My daughter’s opinion of platform engineering is “cool story, let’s go get that kibbeling.”

Relative to your interests

• Ask HN: What happens to “.io” TLD after UK gives back the Chagos Islands? - Not good.

• Users engage with only 6% of product features: Product benchmark findings - ”We found that even the best product teams are focusing on features that aren’t being used by their end users. While 6.4% of features are driving 80% of clicks, almost 94% of features are untouched and ignored.”

• Workers have AI confidence — but no training to back it up, survey shows - ”Nearly two-thirds of leaders said AI is “fully implemented” across their organizations, while only 36% of workers agreed. Additionally, 60% of leaders say they are ahead of their competitors in AI maturity, while only 46% of workers agreed.”

• YouTube takes on TikTok with longer Shorts, templates, trends, and more - Longer shorts, up to three minutes now. Now viewers can avoid watching 175 seconds of content instead of just 55.

Wastebook

• If this is GChat, Slack must be OGChat.

• “Creighton lives on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and he is not planning to voyage far.” Aspirations!

• The sunw dress code: “You must!”

• “What I want is trousers, that merge into shoes.” The good ol' days.

• “We used to work together at Target. He would walk around humming, singing and making weird noises. One day he quit, no one heard from him. Three years later I’m still working at Target and he’s in Amsterdam rocking this crowd. WTF.” Here.

• “It is about Family, Nature, red bricks and the charm of industrial style.” #CaroLife.

• “The Golden Ditch.” James.

• “Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on.” Steinbeck. // Perfection is procrastination.

• “And the Police don’t like poetry.” Rands.

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Our new podcast is out, Software Defined Interviews, with me and Whitney Lee.

For the first episode, I interview Whitney. I’ve known her and worked with her now for, I don’t know, three years? She’s so great to talk with and so smart on all the cloud native stuff. In our episode, we go over her background, of course, but also plenty of “how you work” type stuff. For you nerds out there, we also talk about the evolution of the Kubernetes community and why security is always such a pain in the ass. Plus, at the end, you get the hear the discussion The Deep Dive crew would do.

Listen to it here, and if you want to hear more, subscribe to the podcast. I’ll also put the videos in the Software Defined Talk YouTube channel if you prefer that kind of thing. We’ve been circling around doing this for a year or so. We started with an idea for a show called “I didn’t read the book” (or something) where we’d interview authors about their books…which we hadn’t read. Maybe we’ll do that from time to time. Anyhow, then we just switched an interview show. There’s all sorts of people I’d like to interview, but never really do. It’ll be fun to see what Whitney asks them.

Listen to it now!

(Well, sure, it’s more like a re-boot of a defunct podcast, but just consider the episodes in the archive a fun find in the attic.)

Relative to your interests

• How much would it cost to fork WordPress? I make a wild swag at doing it as a commercial venture.

• Croissant - Good looking cross posting app for Mastodon, BlueSky, and Threads. Adding in Shortcut support would be awesome.

• Shambles, But Make It Digital - School IT is a mess. As with enterprise IT, I bet it could be better by just choosing one platform, no matter the compromises. My kids have three or four systems (ManageBac, Google Classrooms, also email). They haven learned the corporate skills of keeping up with all of this, and it shows. If the school had a semester long course on “office work,” it might be OK, but they don’t.

As read by the AI

Tell me how you like this! Here’s some things I’ve “read” via perplexity.ai summaries, including the brief summary it made and a link to the longer summary:

• Dana Gould’s keynote address at the Just For Laughs Festival offers insightful reflections on success, failure, and the nature of a comedy career. His personal anecdotes and experiences in the entertainment industry provide valuable lessons for aspiring comedians and performers.

• The rise of AI workloads and increasing demands for data sovereignty and governance are driving a resurgence in private cloud adoption, with the market expected to grow from $92 billion in 2023 to $405 billion in 2033. This renaissance is fueled by the need for enterprises to leverage AI capabilities while maintaining control over their data and infrastructure. And, some use cases.

• This presentation discusses Wix’s approach to addressing complexity in software development through a Platform as a Runtime (PaaR) model. Here are the key points and insights

• Open source AI lacks a clear definition and faces significant challenges in implementation, with many so-called “open source” AI models failing to meet true open source standards. The concept of open source AI is complex and often misunderstood, with issues ranging from licensing and data privacy to the practical limitations of reproducing large language models.

Wastebook

• “it was dimming my shine” jenn schiffer.

• And: “new habits that are not workaholic-coded”

• Rate my slop.

• “Seeing people; talking about weird things; then trying to make sense of them in my head.” Lloyd returns to London, for the day.

• “territorial unicorn” The Deep Dive crew.

Conferences

Talks I’m giving, places I’ll be, and other plans.

Cloud Foundry Day EU, Karlsruhe, Oct 9th. VMware Explore Barcelona, speaking, Nov 4th to 7th. GoTech World, speaking, Bucharest, Nov 12th and 13th. SREday Amsterdam, speaking, Nov 21st, 2024.

Discounts! SREDay Amsterdam: 20% off with the code SRE20DAY. Cloud Foundry Day 20% off with the code CFEU24VMW20.

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Back in the 90s, I’d spend hours watching The Comedy Channel. When I caught The Kids in the Hall, it was a special treat. Seeing those videos now is like comfort food on a rainy, cold day. And The Higgins Boys and Gruber - I was in the fan club! (Old guy remises!)

(1) What seems to you like an everyday, boring experience may be totally foreign and inaccessible to other people. It can be delightful and helpful for them to see it, even if you’ve seen it for nine years everyday. This is one of Noah’s stated principles.

(2) I like Dutch Golden Age still life paintings. Big wedges of cheese, glassy eyed herring and equally glassy grapes, glowing wine glasses, walnuts, and Instagram-purposefully draped tablecloths. These are everyday things converted to beautiful tableaus. It’s trite to say that they make you enjoy the beauty of a wedge of cheese - you know, really see the cheese - but that’s what they do. In this case “beauty” is something more akin to what the mindfulness people are seeking: “being present,” therapeutically realizing that everything is OK, and that your job is to stop being a bundle of worries and just be a wedge of cheese. The cheese wedge was always beautiful, you were just too worried about your email. (When I look at abstract art, more of what I see is a box of parts, sometimes just a littered street the morning after a festival. You see the parts, or you can focus in on just one part: those single color canvases, those jumble of lines or huge installations of wires and objects. Sometimes a color - like Klein blue - or a perfect arrangement of lines - Mondrian, etc. - can be A Thing [to me] but the rest is like walking around in a hardware store. I get more from seeing the cheese wedge than all the parts that went into making it.)

(3) Noah’s videos have one of the highest ratios of likes to views that I encounter. He has a very small audience, but that audience is engaged. When you look at the time people actually watch a video, with most videos, people drop after fifteen, even five seconds. “As with almost every video on You[T]ube, the first minute has the most loss (go look). This is why we freak out so much about the first minute and go so above and beyond to make it the best we freakin[’] can,” says the Mr Beast manual. But, when it comes to Noah’s videos, I bet if you look at his charts, his viewers watch a lot more than the first 15 seconds. See #1 above.

(4) When you watch this video, hopefully what you see is, sure, how “an artist engages with their work.” But what you can also see is a model for engaging with your surroundings, both physically and metaphorically - existentially? I’m never sure what that last word means except something like “personal vibes.” The word “metaphysically” in everyday speech is even more abstract. It’s a filler word for “something important I can’t put words around.” What you see in the video is that, and if it “speaks” to you, it makes you wonder around muttering to yourself too. And, if not: maybe I suggest wedges of cheese?

(5) Also, it’s just a guy walking around taking photos. Clearly, everyone likes taking photos, as the smart phone and social media era shows. Capturing a scene, a moment, a curiosity, whatever is fun and even part of living. It can be crude paintings on cave walls, an oral story telling culture, carvings and statues, writing on clay tablets and paper, music, paintings, photography, video, even multi-tools. Whatever it is, capturing a moment is like breathing and eating.

(6) And to that end, you bet, there’s some commentary about “these kids today and their obsession with video.” But what that commentary can say to you is more like: yeah, we can all be more present, engaged, and living life now. We don’t all need a $5,000 camera and the luxury to spend all your time find beauty. You don’t have to have the skills of painting a perfect cheese wedge, nor the wealth to buy it and hang it up in your parlor. You can just take out your phone and make your own cheese wedge picture. Now we can all get that, and make it. Even if it’s 30 seconds videos of people dancing or commenting on absurd fast food menu items.

Did you see that?

(Related: you can do this kind of thing when you ponder the relationship between a culture and its everyday tools.)

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See y’all next episode!

Platforms have many opinions, app architecture is one of them

This 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.” When he says “PCF,” he’s using the older name (Pivotal Cloud Foundry) for the Tanzu Platform for Cloud Foundry, which is built to support cloud native applications.

Establishing and enforcing that style of development is a role for the platform engineering group that I think is under-appreciated: they need to play a role in specifying what type of application architectures work on the platform. It’s tempting to think in a more traditional way where the operations staff have to support a variety of application architectures that come their way. And, in large organizations built up of years of acquisitions, this is an inescapable reality for parts of their app portfolio.

But, when the platform team can drive consistency in application architecture, they can start to make promises about resilience, reliability, supportability, scalability, and the other “ilities.” A platform engineering team that specifies what types of architectures the platform supports is putting in place a contract. “Write your applications this way, and we can ensure that they run well in production.” Site Reliability Engineering thinking brought this idea of “contracts” into enterprise operations, and the Schwab team talks about that way of thinking frequently.

That “contract” extends beyond the app architecture. One example of that is in the continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline. In contrast to traditional approaches where individual developers or development teams create their own build pipelines, many platform teams standardize the CI/CD pipeline. This allows platform teams to control how applications are built, configured, and ultimately deployed. For Charles Schwab, this kind of thinking is key, as Rajesh puts it “today anything which goes to the platform is via automation.” This allows the team to control app configuration and put in controls for things like quota, security groups, and other operations configuration.

To me, what the Charles Schwab team is doing is making sure they have the controls in place to scale how they manage all those applications. This removes burden for the application developers, but also allows the platform team to manage the apps in production. Introducing this consistency comes in handy when the team needs to scale applications. “If you want to sync your apps, you don’t have to reach out to the hundreds of application owners to do the deployments at a platform level,” Rajesh says.

One of the fundamental principles of Cloud Foundry is that developers should not build and package the containers for their applications. Instead, developers use buildpacks to specify how their applications should be built and containerized. This allows the platform team to control and automate those application builds. In another talk from Explore, Scott Rosenberg, from TeraSky gave a great overview of why this principle is a good idea. A lot of the benefits of using buildpacks are focused on security, but there are basic operations benefits as well.

It was a great talk, covering lots of platform engineering topics. One you’ll also want to check out is the team structure they use. Instead of just one platform engineering team, they have two: a developer-facing one and an infrastructure facing one. The first has all the feels of standard platform engineering, the second more SRE vibe-y. This is the division they’ve learned over the past seven or so years, so, you know: it’s probably valid. Read the rest of the blog post, and definitely check out the recording of the panel.

Relative to your interests

• Enterprise Philosophy and The First Wave of AI - AI is (too) expensive for what it does, and thus far clunky, so it will need to start in the enterprise space where companies can get good ROI.

• IBM AI simply not up to the job of replacing staff - If the AI tools don’t work well, it’s hard to get good results. Also, the enterprise AI coding assistant needs to know a lot more than PHP.

• Google Cloud rolls out new Gemini models, AI agents, customer engagement suite - Big round-up of new Gemini stuff: “agents.”

• Gemini at Work 2024: How customers use Google Cloud AI products - More on the “agent” metaphor/thought technology Gemini is using. Plus, a really great list of one-liner, enterprise AI uses cases. See this even longer list.

• Most mainframe application rewrites fail the first time - “Refactoring mainframe applications commonly results in failure on the first try, according to a Forrester survey of over 300 IT professionals commissioned by Rocket Software.” And, from the survey sponsor: ‘“Starting from scratch and rewriting the apps rarely goes well,” Buckellew said. “It can lead to massive cost overruns and it can take years. When you’re in a long rewrite project – that’s when bad things happen and projects get canceled.”’ // As always, there’s bias in a vendor sponsored survey, but you know, seems like it’d be true. It’s software after all.

• How to Keep Learning at Work — Even When You Feel Fried - Enterprise Mindfulness: find out what you want to focus on and personally find valuable, then use your own motivation to structure work that fits your own goals. Also: try to have less toil/cognitive load. // This also falls into the biz-self-help bucket of “the default answer is ‘no,’ unless you can make a personal business case for ‘yes.’”

• 3 Key Practices for Perfecting Cloud Native Architecture - Some notes on cloud native architecture and app patterns. That is, apps you want to run in container platforms like Cloud Foundry or Kubernetes.

• Beyond Infrastructure as Code: System Initiative Goes Live - “In practice, as Jacob has pointed out, this has led to unwieldy, hard-to-update and difficult-to-understand systems built on static definitions. The tools are tightly tied to a version control, making them brittle and difficult to work with. And only elite companies, such as Google, can deploy multiple times in a day with this approach as Jacob (and others) have argued.” // Hey, man, if it works and it handles 60% to 80% of the configuration management goop out there, it’ll be great.

Conferences

Talks I’m giving, places I’ll be, and other plans.

Cloud Foundry Day EU, Karlsruhe, Oct 9th. VMware Explore Barcelona, speaking, Nov 4th to 7th. GoTech World, speaking, Bucharest, Nov 12th and 13th. SREday Amsterdam, speaking, Nov 21st, 2024.

Discounts! SREDay Amsterdam: 20% off with the code SRE20DAY. Cloud Foundry Day 20% off with the code CFEU24VMW20.

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My friend Whitney Lee and I are rebooting the Software Defined Interviews podcast. We’ve been circling around starting a podcast together for a couple of years now, and I think we’ve finally achieved escape velocity. We’ll start with me interviewing her. She’s got one of the most interesting stories of people in tech, and she’s one of a kind. Then we’ll get on to all sorts of people. My filter is interviewing people I want to talk with but either haven’t in the comfortable podcast format or have never talked with. The two of us will make a good podcast-vibe I think. Anyhow, if you’re not already subscribed to it, look it up and subscribe. I’m hoping we get something out soon, maybe even next week.

And software is valuable

You 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. Experimenting costs little. This means that one of the business tools you get with software is discovering new competitive advantages. You can also just discover new ways to run your business better.

Now, you also need software to just do the job you’re already doing: the prescription refill app needs get me my pills. The mobile payment terminal needs to move €5 from my account to the barista’s account so I can get my coffee. You need predictability and reliability in software. It needs to be “boring” as we say every few years.

However, if you’re not also trying out new things, you’re not getting value from your software capabilities. Think of it in terms of money. If I put money in a checking account that gets zero percent interest, I am getting part of the utility of money - paying for things. But if I put some of my money in an index fund, I get the other utility of money: generating more money.

If you’re not using software to experiment with your business, you’re leaving money on the table.

How much experiment should you do? I dislike the reality of “it depends,” so I will give you a number: 10%. For every 9 applications that refill prescriptions or get me coffee, have one that’s just trying to stumble over new business ideas. Or, for existing software, you should spend a month experimenting.

And if that generates too many skulls, first look at the skulls and go down to 5%. Or up to 15%! You also need a disciplined, systematic way to do this experimenting so you’re not just messing around. If you don’t have a process like that, you up the chance of failure, and then you start to think software is risky, expensive, and something to dismiss.

Finding the right system is tricky, but luckily we have decades of practice and figuring it out in large organizations. Trust the process.

I cover just such a proven, enterprise-grade process in my book Monolithic Transformation. It’s got case studies and all that too. (And, I just noticed it’s now totally free - no handing over your email address required!)

Many organizations have neglected their software capabilities for years. What this means is that they have to opportunity to cheaply get better, so change how their business works and try to establish more moats (competitive advantage). It will probably take a year, and you’ll have some tooling catching up to do, but it’ll be worth it.

Relative to your interests

• To Improve Your Mean Time to Recovery, Start at the Beginning - How to think about securing your cloud native apps, and apps in general.

• Six technology myths and the Big Tech-lash - "So why do people think that it’s getting faster? Well, one of the reasons is they sort of conflate applications with platforms. So sure, ChatGPT gets 100 million people in a couple of months. But why is that? Well, they didn’t have to buy anything. I didn’t have to install anything. I could just go use it. And to me, that’s no different than saying that the Milton Berle show on TV went from no users to 50 million users in a year because all you had to do was turn on the station. And so the applications, whether it’s Facebook or Google or ChatGPT, it’s much easier to put an application on top of a radio program, a television or a computer or the internet than to buy a new platform.” And: “Data isn’t [the] new oil. I wish it were true. If only the world revolved around computers and data and information and connectivity and networks, life would be better. But the reality is that energy is still the main force in the global economy.”

• Did a digital obsession ‘Just Do It’ in for Nike’s John Donahoe? - Getting direct versus channel (partners, “middlemen”) right is difficult. It’s especially risky when you dramatically change it (move from selling direct to selling through middle-people, or the other way around).

• Oscar Health’s early observations on OpenAI o1-preview - Experiments with using AI in healthcare, specially the chain of reasoning stuff in o1-preview.

• The impact of AI on the workforce: Tasks versus jobs? - “While many businesses use AI to replace worker tasks, there is little evidence that AI use is associated with a decline in firm employment.” // I’m starting to think that what’s going on here is that we haven’t found the right applications (uses of) for generative AI. Keep exploring!

• Home Depot builds DIY GenAI model that tells human employees what to say - Better search/knowledge management: ‘Home Depot’s team built an LLM with RAG capabilities that answers queries by retrieving knowledge documents and processing them alongside data from previous chat history to “generate response suggestions for customer service agents.”’

• Embracing AI To Augment, Not Replace, The Status Quo - Ideating AI apps: ‘1. Be on the lookout for processes that don’t scale well by adding more resources, are somehow constrained by human involvement, or could be improved if the human actor had more information. 2. Once you identify the process ask yourself either “How can I improve this process?” or “What do people hate most about this process?” 3. With that information, start to triage the type of AI that could help you. If you need more scale or more specific data, start with machine learning or vision apps. If you need more summarized data or connected information, start with generative AI.’

• The Camera is the Filter - “Digital cameras are, themselves, a filter—each one reflects the technology and aesthetics of its time. A photo taken on an early 2000s digital camera, for instance, captures not only the subject but also the era’s unique imperfections—grainy textures, soft focus, lower resolutions, and muted colors. These qualities are part of the photo’s authenticity, a snapshot of history shaped by the camera’s limitations. Adding filters that emulate an old type of film erases that context, replacing the original look with a trendy (at the time), artificial aesthetic that distorts the photograph’s integrity. To me, that defied what I thought the purpose of the job was, which was to document these factories in that particular moment in time.”

• At last, women of Paris can wear the trousers (legally) after 200-year-old law is declared null and void - “Since 7 November 1800, it has been technically illegal for a woman to wear trousers in Paris without a police permit. Just over a century ago, exceptions were introduced for women riding horses or bicycles.”

Wastebook

• “Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison. You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don’t anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn - you stick your hand in there and it’ll chop it off, the end. You don’t think ‘oh, the lawnmower hates me’ – lawnmower doesn’t give a shit about you, lawnmower can’t hate you. Don’t anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don’t fall into that trap about Oracle.” – Bryan Cantrill, via.

• “Success teaches nothing.” Here.

• “Appreciative condescension.” Here.

• Also: “an invitation to condemnation.”

Conferences

Talks I’m giving, places I’ll be, and other plans.

Cloud Foundry Day EU, Karlsruhe, Oct 9th. VMware Explore Barcelona, speaking, Nov 4th to 7th. GoTech World, speaking, Bucharest, Nov 12th and 13th. SREday Amsterdam, speaking, Nov 21st, 2024.

Discounts! SREDay Amsterdam: 20% off with the code SRE20DAY. Cloud Foundry Day 20% off with the code CFEU24VMW20.

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While I was in London last week, I checked out The Courtauld. Above are two fun things from it. There’s two Brueghels in there, and I always want to see those in person. They’ve got an impressive virtual tour that you should check out if you like museums.

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.

Anyhow: watch the videos, and if you like them, leave a cool review. HEY GUYSZ!1!!

Wastebook

• We’ve got to stop using the “is dead” thing. It’s hardly ever accurate and mostly a cheap trick. (It works in zero-sum marketing and community management sometimes, though: 10% to 20% of the time?)

• “Autocado.”

• ‘(In his essay, Parini recounts an old story about the literary critic, Harold Bloom. Bloom was famously prolific, and the story goes that a graduate student once phoned Bloom and his wife answered and said: “I’m sorry, he can’t talk–he’s writing a book.” The student responded: “That’s all right. I’ll wait.”)’ Here.

• ‘The term “pseudoclarity” refers to a misleading sense of clarity that arises from overly simplistic metrics and frameworks, like those often used in Scrum methodologies. It highlights the danger of relying on superficial calculations and symbols that may obscure the true complexity and uncertainty of real-world projects, leading to a false sense of control and understanding.’ From “Tossed Salads And Scrumbled Eggs,” as understood by Perplexity.ai. Related:

• It’s better to reverse engineer the strategy from how it gets implemented than pay much attention to the annual planning PowerPoint.

• Or: strategy is defined execution, not PowerPoint.

• “‘Deep doubt’ is skepticism of real media that stems from the existence of generative AI.” Benj Edwards.

• I wouldn’t say they lied. More so that they did a bad job predicting.

• “Rye is Canadian, right?” “You better find out.” Mad Men.

• And: “I’m living like there’s no tomorrow, because there isn’t one.” “I don’t think I realized until this moment: but, it must be hard being a man, too.” Ibid.

• Living the memento mori corporate life.

Relative to your interests

• IDC #US52372824 (June 2024). Source: IDC DevOps Survey, - “79.1% of respondents are extending, using, or piloting Wardley Mapping to diagram the value chain and application components, demonstrating the value it can add to strategic application planning.” IDC #US52372824 (June 2024). Source: IDC DevOps Survey, November 2023, n = 311. // I never would have guessed that, but people do talk about those maps a lot.

• Digital transformation strategies focus on reducing costs, upskilling - Highlights from Macroeconomic Outlook, Business Trends - ”Digital transformation focuses on employee productivity and automation. Nearly 44% of respondents either have a formal digital transformation strategy (32%) or are planning to develop one (11%). The primary drivers for adopting a digital transformation strategy are improving efficiency through process automation (59%), improving employee productivity (56%) and customer experience enhancements (47%). The main priorities in digital transformation are to improve workforce productivity and engagement experiences (44%), followed by intelligent automation to reduce/remove need for labor and manual processes (43%). Modernizing legacy back-office (e.g., ERP, supply chain) and front-office (e.g., customer relationship management, e-commerce) applications is also a top priority in digital transformation.”

• Free ‘JavaScript’ from Legal Clutches of Oracle, Devs Petition - This seems like a don’t wake the sleeping bear situation.

• The types information available on the internet and why AI is bad for all of them - ”For example, if I’m looking to buy an ergonomic chair and I read a review that says “I’m a 6’3” man and this chair is absolutely perfect for my size,” this anecdote provides helpful information to me in a way that simply reading the measurements does not.”

• AI is great for churning out apps, but don’t forget to test - Enterprise AI needs testing just like code needs testing. // “Research published by Leapwork, drawn from the feedback of 401 respondents across the US and UK, noted that while 85 percent had integrated AI apps into their tech stacks, 68 percent had experienced performance, accuracy, and reliability issues.”

• Customers don’t trust AI, and the rift might be hurting business - ”Participants were then asked questions to determine their willingness to buy the TV. Those who saw AI in the product description were less likely to make the purchase.”

• CIOs: Get Tech Sprawl Under Control - “According to Forrester’s Q2 2024 Tech Pulse Survey, a staggering 77% of US technology decision-makers report moderate to extensive levels of technology sprawl. This sprawl can result in unsustainable costs, slower IT delivery, reduced operational resilience, and increased security risks.”

• Business leaders are losing faith in IT, according to this IBM study. Here’s why - “Fewer than half (47%) of business leaders surveyed think their IT organization is “effective in basic services,” down from 69% surveyed in 2013, the survey shows. Only 36% of CEOs in the survey see IT as effective, down from 64% since 2013. Chief financial officers give a bit more credit to IT, with 50% seeing its effectiveness, but this is down from 60% since 2013.”

• IBM buys Kubernetes cost control startup Kubecost to expand its FinOps suite - They’ve bought a lot in this category - solution suite’ing. ”IBM said Kubecost’s capabilities will be integrated into an expanding FinOps Suite, enhancing the combined capabilities of Apptio, Cloudability, Instana and Turbonomic to provide what will perhaps be the most comprehensive cost monitoring toolset around. The company didn’t say so, but there is clear potential for Kubecost’s technology to be integrated with IBM’s OpenShift application development platform too.”

• How PepsiCo capped cloud overspend - ‘“FinOps is all about evangelization,” Woo said. “This is probably the most difficult side of running a FinOps practice, because when you are a FinOps practitioner you’re trained to do IT work. You may have had a finance background. You weren’t trained to be a mediator or therapist.”’

Conferences

Talks I’m giving, places I’ll be, and other plans.

Cloud Foundry Day EU, Karlsruhe, Oct 9th. VMware Explore Barcelona, speaking, Nov 4th to 7th. GoTech World, speaking, Bucharest, Nov 12th and 13th. SREday Amsterdam, speaking, Nov 21st, 2024.

Discounts! SREDay Amsterdam: 20% off with the code SRE20DAY. Cloud Foundry Day 20% off with the code CFEU24VMW20.

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// I’m pretty sure it was Brandon who came up with the phrase “employee mode,” just in the off-handed way that you do in a podcast. It’s great, right?

// Thanks for subscribing! I think we’re on track to 1,000 subscribers sometime over the next two months. That’ll be thrilling! You know: tell a friend, recommend it, etc. IT MAKES ME HAPPY.

See you next episode.

Code to Production: From Cloud to DevOps to Platform Engineering, with Purnima Padmanabhan

There'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. We also discuss the differences between startups and large companies - most interestingly Purnima’s take on what large companies can learn from how startups operate. Listen to it here, it's was a fun interview

Here’s a more detailed overview:

In this episode, Purnima Padmanabhan, the general manager of Tanzu at Broadcom, talks with Coté about the evolution of DevOps and platform engineering. Purnima has worked at many interesting over the years LoudCloud, BMC Software, and VMware. That experience gives her a great perspective on the industry's ongoing journey to empower developers to deploy code into production quickly and reliably. The discussion follows the industry innovations and trends from early infrastructure automation to the rise of cloud computing and the emergence of platform engineering.

Purnima highlights the enduring challenge of bridging the gap between development and operations, emphasizing that the core objective remains consistent: accelerating the time it takes to move code into production. She underscores the importance of continuous improvement, noting that the industry is still striving for perfection. The conversation also delves into the nuances of platform engineering and DevOps, exploring the balance between standardization and flexibility, the role of automation in fostering trust, and the enduring need for both development and operations roles.

Purnima also discusses her experiences at various companies and the lessons she's learned throughout her career. Listen in to this 20+ year journey from LoudCloud's early foray into cloud computing to BMC's focus on process automation and VMware's cloud management solutions, all the way up the Tanzu's focus on cloud native development and platforms.

Listen in!

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I keep putting off rounding up interesting links and fun fines. It’ll finally be in the next episode! // I’m speaking at SREDay London this week. I’ve got plenty of time to actually take in the presentations and talk with people this time so I’m hoping to get a little snap-shot of what’s up with SRE now-a-days.

Let’s start with some good looking cheese:

Community is Mission Critical for Platform Engineering

Establishing 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. 

In a talk at Explore going over their general platform engineering group, Jürgen Sußner went over this tactic. I wrote-up my take on using internal communities for support and platform innovation over on the Tanzu blog.

Jürgen works at DATEV, a German company that makes widely used accounting software. They’ve been running on Cloud Foundry (via the Tanzu Platform) for over six years and now are supporting over 1,200 apps and services that span 18,000+ containers and 8,000 virtual machines. There’s over 2,000 developers using the platform. So, the stories and advice they have are pretty enterprise-y, exactly the kind of scale I like the study.

Anyhow, here’s my write-up of Jürgen’s story of the internal community their platform team relies on. This pattern comes up a lot in other organizations that have been running platforms for a couple of years, like Mercedes and Garmen.

Software Defined Talk #484: A Lot of USB Ports

Take a listen this week’s podcast episode:

This week, we discuss Dell's growth in AI servers, GEICO’s transition from VMware to OpenStack, and the concept of Kingmaking. Plus, plenty of thoughts on USB hubs.

Subscribe and enjoy!

Conferences

Talks I’m giving, places I’ll be, and other plans.

SREday London 2024, speaking, September 19th to 20th. SREday Amsterdam, Nov 21st, 2024. Coté speaking. Cloud Foundry Day EU, Karlsruhe, Oct 9th. VMware Explore Barcelona, speaking, Nov 4th to 7th.

Discounts! SREDay London and Amsterdam: 20% off with the code SRE20DAY. Cloud Foundry Day 20% off with the code CFEU24VMW20.

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There’s not enough links or wastebook entries to include, so I’ll ball up some more and put them in the next episode.

Today it’s just links and fun finds that I’ve been storing up for a about a week.

What the AIs thinks of the debate

I 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 two outlets obviously watched a different TV show than the other, possibly broadcast from two different parallel universes.

The other interesting part was asking the AI what was not covered in each article: climate change is the biggest one, it seems. At the end, I asked it to make D&D characters for each. Overall, it was pretty good - at least enjoyable to read.

Anyhow, I also asked it to write an overview at the end. It was predictably boring in that it was devoid of any point of view. Meanwhile, here’s the view from across the pond in The Economist - plenty of PoV and style as usual.

Oh, and Gemini just flat-out chickened out and wouldn’t do anything. I tried to outfox it by saying it was a fictional transcript, but it was too wise.

(And, yes, obviously generative AIs don’t actually think anything about the debate, they’re just doing their thing outputting what seems like the word that follows the one before it.)

Relative to your interests

• Charles Schwab Adopts PostgreSQL (With VMware Tanzu) - Why Charles Schwab chose Postgres over Oracle, and chose to pay for Tanzu Data Services support.

• Cycle Time - Time spent figuring out this nuance is time spent not coding and getting your apps out the door and kicking in the product management feedback cycle. Still, good discussion of the nuances of the phrase.

• 2025 IT Budgets See 5.5% Increase as CIOs Invest in AI and Cloud - “With a projected 5.5% increase in IT budgets, the year ahead is set to focus heavily on artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud computing.”

• Executive translation - “Many high-agency managers try to prevent executives from doing silly things, but it’s almost always more effective to translate their energy for a silly thing into energy for a useful thing. It also leaves the executive feeling supported by your work rather than viewing you as an obstacle to their progress.”

• How Heroku Is Positioned To Help Ops Engineers in the GenAI Era - “We decided that the best thing for us strategically was to use Kubernetes underneath the covers, essentially to replace a lot of the code that we have been using to do the same thing. That’s a big migration effort for us. There’s a lot of expertise that needs to be built.”

• Oracle Runs OCI Clones At Rival AWS, Google, And Azure Clouds - Oracle runs its stack in the various clouds.

• Admins wonder if the cloud was such a good idea after all - ”According to a report published by UK cloud outfit Civo, more than a third of organizations surveyed reckoned that their move to the cloud had failed to live up to promises of cost-effectiveness. Over half reported a rise in their cloud bill…. Although the survey, unsurprisingly, paints Civo in a flattering light”

• Five Lessons Learned From a Lifetime of Platform-as-a-Product - Text version of a good talk.

• DOJ, Nvidia, and why we restrict monopolies - “A company getting it right does not give it some kind of permanent license to coast while printing money. The question that all antitrust seeks to answer is simple: how much is enough? When do the well-deserved riches and power that accumulate to companies that make big bets, execute well, and invest wisely start to be toxic for society or humanity as a whole, and for competition itself? Are the riches that the largest companies make earned, or are they simply the product of being large? If it’s the former, great! But if it’s the latter…”

• Platform Engineering Reshapes Software Dev at Bechtle - Customer case or Bechtle using Humanitec.

VMware Corner

What with our big conference, there’s been lots of coverage recently of VMware. Here’s some. I think the new strategy - focusing on private cloud - came across clearly.

• Under New Management: Impressions from VMware Explore 2024 - “Tan made comments about not chasing ‘bright shiny objects.’ The context around these comments – particularly from the analyst session – indicate Tan’s statements could reasonably be interpreted as pointed commentary about Kubernetes. The Tanzu platform has two available runtimes: Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes. More airtime was given to Cloud Foundry than Kubernetes, and the leadership team made statements about ‘focusing on existing customer success.’ All together, there were signals that read as the company focusing on nurturing the assets from the Pivotal acquisition over the Heptio acquisition, and prioritizing solutions centered around its VM-centric past more broadly.”

• Tanzu 10 Sets New Standard for Private Cloud-Native Platforms - ”According to a recent survey by Futurum Research, organizations that have adopted cloud-native technologies have seen an average of 20% faster time to market and a 15% reduction in IT costs.”

• Broadcom CEO: VMware still ringing the cash registers - 'That translates into 32% quarter-on-quarter VMware bookings growth." And: ‘When it comes to revenue tailwinds, AI is driving “about two-thirds in compute and one-third in networking” said Broadcom CFO Spears.’

• Broadcom VMware acquisition sees profitability amid disruption - “As long as [Tan] keeps the [total cost of ownership] for running a workload under the cost of the public cloud and under the cost of comparable competitors, he’s good,” Ellis said. “But the bar was low … essentially [VMware] was the discounted enterprise virtualization suite for Dell and EMC, and they used it to sell hardware; they used it to sell the other parts of their infrastructure. The price was artificially kept low, and essentially Hock Tan is allowing [time] to figure out, ‘Will it sustain this higher price?’ I think when you talk about the inertia, when you talk about how well embedded it is within the tech stack, the answer’s probably going to be yes.”

Wastebook

• “At the average organization, 56% of teams utilize a DevOps methodology. Organizations expect this to grow in 12 months by about 6 percentage points. However, it has been 15 years since the inception of DevOps, and organizations are still struggling to expand the adoption of DevOps across their application estates.” IDC: “Development Tools and Applications, 2024.”

• In tech, don’t confuse the story that drives your valuation versus the features that get customers to buy your products.

• Life is short. Don’t waste it eating chicken breasts.

• “tentacles of spend”

• “no Facebook employee has, to my knowledge, been killed by cannon fire” Here.

• And: “who remembers DR-DOS?”

• “We become Old, before we have been able to taste the Pleasure of being Young” Here.

• “Did any of your grandmother’s go to college?” RotL #551.

• It’s one dimensional chess at its finest.

• “galaxy-brain peanut gallerians” here.

Conferences

Talks I’m giving, places I’ll be, and other plans.

SREday London 2024, speaking, September 19th to 20th. SREday Amsterdam, Nov 21st, 2024. Coté speaking. Cloud Foundry Day EU, Karlsruhe, Oct 9th. VMware Explore Barcelona, speaking, Nov 4th to 7th.

Discounts! SREDay London and Amsterdam: 20% off with the code SRE20DAY. Cloud Foundry Day 20% off with the code CFEU24VMW20.

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In AI-land, I’ve been using Gemini and Perplexity more than ChatGPT. I re-signed up for Gemini and…it’s fine? I use Perplexity to the most for basic search and summarizing. Gemini isn’t that great at D&D - ChatGPT feels better. But, I’m still at that ceiling of usefulness for chat AI: without spending a lot of time, I can’t get the results I’m looking for. And that’s the point: it should be quick and effortless.

What I’m liking about Gemini is: it’s integration into the rest of Google (Gmail, docs, Google Drive, etc.) and that you get 2 TB of storage. This means I can use Google Photos again. ChatGPT can import Google Docs, and you can of course upload files, but it’s a lot different to just have Gemini right there in a document you’re working on, or in email. One theory: chat AI is just a feature, so without integrating with and/or owning the rest of the apps, it’ll quickly become less useful.

I used Gemini to help me figure out what to write about for a recent blog post, but it wasn’t good at doing the actual writing. Still, as an assistant it worked, this once at least. The “copilot” idea is a good one.

Gemini still can’t tell me the top five people I emailed in the 2000’s. It just says it can’t do that, despite having all of my email. Something like perplexity would figure out how to search all my emails, sort them by frequency, and then output that. I think?

I still think that the only people who think AI is going to change everything, is super-cool, are people who don’t use it much. The initial impression is amazement, but then you realize it’s just a dancing bear.

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. 

Here's what I think DevOps needs to do to come back from the dead:

(1) Steal back the flame from platform engineering

Developing software and building digital capabilities is becoming ever more complex. By 2026, 80% of large software engineering organizations will establish platform engineering teams as internal providers of reusable services, components and tools for application delivery - up from 45% in 2022. Gartner, circa 2024.

"Platform Engineering," is fine, but creating it as separate, new method of work has done a disservice to DevOps. Shoving DevOps into a grave was also a bit rude.

Platform engineering was a very well done marketing strategy to establish a new market for a handful of portal vendors to start working in. All of us joined the momentum of platform engineering. I have done it many times, and probably still will!

Much like The 12 Factor App, a piece of brilliant technical marketing, platform engineering has actually become its own, legit thing now. But, that early strategy of stealing the sun-light from DevOps made platform engineering seem like more than it is. Platform engineering is just DevOps with one small thing: adding in product management.

The rest of platform engineering is just adding new tools to the DevOps toolchain: primarily internal developer portals and all of the work and tooling that goes into making Kubernetes usable for developers. Over the next 12 months, platform engineering is going to take hold in "enterprises" (see Gartner prediction above), which is what I call large organizations that are not tech companies: you know, IT normies. There's early use here-and-there in enterprises,2 but not at the scale of DevOps, or even cloud native (you know, architecting your applications in containers).

The DevOps community has to take over, gobble up, or otherwise “ride” the platform engineering wave or get drowned by it, lost in the deep like some ancient city. It's too late to reverse the name. And, really, "platform" as a name is incredibly valuable and descriptive, and "platform engineer" is a fine synonym for "DevOps engineer."

The job title might even do a good job to clean house on what exactly a "DevOps engineer" is. This is the case with DevOps in general: it's become so dominate that “DevOps” has started to mean most anything, and everything related to building and running in-house applications. This is not good!

(2) DevOpsDays should be renamed to Platform Days 

When suggesting such a thing, one must always begin with praise.

The community-driven, global DevOpsDays organization is one of the most unique assets in the IT world. At the moment, there's nothing like it: a vendor-independent, volunteer-led organization focused on industry best practices that holds regional events to educate and enrich the community. 

Let me do some boosterism here:

1. Being vendor-independent is important for two reasons. First, it means the content is actually practical and "true" without the bias of a commercial agenda. Second, it means that all vendors feel comfortable sponsoring DevOpsDays. Vendors are incredibly important to the DevOps community. They're the ones who have funded its existence! If the overall community and DevOpsDays was owned by a single vendor or an oligopoly it wouldn't have been successful nor valuable. Vendors have an agenda to sell their products and their market category (people who sell on-premises software want to show buyers why private cloud is the best, people who sell public cloud software want to show buyers why on-premises software is better, people who have new tools of monitoring and log management want to explain to you why the old ways suck - shocker!). Vendor's budgets also come and go at the whim of their business, new technologies, and macro-economic headwinds. One year, the company is focused on growth at all costs to drive company valuation, the next year the company is focused on cutting costs because a PE firm bought them. One year, money is cheap, the next year money is scarce. One year, DevOps is important, the next year generative AI is important. Budgets shift! In short, depending on vendors to support an ongoing, multi-decade community is risky.

2. The volunteers are the ones, then, who make it all happen. The passion that DevOpsDays volunteers have for the DevOps community and event is extremely rare in other parts of IT. Even the agile community doesn't seem to muster enough energy to put on so many conferences. I don’t think application developers can be bothered to look up from their IDEs. There are regional meetups and user groups in IT, sure, but I don’t think there’s anything close to the scale of DevOpsDays. While my overly utilitarian, cold heart might ache at all the "culture" talk in the DevOps community, that vibe is incredibly real and important: it becomes part of the identity and lives of these volunteers. I don't want to see that lost, and it's a huge asset that the IT community should cherish and protect.

3. Focusing on best practices means that the talks, workshops, and discussions at DevOpsDays are focused on continually improving the IT community. There have been four, maybe even five stages of DevOps over the past 15+ years. The DevOpsDays talks focus on what the DevOps community needs help with at the time. You can see this in the community's shifting from automation (infrastructure as code, immutable infrastructure, Puppet, Chef, etc.), to monitoring and management (observability, chaos engineering, etc.), to culture (how people work, the mindsets that lead to good outcomes and good lives), to filling the usefulness-gap created by people's over-enthusiasm for Kubernetes, to the present.

4. DevOpsDays are in-person which is the most effective way to educate the community and keep it thriving. More than many other in-person events, the edge that DevOpsDays has is that the events are regional. They’re all over the world. This means that people in the DevOps community don't have to pay to travel, and if they do, it's usually just an hour or two to go to a nearby city. Compare this to one, large event a year in Las Vegas or Barcelona. The audience and community reach for DevOpsDays is so much larger and, thus, more effective.

The survival of DevOpsDays is more important than the survival of the name DevOpsDays. Because the platform engineering community successfully stole so much of the mindshare, they've sucked much of the sponsorship money out of the DevOpsDays. Worse than redirecting the money is drying the money up all together. Marketing budgets are tight now-a-days (I'm not sure why: vendors want to sell more than ever) so the people controlling event sponsorship money is looking for an excuse to cut costs. And, of course, there’s the redirection that platform engineering, drawing attention and therefore people away from DevOps.

There is currently no platform engineering set of conferences like DevOpsDays. PlatformCon is a good, online conference. I enjoy the recordings, have presented at them, and have encouraged other people to present. The PlatformCon crew is building up momentum for more in-person events (see all the regional group on their above page) - this is great! Good for them! Yay! RIP-TAYLOR-CONFETTI-BLAST!

But it will take years to replicate the reach and assets that the DevOpsDays community has.

I know it feels weird to the DevOpsDays people - it feels weird to me! - but renaming DevOpsDays to PlatformDays would solve a lot of problems quickly. Maybe the PlatformCon community could even merge with DevOpsDays, joining up the benefits of both. I don’t know. Maybe.3

(3) DORA should focus less on metrics and more on practices

DORA is probably the most important marketing asset DevOps has and has had. And it's a genuinely useful tool! DORA’s work is what helped spread DevOps into the mainstream, all those "enterprises.” And the annual cadence and DORA community has helped DevOps evolve, and kept it alive. 

The problem DORA has now is that most people focus only on the four DORA metrics. Common lore is that those enterprise normies don't look beyond the four metrics. This extends to DORA's annual clustering of elite, high, medium, and low performers: these are rankings. Those are just small parts of the overall knowledge in and utility of DORA. I don't think this short-sightedness of DORA users is intentional, or even conscious. It's how just people work. 

Whenever you put metrics and rankings in front of a corporate-human, eventually they'll focus most of their intention on upping their ranking. People do this because they think that being successful means being ranked high, getting a good score/grade. This is because that's how rewards are given in most organizations! Gaming metrics is the most rational thing for a person to do in most organizations. Each year, DORA refines high-grade fuel for this way of working and thinking.

Just as it's not really the fault of the users, it's not really DORA's fault either. But, DORA can help people do better by re-orienting their annual work.

First, the value of DevOps practices are not really in dispute. We all know that they're good. As with flossing, we all know that we should do the practices. DORA shouldn't stop gathering and analyzing these metrics, nor reporting on them. 

What DORA needs to do is move the focus reporting on the actual practices people follow. The activities they do day-to-day, the tools they use, that lead to the great results and clustering.

Of course, DORA currently cover this, but over the years the reports have focused more and more on a discussion of the survey and mechanics of the research rather than actions to take. This is fine! I get it - I have an engineering mindset and I would rather tell you about the internals of what I build, how I did it, and, most of all, what's cool about it. But the DORA-users need a tool. They need to know what to do, not why they should be doing it.

Sure, there's a danger that the users apply tools the wrong way, and you end up with a similar trap of focusing just on the four metrics. But, I mean: let's have a little more faith in people, and DORA’s ability to avoid that.

Let's also take a lesson from Extreme Programming. Extreme Programming is incredibly prescriptive. And, while I don't want to speak on behalf of the priests of that community, over the past few decades there's been a latent operating principle of using Extreme Programming: start with following all of the strict practices, learn what works and doesn't work in your organization, adapt the practices, and start the loop over again. That is how the DORA practices should be applied, and it should be the mission of DORA to make it happen.

In the most recent DORA report (2023) an easy to use discussion of these practices doesn't start until page 81 (out of a total report size of 95 pages). I confess my laziness here and apologize if it resulted in error, but after a few quick flips, I couldn't even find where the practices are covered after flipping through the 77 pages of the 2022 report, the 45 pages of the 2021 report, and had to go all the way back to 2019 to find this on page 31 of 82 pages:

…and page 57 to find the equally valuable this:

There's a snark in the DevOps community that the problem with Accelerate is that everyone who read it came across the four metrics on page 17, declared that they had all they needed, and then closed the book. Well, how about we put a discussion of practice - these very charts - on page one, or, at least page 9.

People in enterprises who are struggling to get better at software need this kind of material: easy to understand, focused and quick, and possible to put into place practices. How do you ensure you floss everyday? First, buy some floss. Second, put it where ever you brush your teeth. Third, notice when you do it and don’t do it. Fourth, keep trying to do it better each day. Life-hack: put it on your desk and turn off the camera when you're bored in a dumb Zoom meeting you can't get out of, and floss. You could also keep the camera on.

The "model" (as I think DORA calls it) is there, and it's even nicely done on the DORA community site (see the figure at the beginning opening of this section). What I'm suggesting is that it should the primary, the first focus of each report. When you email around a 45 to 95 page PDF in enterprises you have one shot to get people to read it and benefit from it. They're looking for the most effective tool they can use right now to achieve whatever goals they have. That practices chart is the tool they're looking for and it should be the first thing they see in the 30 seconds they're going to spend on that PDF. The rest of the work is great, valuable, and hard to do, but those are the "backup slides" that you'll use once you get people's attention and show them what you're proposing.4

We don't need further proof that flossing is good, nor to be told that people who floss have elite teeth. We need to know the mechanics of flossing and how to build a system that lets us put in place continuous flossing.

(4) DevOps should add product management for infrastructure

I give platform engineering a hard time because the people who launched it tried to push the DevOps community in the grave. Or, I don't know, maybe they were just having fun with the headline. Har, har, har…good one.

But, rasing the prominence of product management is an incredibly valuable thing that the platform engineering community has done. And it’s why I think it’s a good, helpful body of work.

The ideas of product management - identifying your customers/users and using, their problems/jobs to be done, crossed with what is technically feasible, and using feedback loops to continuously build a product that best solves their problems…with software - haven't been a large part of the DevOps community. The platform engineering community frames their work as building platforms for application developers, treating them as "customers," and, therefore product managing infrastructure for application developers.5

Sure. Absolutely. Without a doubt. The DevOps community has wanted that outcome and worked towards it. It's right there in the name: Dev! But product management as a practice hasn't been a focus in the DevOps community. It should be! There is a-funny-because-it's-true joke that there are very few devs at a DevOpsDays conference.6 The same is true for the community as a whole.

The good news here is that product management is one of the most understood, well documented, and proven methods of working in software. Thus, from a regular person's perspective - those people enterprises - product management is straightforward and learnable.

Despite product management being easy enough to learn, I think it’ll be incredibly difficult for enterprises to add product management to their infrastructure/DevOps/platform groups. They’re going to need help, and the DevOps community has a proven track record for such tough work.

Some of the people who introduced product management into infrastructure ("platforms") over the past ten years have done a great job grafting their term of art, “platform as a product,” into platform engineering. And it's stuck! I wish this had happened in the DevOps community, but because the platform engineering fig vines took over, it didn't.

Well. You know. We should bring product management into the DevOps world.

For example, DORA could start incorporating it into their studies. While product management is understood for applications, there's not a lot of work on applying it to infrastructure (yes, again: "platforms," if you prefer) and developer tools. Us vendors know about it since it’s our business, but figuring out how to do it in enterprise infrastructure (or even apps!) isn't much studied. DORA can do that, and it'd help clear out some of those vines if they did. (I know the Puppet study-surveys are going for it, so good on them!)

In fact, I'd go as far to say that product management is the missing piece for the wider success of DevOps.

(Now, if you wanted to be clever, you would think this: platform engineering is focused on developers and product manages for them. DevOps will do that, of course, but what a DevOps person will tell you is operations people are also customers [and maybe security people if they behave]. Why not product manage for ops too?)

I will be sad

Listen: I know! I hear you.

But, I'm not saying your efforts are wasted - it's all good stuff. We just need to do more. We need to adapt and change. Fast feedback loops, continuous learning, and changing to do what works are core principles of DevOps. This is what I'm seeing in the feedback loops and the theories I have for how to get better.

I give a huge, massive, rainbow-smelling shit about the DevOps community. It's been a positive force in my career and life. Many of my friends are in the DevOps community and going to DevOpsDays is how I see them. It’s fun! DevOps has also had an important, large impact on how the world builds and runs software. And not just “hats on cats” apps, but apps that you and use everyday to run our lives.

There's a lot of existential malaise going on in the DevOps community, especially among the most enthusiastic and committed members of the community. Some (many?) of the original DevOps community members have drifted out of the community, and will sort of roll their eyes over the whole thing over drinks. There isn't a better community in IT than the DevOps community - it's managed to remain kind, helpful, and nice. I'll be sad if we can't keep it alive and thriving.

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I guess what I’m trying to say is: DevOpsDays Antwerp was good. It was nice to visit with everyone and see some great talks.