Goldman Sachs has implemented its GS AI Assistant to enhance employee efficiency in tasks like document summarization and data analysis, while acknowledging the importance of personal nuance in client services.

Somewhere between 40% and 60% of apps run on private cloud, you just never hear about it.

I’m thinking through the topic of ROI for infrastructure software again (obviously for our PaaS stuff). I get asked about this every year or two. Each time I look at it, I get more confused. This ask always come from sales, presumably because the buyers are asking it. But, I don’t think the ask is about the basic ROI calculations: the amount we paid for this tech is less than the amount of money we make using it.

An enterprise AI strategy probably means adding AI to your existing apps and workflows, not just standing up a stand-alone AI app. We experience generative AI as chatbots in the consumer space - and they’re great! - but this doesn’t seem like the best approach for business applications. Think about search. We don’t even notice it now, but at work, search is built into existing apps, it’s not usually a stand-alone app that tightly integrates with and links into existing apps.

Much like financial debt, technical debt is helpful when managed responsibly, but like real debt, tech debt can also stop growth and innovation in its tracks. My colleague Bryan Ross has a piece out on tech debt with five ways to address is. Here’s a summary of it. Think of technical debt as the accumulation of compromises on development quality to save time. Some examples of these choices are postponing unit tests, running outdated software, or focusing on end-user features at the expense of internal processes.

The people in my tech community who talk about community find Twitter so vile that there’s little discussion of the good parts. It was a great place for discovering, building, and “doing” community. And it still is, though mixed in with all the other stuff1. This history of DevOps, cloud stuff, and everything that followed - open source, even! - would be different if Twitter weren’t around. We’d be in…listservs? Blogs?

Early on in the life of a new open source project, some vendors will tell you it’s too complex and unreliable, and wrap their fixes on top of it, often hiding the project. They’re not wrong (early in, most OSS projects are literally not even 1.0 projects yet!), but it’s rhetorically risky strategy. With the early adopters, you have to show how you make it better and are evolving the project without hiding it.

From the report “Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2023: Platform Engineering,” Paul Delory and Oleksandr Matvitskyy, Gartner, Oct 2022. The authors don’t take a strong position here (?), but I think their vision of platform engineering sits above the infrastructure layer. See the diagram above, for example. The platform engineering group doesn’t mess with that stuff. This seems right to me. Everyone loves a Gartner prediction: “By 2026, 80% of software engineering organizations will establish platform teams as internal providers of reusable services, components and tools for application delivery.

I've proposed an open spaces for DevOpsDays Amsterdam, 2021. The idea is: The DevOps community pushes for people to change how they think and operate. When it comes to working better, we have proven tools, techniques, and even big picture ways of thinking like CALMS. You’re more than likely eager to try these new things, get better, change. However, many more people seem less than eager to change - your co-workers, managers, and the countless “others” in your organization.