Since May 2016, DIUx has completed 21 contracts using other transaction (OT) authority and the average time is 78 days, Shah said at the New America Foundation Future of War summit in Washington. The mission of DIUx, he said, “is to do agile culture change.…We are never going to be the acquisition arm of the Department of Defense, we’re not the R&D arm of the department.” DIUx has so far comprised $42 million in program funding, which Shah characterized as a “rounding error of a rounding error” of the DOD budget.

If there’s one complaint that I hear consistently in my studies of IT in large organizations, it’s that government IT, as traditionally practiced, is fucked. Compared to the private sector, the amount of paperwork, the role of contractors, and the seeming separation between doing a good job and working software drives all sorts of angst and failure. Mark Schwartz’s book on figuring out “business value” in IT is turning out to be pretty amazing and refreshing, especially on the topic of government IT.

A few weeks back my book review of two “the robots are taking over” came out over on The New Stack. Here’s some responses, and also some highlights from a McKinsey piece on automation. Don’t call it “automation” From John Allspaw: There is much more to this topic. Nick Carr’s book, The Glass Cage, has a different perspective. The ramifications of new technology (don’t call it automation) are notoriously difficult to predict, and what we think are forgone conclusions (unemployment of truck drivers even though the tech for self-driving cars needs to see much more diversity of conditions before it can get to the 99%+ accuracy) are not.

I reviewed two books on automation and digital transforming this month: The Wealth of Humans and Silicon Collar. These two books go well together because the first describes how automation is lowering the need for labor, leading, likely, to less jobs, while the second provides a compendium of examples of such software-driven labor change. Vinnie’s book has the optimism of a technologist, while Avent’s is much more fraught. Both accurately describe how IT is optimizing and replacing “analog” labor and businesses, leaving the core problem of devaluing human labor, perhaps to the point of eliminating millions of jobs, permanently.

The new version of Pivotal Cloud Foundry (“PCF” as folks like to say) is out. It has awhole slew of updates across the board. My selective highlights: Google Cloud & Azure support, so you’re all multi-cloud ready (still with OpenStack, VMware, and AWS support). Will run 250,000 containers concurrently; in addition to scaling based on CPU usage, you can now auto-scale on HTTP Latency and HTTP Throughput. Updates to Spring Cloud, Zipkin, and Spring Boot Actuators for diagnostic stuff.

When we're talking with customers about the value that Puppet brings to them, invariably we talk about the future, and the future in their mind in some ways includes containers. There's a lot experimentation going on. There's a lot of Docker work being done and container work being done, Kubernetes work being done on their laptops. The conversations we have with them is how does Puppet help you bring it into production, into mission-critical production?

Lots of specific middleware - like targeting mobile users - and a VPS offering, among many other things. Link

The wider Cloud Native ecosystem is, however, a very disparate and confused place. We anticipate a significant level of consolidation over the next twelve to eighteen months with some clear winners emerging. The emergence of several opinionated distributions of Kubernetes is hardly a surprise and this space will expand a little further before settling down. Link

I get asked to talk on DevOps a lot. Here’s my current (late 2016 and 2017) presentation, going over the why’s, the how’s, the technologies, and the meatware that supports including some best and worst practices based on what Pivotal customers do. See the newer slides with big pictures on most slides, and some of the older slides Also, here’s a more blatantly pro-Pivotal (and longer) version that you might have seen, esp.

[Gallery images not available] Like reading about doing agile, DevOps, and “cloud native” in the real world? Check out my little booklet on that topic drawing from failures and success at large organizations that I’ve observed over the past few years. Get it here. A Chinese version is also available. I often present on this topic too. I have a new, updated version of this book in development. Check out the draft!