Today it’s just a links and wastebook clean out. Two Recent Garbage Chairs on AmsterdamI’ve found a few Garbage Chairs of Amsterdam recently. Truth be told, I stopped looking. When I moved here, the locals were bemused about all my photos “I never really thought about that,” they’d say, “but; yeah, there are a lot of garbage chairs!” I’ve got to get that sense of wonder back. (I seem to have deleted wherever I kept the archive of all these.

When it comes to cloud native application platforms, we’re at an important evolutionary point: will the best practice for platform strategies be to build or to buy? Should you choose the components you need for a platform and integrate them together, or should you buy a pre-integrated platform? Unless you’re a handful of organizations, the practical answer is that you should buy the platform. Before I get to why, what even is a “cloud native platform”?

Today’s survey: “State of the Developer Experience 2024,” Harness/Wakefield Research. Most enterprises need to automate their build and deployment pipelines. This is more than just building code and automating tests (which 71% of people are not doing), but also automating governance and security checks (which 41% of developers are not doing). In my mind, this is the number one thing development organizations should be working on in 2024, and probably next year.

Business models are fascinating. Most business models come down to a type of arbitrage, at least as I understand it. You find something you have that you can sell to someone else, crucially, at a price above what it cost you to make that thing.1 In, let’s call it, The Capatalist Upbrining, there is a major intellectual jump where you understand that the price for a think is not determined by what it cost to make it, the costs of goods sold.

On that random person in NebraskaOpen source is important for the entire industry, sell side (especially in the cloud era) and buy side. Things would go very bad if it did not exist as method of software production and innovation. (Source: see the QED from that one xkcd.) Open source is a bad business model, it’s very difficult to grow and it conflicts with the VC need for a big pay off.

Kubernetes is popular. If you’re in my business, you know that it’s widely considered to be how enterprises run and will their applications. So, it must be a huge market right? Lots of money flowing around. Well…not really! Let’s look at some numbers: "The container management market has seen accelerated growth of 28.6% over the past year with a market value of $1.6 billion in 2022. The market is forecast to exceed $3.

Container, DevOps, and Generative AI for Testing UsageMy work sponsored an IDC paper going over ways to use generative AI (and ML) at various stages of software development (the “Application Development and Product Life-Cycle Management”). There’s some interesting ideas in there, you should check them out. As always, I like to collect the numbers from surveys and estimates. There’s some good ones in there! Here they are: “26% of organizations are using GenAI to support application development, testing, and management and 25% are utilizing machine learning with the greatest focus on leveraging AI to support DevOps analytics and process, governance, and security testing”

The CD Foundation Survey, 2024Today’s survey: “State of CI/CD Report 2024: The Evolution of Software Delivery Performance,” CD Foundation and SlashData, April, 2024. Are people getting better at frequently releasing software and fixing problems in production? The most recent CD Foundation survey says…no: On average, 29% of respondents say they release software once a week or even more frequently; 40% take a more than month. The numbers here have been pretty stable over the past 4 years.

When I look at recent platform engineering surveys, the results are positive: people see the value in platforms and platform groups. I’d say this is because platforms are helping speed up the app release cycle by automating a lot of the infrastructure work app developers would otherwise need to do, baking in/automating security and compliance, and, to a lesser extent, standardizing how apps are built, run, managed, and optimized. Below are my notes one of the many, recent surveys.

When I look at recent platform engineering surveys, the results are positive: people see the value in platforms and platform groups. I’d say this is because platforms are helping speed up the app release cycle by automating a lot of the infrastructure work app developers would otherwise need to do, baking in/automating security and compliance, and, to a lesser extent, standardizing how apps are built, run, managed, and optimized. Here’s my notes on one of those surveys, the one from Perforce/Puppet.