Platforms have many opinions, app architecture is one of themThis 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.

And software is valuableYou 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.

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.

Code to Production: From Cloud to DevOps to Platform Engineering, with Purnima PadmanabhanThere's not that many people who've worked through the early years of cloud, the rise of cloud and IaaS, DevOps, cloud native apps, and now platform engineering...but my colleague Purnima Padmanabhan sure has. So, it was fun to talk with her about the history of all of that - something I've been involved in and equally curious about these past 20+ years.

Let’s start with some good looking cheese: Still Life with Cheese and Fruits, Roelof Koets, 1625.Community is Mission Critical for Platform EngineeringEstablishing an internal community is one of the keys to enterprise platform engineering. A lean platform team can’t support all the support and consultative requests from thousands of developers. When you create and garden an internal community you’re trying to get the developers to talk with each other and help solve each others problems.

Today it’s just links and fun finds that I’ve been storing up for a about a week. Great “Please Eat Me” specimen, from Russell Davies. Also, a big sign of the same.What the AIs thinks of the debateI asked Perplexity about the US presidential debate last night. I wasn’t very interested in “fact checking,” but in how different the coverage in the New York Times and Fox News was. I added in a “partial transcript” of the debate as well to compare both to what actually happened.

The DevOps community is running on fumes and at the lowest point in mindshare and interest that it’s ever been at. This is stupid. The practices, tools, and mindset of DevOps are vital to how most organization run their software1 and DevOps has improved the way the software we use everyday is built and run, improving all of our lives. If DevOps wasn't a thing, the world of software would be worse and each day would be a little more tedious because the apps we depend on would be worse.

Searching for Cheap TricksThe amount of AI content and conversations out there is getting exhausting. It’s almost as bad as the burbling font of platform engineering content that gets rewritten and published each week. The below RAND paper and commentary got me thinking though: a lot of the AI talk is just talk about applying new technologies in general. We are still really bad at the basic task of communicating requirements to developers, checking in on their work and seeing if they’re solving the right problems in a helpful way…and even knowing what business problems to need attention in the first place.

Just links and fun finds. Before “fun” was invented. Found in Amsterdam thrift shop.Relevant to your interestsI didn’t do link round-ups this past week, so there’s a backlog. Also, I’ve been using Perplexity to summarize some articles (not listed here, usually). I think it’s pretty good, and I recommend you use it. Amazon’s CEO says their AI tool has saved them a crazy amount of time - This oddly specific, and a big deal if applicable to other organizations.

Normally I wouldn’t disclaim this since I think you, dear readers, are wise enough to know that it always applies, but: these views are my own, not my employer, VMware Tanzu by Broadcom. Also, we covered the below on this week’s Software Defined Talk. If you prefer to listen a podcast, it’ll be out on Friday morning, 7:30am Amsterdam time: subscribe! Private CloudYesterday at my work’s big conference, Explore, there was a lot of conversation about private cloud.