Just links this episode. Some fantastic #gartnercoreFrom “Technical Insights: Battle of the APIs — Will REST be Toppled by GraphQL, gRPC or AsyncAPI?,” Gary Olliffe, GartnerRelative to your interestsThinking Strategically About Software Bills of Materials (SBOMs) - As with most things, the whole SBOM push is probably a lot simpler to solve than it seems. Also, a delightful “old man yells at secure software supply chain hype” vibe as only Jon could do well.

Suggested theme song for this episode: 30% in 2025 implies low use in 2023 From the recent Gartner Marketing Symposium highlights: 64% of marketers have deployed, or are piloting, AI/ML to support autonomous campaign creation, execution, and optimization capabilities. [But:] Gartner predicts that by 2025, 30% of outbound marketing messages from large organizations will be synthetically generated. If you’re in marketing, you need to be using ChatGPT (or WHATEVER) today, as much as possible.

Read to the end to see an illustration of the inner workings of cloud infrastructure. For all the interest in Kubernetes, there's not actually many apps running on it right now. Gartner's Wataru Katsurashima estimates that "by 2027, 25 percent of all enterprise applications will run in containers, an increase from fewer than 10 percent in 2021." When I look at that, it makes me think that, I don't know, there's at best 15% of apps running in kubernetes this year.

Just links today, but first! I’m giving the opening talk at the VMUG Belgium, on June 1st. It’s in Brussels, which is always a nice place to be. It seems like it’s free, so of course you should come in you’re in the neighborhood. There’ll be a wide range of talk from traditional VMware topics to whacky cloud native ones. Relative to your interestsIf you like the links I put in these newsletters, you’ll love Seroter’s daily links - I steal a lot of them!

App StoriesI’m working on a new idea for a project - a series of interview and case studies about applications inside, you know, large organizations - my ongoing interest. These are my favorite types of stories: why an application was needed, how people came up with what to do, how they wrote the app, encountered changes as they went, and what they learned through that process. If you’ve got a story like that, perhaps I could interview you for this project.

That’s a chart from our recent State of Kubernetes survey that I’ll probably use a lot this year. Here’s my commentary on it from a blog post this week: In our surveys, I’ve been using the software release cycle question to represent developer benefits. For the most part, the faster developers can release software, the better their software will be. There are exceptions, but not many. The sooner you have people using your software, the more feedback you'll get about the quality, usability, and overall usefulness of your software.

What Computers Do At BanksHere’s two diagrams from a 2021 BCG report on banking that show, basically, everything that IT does for the business part of retail banking. First, the “value streams,” or lines of business and products: Second, what the typical IT stacks look like to support these value streams: Pretty good stuff! And, if you’re into that, I also liked this white paper that goes over the general deal with modernizing banking apps, services, etc.

Source:  IDC, The Evolution of Cloud Infrastructure: Multicloud to Hybrid; Shared to Dedicated, doc #DR2023_T1_DM, March 2023Each year when we do the State of Kubernetes survey, we’re of course interested in “multi-cloud.” That’s one of the reasons to use a Kubernetes management suite stack, like VMware Tanzu. The term can mean many things. The most obvious one is “using multiple clouds.” The motivations here can be to use best of breed features, geographic/sovereign cloud needs, and doing the old “we could always go to your competitor if you raise prices too much” gambit.

This tech is so complex that you really should be using itHere is a tech marketing anti-pattern that I agree with. It makes me think of another one. Let's call it "you don't realize this yet, but what you want is very complex!" All of us in the tech world have done, and will keep doing, this kind of marketing, be it a presentation, a blog post, a commissioned survey, posts on Bluesky and LinkedIn, or whatever.

Last week I talked with my co-worker Fouad Hamdi about a mainframe modernization project he worked on last year. I mean, the team he was on of course, not him single handedly. He wrote a great over of the process and I was eager to ask him a few questions. The video included in this episode is an except about finding the complete end-to-end application, rather, process that you’re modernizing.