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.

Lots of original content this week, starting with this prediction about “enterprise AI”: I also made these since last episode: Another go-round at figuring out playing D&D with ChatGPT. It went pretty well! Here’s my retro/analysis of it, and here’s the actual play session with inline commentary. I was the guest co-host on this week’s Cloud Foundry Weeklywhere we discussed the new features in the Tanzu Application Service 6.0. We, of course, spent a lot of time on the generative AI beta stuff that’s included.

I don't think we really know what "enterprise AI" is yet, what apps will be helpful. So you need to just mess around and see what works. Come on a dog walk with me in Amsterdam and I'll tell you more. Check out the experimenting we're doing with private AI in the VMware Tanzu Platform. LogoffNo links or anything today, just the video above which I liked making. Will people actually watch six minute and 12 second video?

Here’s two things of mine to check out: What we do at my workWe broadcast our updated Tanzu overview yesterday. I MC it and do a Q&A session at the end. I tried to get a lot of my views of the platform engineering, what we do, build vs. buy, and the usual stuff in through my questions and the intro and outo parts. It’ll give an idea of what people do with our stack, you know, when it comes to building, running, and managing their apps.