Potsdamer Platz bei Nacht, Paul Paeschke, ca. 1929. Related to your interests Why your DIY Kubernetes stack won’t survive the era of agentic AI How tech chiefs gauge ROI on AI - AI uses: better search, preparing leases, and this: “When the system senses that ice is running low, it fires off an order to AI agents, which begin routing trucks to fulfill orders. The system also takes into account historical sales trends, weather analytics and other factors to anticipate each route’s ice requirements.

Links! Wastebook! Background changes afoot! Potsdamer Platz bei Nacht, Paul Paeschke, ca. 1929.Related to your interestsWhy your DIY Kubernetes stack won’t survive the era of agentic AI How tech chiefs gauge ROI on AI - AI uses: better search, preparing leases, and this: “When the system senses that ice is running low, it fires off an order to AI agents, which begin routing trucks to fulfill orders. The system also takes into account historical sales trends, weather analytics and other factors to anticipate each route’s ice requirements.

Enterprise AI apps (or lack thereof), ROI surveys, CFO budget pivots, agile’s stubborn relevance, platform engineering vs. private cloud, Heroku’s freeze, IRS tech cuts, and Europe hedging on AI tools Peter Klúcik's The Hobbit illustrations. Related to your interests Where are the enterprise AI apps? Part n + 1 - AI capacity demand is high, but it’s still “early innings” for enterprise AI use.

From “CEO said a thing” journalism and sovereign payments to product teams in code-gen land, Deming vs. OKRs, sex recessions, Neanderthals, fonts, and hype cycles - a tour through power, productivity, and what actually holds systems together.

Original ContentEnterprise AI needs new apps, enterprise AI doesn’t need new platforms - I’ve been circling a theme this week after reading “AI as a Normal Technology” (Spring, 2025). This is some stream of conscious on it. Enterprises are gonna enterprise-y, especially with AI. Also available in LinkedIn, if you prefer that kind of thing. A series of OODA loops, Software Defined Talk #559 - This week, we discuss the future of SaaS, OpenAI vs.

Original ContentA few things since last time: Kubernetes use rising, large organizations slowest to adapt, not many people train their own AI model or deploy new AI models frequently - my highlights from the most recent CNCF state of stuff survey. Enterprise ROI is elusive - maybe ROI is just headcount chopping, not revenue growth and “transformation” - Executives continue to say they don’t know how to measure ROI for AI, and/or that it’s low.

NICHOLAS LITTLE, from this IEEE article.Original ContentHere’s a summary of a new post on my weblog: Three years into the generative AI boom, enterprise ROI remains stubbornly hard to find. Survey after survey shows a familiar pattern: widespread experimentation, lots of “in production” claims, and very little impact on revenue, costs, or P&L. The usual explanation is “culture,” but that’s a dead end for IT - culture change belongs to executives, and most employees don’t believe leadership has a real plan anyway.

Original ContentAmazon should buy Anthropic. I wasn’t really sure what hardned images were, let alone “distroless,” so Tony and I were lucky to get William on this week’s Tanzu Catsup to sort it out. We also discuss how it fits into platform engineering. If you can’t be bothered, here’s an excerpt on optimizing Helm charts. After the Dream, Software Defined Talk #555 - This week, we discuss Gemini powering Siri, AWS’s biggest competitor, and AWS strategy choices.

Garbage Chairs of Amsterdam, Duivendrecht edition.Original ContentFrom Platform Engineering to Stand-Up Comedian, with Lian Li, Software Defined Talk #117: “In this episode, Whitney and Coté talk with Lian, a “cloud-native human” with a 15-year career in tech. Lian discusses her transition from tech to performance art, her experiences in amateur musical theater, stand-up comedy, and improv theater. She talks about platform engineering, the importance of community building in tech, and balancing professional life with personal projects.

Pardon the not-an-actual-newsletter episode of the newsletter, but… Do you listen to my podcast, Software Defined Talk? If you do, I’d appreciate you taking the time to fill out our listener survey. We do occasional ads and paid interviews, and this helps us do more and charge more. It means we can pay for the podcast and some tasty beef ribs at the end of the year. Also, I’m always curious to know more about listeners.