries, including the brief summary it made and a link to the longer summary:

  • Dana Gould’s keynote address at the Just For Laughs Festival offers insightful reflections on success, failure, and the nature of a comedy career. His personal anecdotes and experiences in the entertainment industry provide valuable lessons for aspiring comedians and performers.

  • The rise of AI workloads and increasing demands for data sovereignty and governance are driving a resurgence in private cloud adoption, with the market expected to grow from $92 billion in 2023 to $405 billion in 2033. This renaissance is fueled by the need for enterprises to leverage AI capabilities while maintaining control over their data and infrastructure. And, some use cases.

  • This presentation discusses Wix’s approach to addressing complexity in software development through a Platform as a Runtime (PaaR) model. Here are the key points and insights

  • Open source AI lacks a clear definition and faces significant challenges in implementation, with many so-called “open source” AI models failing to meet true open source standards. The concept of open source AI is complex and often misunderstood, with issues ranging from licensing and data privacy to the practical limitations of reproducing large language models.

Atlas Supporting the Heavens and Hercules Killing the Hydra, Peter Paul Rubens, ~1636. These are prep work for the final pieces. Their rough nature has a kind of mid-century decoration, graphic arts vibe. Like ads for crackers.

Wastebook

  • “it was dimming my shine” jenn schiffer.

  • And: “new habits that are not workaholic-coded”

  • Rate my slop.

  • “Seeing people; talking about weird things; then trying to make sense of them in my head.” Lloyd returns to London, for the day.

  • “territorial unicorn” The Deep Dive crew.

Conferences

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

Cloud Foundry Day EU, Karlsruhe, Oct 9th. VMware Explore Barcelona, speaking, Nov 4th to 7th. GoTech World, speaking, Bucharest, Nov 12th and 13th. SREday Amsterdam, speaking, Nov 21st, 2024.

Discounts! SREDay Amsterdam: 20% off with the code SRE20DAY. Cloud Foundry Day 20% off with the code CFEU24VMW20.

Logoff

It was more important to be in the club than to have my name spelled right.

Back in the 90s, I’d spend hours watching The Comedy Channel. When I caught The Kids in the Hall, it was a special treat. Seeing those videos now is like comfort food on a rainy, cold day. And The Higgins Boys and Gruber - I was in the fan club! (Old guy remises!)

Cheese wedge mindfulness

(1) What seems to you like an everyday, boring experience may be totally foreign and inaccessible to other people. It can be delightful and helpful for them to see it, even if you’ve seen it for nine years everyday. This is one of Noah’s stated principles.

(2) I like Dutch Golden Age still life paintings. Big wedges of cheese, glassy eyed herring and equally glassy grapes, glowing wine glasses, walnuts, and Instagram-purposefully draped tablecloths. These are everyday things converted to beautiful tableaus. It’s trite to say that they make you enjoy the beauty of a wedge of cheese - you know, really see the cheese - but that’s what they do. In this case “beauty” is something more akin to what the mindfulness people are seeking: “being present,” therapeutically realizing that everything is OK, and that your job is to stop being a bundle of worries and just be a wedge of cheese. The cheese wedge was always beautiful, you were just too worried about your email. (When I look at abstract art, more of what I see is a box of parts, sometimes just a littered street the morning after a festival. You see the parts, or you can focus in on just one part: those single color canvases, those jumble of lines or huge installations of wires and objects. Sometimes a color - like Klein blue - or a perfect arrangement of lines - Mondrian, etc. - can be A Thing [to me] but the rest is like walking around in a hardware store. I get more from seeing the cheese wedge than all the parts that went into making it.)

Still Life with Cheese, Roelof Koets, 1625, Museum Mayer van den Berg, Antwerp.

(3) Noah’s videos have one of the highest ratios of likes to views that I encounter. He has a very small audience, but that audience is engaged. When you look at the time people actually watch a video, with most videos, people drop after fifteen, even five seconds. “As with almost every video on You[T]ube, the first minute has the most loss (go look). This is why we freak out so much about the first minute and go so above and beyond to make it the best we freakin[’] can,” says the Mr Beast manual. But, when it comes to Noah’s videos, I bet if you look at his charts, his viewers watch a lot more than the first 15 seconds. See #1 above.

(4) When you watch this video, hopefully what you see is, sure, how “an artist engages with their work.” But what you can also see is a model for engaging with your surroundings, both physically and metaphorically - existentially? I’m never sure what that last word means except something like “personal vibes.” The word “metaphysically” in everyday speech is even more abstract. It’s a filler word for “something important I can’t put words around.” What you see in the video is that, and if it “speaks” to you, it makes you wonder around muttering to yourself too. And, if not: maybe I suggest wedges of cheese?

Still Life with Stag Beetle, Georg Flegel, 1635, Wallraf–Richartz Museum, Cologne.

(5) Also, it’s just a guy walking around taking photos. Clearly, everyone likes taking photos, as the smart phone and social media era shows. Capturing a scene, a moment, a curiosity, whatever is fun and even part of living. It can be crude paintings on cave walls, an oral story telling culture, carvings and statues, writing on clay tablets and paper, music, paintings, photography, video, even multi-tools. Whatever it is, capturing a moment is like breathing and eating.

(6) And to that end, you bet, there’s some commentary about “these kids today and their obsession with video.” But what that commentary can say to you is more like: yeah, we can all be more present, engaged, and living life now. We don’t all need a $5,000 camera and the luxury to spend all your time find beauty. You don’t have to have the skills of painting a perfect cheese wedge, nor the wealth to buy it and hang it up in your parlor. You can just take out your phone and make your own cheese wedge picture. Now we can all get that, and make it. Even if it’s 30 seconds videos of people dancing or commenting on absurd fast food menu items.

Still Life with Cheese, Floris van Dyck, ~1615, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Did you see that?

(Related: you can do this kind of thing when you ponder the relationship between a culture and its everyday tools.)

Logoff

See y’all next episode!

Using app architecture constraints and templates in platform engineering

Platforms have many opinions, app architecture is one of them

This is an excerpt from a new blog post of mine covering a recent panel with platform engineers from Charles Schwab. I’ve made some slight changes.

Ensuring platform scalability and resilience starts with making sure applications are architected appropriately. Nowadays, that usually means using a cloud native architecture.

The guidelines for creating cloud native applications are well-known and proven. “Generally speaking, follow the 12 factor app pattern, have a stateless application, and deploy it as a microservice to PCF, that is our guidance,” Anis says, “It’s pretty simple.” When he says “PCF,” he’s using the older name (Pivotal Cloud Foundry) for the Tanzu Platform for Cloud Foundry, which is built to support cloud native applications.

Establishing and enforcing that style of development is a role for the platform engineering group that I think is under-appreciated: they need to play a role in specifying what type of application architectures work on the platform. It’s tempting to think in a more traditional way where the operations staff have to support a variety of application architectures that come their way. And, in large organizations built up of years of acquisitions, this is an inescapable reality for parts of their app portfolio.

The market-storm. Each day, the stock markets open, and you see this predictable spike in usage.

But, when the platform team can drive consistency in application architecture, they can start to make promises about resilience, reliability, supportability, scalability, and the other “ilities.” A platform engineering team that specifies what types of architectures the platform supports is putting in place a contract. “Write your applications this way, and we can ensure that they run well in production.” Site Reliability Engineering thinking brought this idea of “contracts” into enterprise operations, and the Schwab team talks about that way of thinking frequently.

That “contract” extends beyond the app architecture. One example of that is in the continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline. In contrast to traditional approaches where individual developers or development teams create their own build pipelines, many platform teams standardize the CI/CD pipeline. This allows platform teams to control how applications are built, configured, and ultimately deployed. For Charles Schwab, this kind of thinking is key, as Rajesh puts it “today anything which goes to the platform is via automation.” This allows the team to control app configuration and put in controls for things like quota, security groups, and other operations configuration.

To me, what the Charles Schwab team is doing is making sure they have the controls in place to scale how they manage all those applications. This removes burden for the application developers, but also allows the platform team to manage the apps in production. Introducing this consistency comes in handy when the team needs to scale applications. “If you want to sync your apps, you don’t have to reach out to the hundreds of application owners to do the deployments at a platform level,” Rajesh says.

One of the fundamental principles of Cloud Foundry is that developers should not build and package the containers for their applications. Instead, developers use buildpacks to specify how their applications should be built and containerized. This allows the platform team to control and automate those application builds. In another talk from Explore, Scott Rosenberg, from TeraSky gave a great overview of why this principle is a good idea. A lot of the benefits of using buildpacks are focused on security, but there are basic operations benefits as well.

Platform use over time. As the platform is trusted, people move more apps to it, and you get more ROI.

It was a great talk, covering lots of platform engineering topics. One you’ll also want to check out is the team structure they use. Instead of just one platform engineering team, they have two: a developer-facing one and an infrastructure facing one. The first has all the feels of standard platform engineering, the second more SRE vibe-y. This is the division they’ve learned over the past seven or so years, so, you know: it’s probably valid. Read the rest of the blog post, and definitely check out the recording of the panel.

Relative to your interests

  • Enterprise Philosophy and The First Wave of AI - AI is (too) expensive for what it does, and thus far clunky, so it will need to start in the enterprise space where companies can get good ROI.

  • IBM AI simply not up to the job of replacing staff - If the AI tools don’t work well, it’s hard to get good results. Also, the enterprise AI coding assistant needs to know a lot more than PHP.

  • Google Cloud rolls out new Gemini models, AI agents, customer engagement suite - Big round-up of new Gemini stuff: “agents.”

  • Gemini at Work 2024: How customers use Google Cloud AI products - More on the “agent” metaphor/thought technology Gemini is using. Plus, a really great list of one-liner, enterprise AI uses cases. See this even longer list.

  • Most mainframe application rewrites fail the first time - “Refactoring mainframe applications commonly results in failure on the first try, according to a Forrester survey of over 300 IT professionals commissioned by Rocket Software.” And, from the survey sponsor: ‘“Starting from scratch and rewriting the apps rarely goes well,” Buckellew said. “It can lead to massive cost overruns and it can take years. When you’re in a long rewrite project – that’s when bad things happen and projects get canceled.”’ // As always, there’s bias in a vendor sponsored survey, but you know, seems like it’d be true. It’s software after all.

  • How to Keep Learning at Work — Even When You Feel Fried - Enterprise Mindfulness: find out what you want to focus on and personally find valuable, then use your own motivation to structure work that fits your own goals. Also: try to have less toil/cognitive load. // This also falls into the biz-self-help bucket of “the default answer is ‘no,’ unless you can make a personal business case for ‘yes.’”

  • 3 Key Practices for Perfecting Cloud Native Architecture - Some notes on cloud native architecture and app patterns. That is, apps you want to run in container platforms like Cloud Foundry or Kubernetes.

  • Beyond Infrastructure as Code: System Initiative Goes Live - “In practice, as Jacob has pointed out, this has led to unwieldy, hard-to-update and difficult-to-understand systems built on static definitions. The tools are tightly tied to a version control, making them brittle and difficult to work with. And only elite companies, such as Google, can deploy multiple times in a day with this approach as Jacob (and others) have argued.” // Hey, man, if it works and it handles 60% to 80% of the configuration management goop out there, it’ll be great.

Georg Eisler, Café Sperl
Café Sperl, Georg Eisler.

Conferences

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

Cloud Foundry Day EU, Karlsruhe, Oct 9th. VMware Explore Barcelona, speaking, Nov 4th to 7th. GoTech World, speaking, Bucharest, Nov 12th and 13th. SREday Amsterdam, speaking, Nov 21st, 2024.

Discounts! SREDay Amsterdam: 20% off with the code SRE20DAY. Cloud Foundry Day 20% off with the code CFEU24VMW20.

Logoff

My friend Whitney Lee and I are rebooting the Software Defined Interviews podcast. We’ve been circling around starting a podcast together for a couple of years now, and I think we’ve finally achieved escape velocity. We’ll start with me interviewing her. She’s got one of the most interesting stories of people in tech, and she’s one of a kind. Then we’ll get on to all sorts of people. My filter is interviewing people I want to talk with but either haven’t in the comfortable podcast format or have never talked with. The two of us will make a good podcast-vibe I think. Anyhow, if you’re not already subscribed to it, look it up and subscribe. I’m hoping we get something out soon, maybe even next week.

Software is cheap

And software is valuable

You want to maximize the amount of weird stuff you’re doing across the business to generate asymmetry with your competitors, with the admittedly serious caveat that the pathway to this particular ancient ruin is littered with skulls. Pay attention to the skulls. (From the HST or tech.)

Software costs very little to make, and you can rapidly try new things. As opposed to manufacturing or setting up a new Starbucks store. Experimenting costs little. This means that one of the business tools you get with software is discovering new competitive advantages. You can also just discover new ways to run your business better.

Now, you also need software to just do the job you’re already doing: the prescription refill app needs get me my pills. The mobile payment terminal needs to move €5 from my account to the barista’s account so I can get my coffee. You need predictability and reliability in software. It needs to be “boring” as we say every few years.

However, if you’re not also trying out new things, you’re not getting value from your software capabilities. Think of it in terms of money. If I put money in a checking account that gets zero percent interest, I am getting part of the utility of money - paying for things. But if I put some of my money in an index fund, I get the other utility of money: generating more money.

If you’re not using software to experiment with your business, you’re leaving money on the table.

How much experiment should you do? I dislike the reality of “it depends,” so I will give you a number: 10%. For every 9 applications that refill prescriptions or get me coffee, have one that’s just trying to stumble over new business ideas. Or, for existing software, you should spend a month experimenting.

And if that generates too many skulls, first look at the skulls and go down to 5%. Or up to 15%! You also need a disciplined, systematic way to do this experimenting so you’re not just messing around. If you don’t have a process like that, you up the chance of failure, and then you start to think software is risky, expensive, and something to dismiss.

Finding the right system is tricky, but luckily we have decades of practice and figuring it out in large organizations. Trust the process.

I cover just such a proven, enterprise-grade process in my book Monolithic Transformation. It’s got case studies and all that too. (And, I just noticed it’s now totally free - no handing over your email address required!)

Many organizations have neglected their software capabilities for years. What this means is that they have to opportunity to cheaply get better, so change how their business works and try to establish more moats (competitive advantage). It will probably take a year, and you’ll have some tooling catching up to do, but it’ll be worth it.

Relative to your interests

  • To Improve Your Mean Time to Recovery, Start at the Beginning - How to think about securing your cloud native apps, and apps in general.

  • Six technology myths and the Big Tech-lash - "So why do people think that it’s getting faster? Well, one of the reasons is they sort of conflate applications with platforms. So sure, ChatGPT gets 100 million people in a couple of months. But why is that? Well, they didn’t have to buy anything. I didn’t have to install anything. I could just go use it. And to me, that’s no different than saying that the Milton Berle show on TV went from no users to 50 million users in a year because all you had to do was turn on the station. And so the applications, whether it’s Facebook or Google or ChatGPT, it’s much easier to put an application on top of a radio program, a television or a computer or the internet than to buy a new platform.” And: “Data isn’t [the] new oil. I wish it were true. If only the world revolved around computers and data and information and connectivity and networks, life would be better. But the reality is that energy is still the main force in the global economy.”

  • Did a digital obsession ‘Just Do It’ in for Nike’s John Donahoe? - Getting direct versus channel (partners, “middlemen”) right is difficult. It’s especially risky when you dramatically change it (move from selling direct to selling through middle-people, or the other way around).

  • Oscar Health’s early observations on OpenAI o1-preview - Experiments with using AI in healthcare, specially the chain of reasoning stuff in o1-preview.

  • The impact of AI on the workforce: Tasks versus jobs? - “While many businesses use AI to replace worker tasks, there is little evidence that AI use is associated with a decline in firm employment.” // I’m starting to think that what’s going on here is that we haven’t found the right applications (uses of) for generative AI. Keep exploring!

  • Home Depot builds DIY GenAI model that tells human employees what to say - Better search/knowledge management: ‘Home Depot’s team built an LLM with RAG capabilities that answers queries by retrieving knowledge documents and processing them alongside data from previous chat history to “generate response suggestions for customer service agents.”’

  • Embracing AI To Augment, Not Replace, The Status Quo - Ideating AI apps: ‘1. Be on the lookout for processes that don’t scale well by adding more resources, are somehow constrained by human involvement, or could be improved if the human actor had more information. 2. Once you identify the process ask yourself either “How can I improve this process?” or “What do people hate most about this process?” 3. With that information, start to triage the type of AI that could help you. If you need more scale or more specific data, start with machine learning or vision apps. If you need more summarized data or connected information, start with generative AI.’

  • The Camera is the Filter - “Digital cameras are, themselves, a filter—each one reflects the technology and aesthetics of its time. A photo taken on an early 2000s digital camera, for instance, captures not only the subject but also the era’s unique imperfections—grainy textures, soft focus, lower resolutions, and muted colors. These qualities are part of the photo’s authenticity, a snapshot of history shaped by the camera’s limitations. Adding filters that emulate an old type of film erases that context, replacing the original look with a trendy (at the time), artificial aesthetic that distorts the photograph’s integrity. To me, that defied what I thought the purpose of the job was, which was to document these factories in that particular moment in time.”

  • At last, women of Paris can wear the trousers (legally) after 200-year-old law is declared null and void - “Since 7 November 1800, it has been technically illegal for a woman to wear trousers in Paris without a police permit. Just over a century ago, exceptions were introduced for women riding horses or bicycles.”

Wastebook

  • “Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison. You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don’t anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn - you stick your hand in there and it’ll chop it off, the end. You don’t think ‘oh, the lawnmower hates me’ – lawnmower doesn’t give a shit about you, lawnmower can’t hate you. Don’t anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don’t fall into that trap about Oracle.” – Bryan Cantrill, via.

  • “Success teaches nothing.” Here.

  • “Appreciative condescension.” Here.

  • Also: “an invitation to condemnation.”

Conferences

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

Cloud Foundry Day EU, Karlsruhe, Oct 9th. VMware Explore Barcelona, speaking, Nov 4th to 7th. GoTech World, speaking, Bucharest, Nov 12th and 13th. SREday Amsterdam, speaking, Nov 21st, 2024.

Discounts! SREDay Amsterdam: 20% off with the code SRE20DAY. Cloud Foundry Day 20% off with the code CFEU24VMW20.

Logoff

While I was in London last week, I checked out The Courtauld. Above are two fun things from it. There’s two Brueghels in there, and I always want to see those in person. They’ve got an impressive virtual tour that you should check out if you like museums.

Employee Mode

You are a company of one: Click here to watch the video.

If you liked that, there’s more of my take on “employee mode” in the ten part video series I did for O’Reilly: “How to Survive and Thrive in a Big Company: Tactics and Practices to Manage Your Time and Relationships.” How about that title, huh?!

If you work at a large company, you might even have access. Or, just get 10 days free.

Anyhow: watch the videos, and if you like them, leave a cool review. HEY GUYSZ!1!!

Wastebook

  • We’ve got to stop using the “is dead” thing. It’s hardly ever accurate and mostly a cheap trick. (It works in zero-sum marketing and community management sometimes, though: 10% to 20% of the time?)

  • “Autocado.”

  • ‘(In his essay, Parini recounts an old story about the literary critic, Harold Bloom. Bloom was famously prolific, and the story goes that a graduate student once phoned Bloom and his wife answered and said: “I’m sorry, he can’t talk–he’s writing a book.” The student responded: “That’s all right. I’ll wait.”)’ Here.

  • ‘The term “pseudoclarity” refers to a misleading sense of clarity that arises from overly simplistic metrics and frameworks, like those often used in Scrum methodologies. It highlights the danger of relying on superficial calculations and symbols that may obscure the true complexity and uncertainty of real-world projects, leading to a false sense of control and understanding.’ From “Tossed Salads And Scrumbled Eggs,” as understood by Perplexity.ai. Related:

  • It’s better to reverse engineer the strategy from how it gets implemented than pay much attention to the annual planning PowerPoint.

  • Or: strategy is defined execution, not PowerPoint.

  • “‘Deep doubt’ is skepticism of real media that stems from the existence of generative AI.” Benj Edwards.

  • I wouldn’t say they lied. More so that they did a bad job predicting.

  • “Rye is Canadian, right?” “You better find out.” Mad Men.

  • And: “I’m living like there’s no tomorrow, because there isn’t one.” “I don’t think I realized until this moment: but, it must be hard being a man, too.” Ibid.

  • Living the memento mori corporate life.

This week’s field studio for recording Software Defined Talk.

Relative to your interests

  • IDC #US52372824 (June 2024). Source: IDC DevOps Survey, - “79.1% of respondents are extending, using, or piloting Wardley Mapping to diagram the value chain and application components, demonstrating the value it can add to strategic application planning.” IDC #US52372824 (June 2024). Source: IDC DevOps Survey, November 2023, n = 311. // I never would have guessed that, but people do talk about those maps a lot.

  • Digital transformation strategies focus on reducing costs, upskilling - Highlights from Macroeconomic Outlook, Business Trends - ”Digital transformation focuses on employee productivity and automation. Nearly 44% of respondents either have a formal digital transformation strategy (32%) or are planning to develop one (11%). The primary drivers for adopting a digital transformation strategy are improving efficiency through process automation (59%), improving employee productivity (56%) and customer experience enhancements (47%). The main priorities in digital transformation are to improve workforce productivity and engagement experiences (44%), followed by intelligent automation to reduce/remove need for labor and manual processes (43%). Modernizing legacy back-office (e.g., ERP, supply chain) and front-office (e.g., customer relationship management, e-commerce) applications is also a top priority in digital transformation.”

  • Free ‘JavaScript’ from Legal Clutches of Oracle, Devs Petition - This seems like a don’t wake the sleeping bear situation.

  • The types information available on the internet and why AI is bad for all of them - ”For example, if I’m looking to buy an ergonomic chair and I read a review that says “I’m a 6’3” man and this chair is absolutely perfect for my size,” this anecdote provides helpful information to me in a way that simply reading the measurements does not.”

  • AI is great for churning out apps, but don’t forget to test - Enterprise AI needs testing just like code needs testing. // “Research published by Leapwork, drawn from the feedback of 401 respondents across the US and UK, noted that while 85 percent had integrated AI apps into their tech stacks, 68 percent had experienced performance, accuracy, and reliability issues.”

  • Customers don’t trust AI, and the rift might be hurting business - ”Participants were then asked questions to determine their willingness to buy the TV. Those who saw AI in the product description were less likely to make the purchase.”

  • CIOs: Get Tech Sprawl Under Control - “According to Forrester’s Q2 2024 Tech Pulse Survey, a staggering 77% of US technology decision-makers report moderate to extensive levels of technology sprawl. This sprawl can result in unsustainable costs, slower IT delivery, reduced operational resilience, and increased security risks.”

  • Business leaders are losing faith in IT, according to this IBM study. Here’s why - “Fewer than half (47%) of business leaders surveyed think their IT organization is “effective in basic services,” down from 69% surveyed in 2013, the survey shows. Only 36% of CEOs in the survey see IT as effective, down from 64% since 2013. Chief financial officers give a bit more credit to IT, with 50% seeing its effectiveness, but this is down from 60% since 2013.”

  • IBM buys Kubernetes cost control startup Kubecost to expand its FinOps suite - They’ve bought a lot in this category - solution suite’ing. ”IBM said Kubecost’s capabilities will be integrated into an expanding FinOps Suite, enhancing the combined capabilities of Apptio, Cloudability, Instana and Turbonomic to provide what will perhaps be the most comprehensive cost monitoring toolset around. The company didn’t say so, but there is clear potential for Kubecost’s technology to be integrated with IBM’s OpenShift application development platform too.”

  • How PepsiCo capped cloud overspend - ‘“FinOps is all about evangelization,” Woo said. “This is probably the most difficult side of running a FinOps practice, because when you are a FinOps practitioner you’re trained to do IT work. You may have had a finance background. You weren’t trained to be a mediator or therapist.”’

Conferences

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

Cloud Foundry Day EU, Karlsruhe, Oct 9th. VMware Explore Barcelona, speaking, Nov 4th to 7th. GoTech World, speaking, Bucharest, Nov 12th and 13th. SREday Amsterdam, speaking, Nov 21st, 2024.

Discounts! SREDay Amsterdam: 20% off with the code SRE20DAY. Cloud Foundry Day 20% off with the code CFEU24VMW20.

Logoff

DevOps has done a great job if you know how to rear the metrics. Speaking at SREDay London earlier today.

// I’m pretty sure it was Brandon who came up with the phrase “employee mode,” just in the off-handed way that you do in a podcast. It’s great, right?

// Thanks for subscribing! I think we’re on track to 1,000 subscribers sometime over the next two months. That’ll be thrilling! You know: tell a friend, recommend it, etc. IT MAKES ME HAPPY.

See you next episode.

@cote@hachyderm.io, @cote@cote.io, @cote, https://proven.lol/a60da7, @cote@social.lol