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 tracked at least three different definitions of DevOps since the days of “agile infrastructure”: Using Puppet and Chef (and then Ansible and Chef) to replace Opsware and BladeLogic. Full stack engineers to setup EC2, load-balancers, and other Morlock shit. Full stack engineers are bad, but sort of the same thing. Also, you can’t have a DevOps “group” or title. But, you know, someone should do all that automation. Putting all the people on one team, having them focus on a product, and establishing a culture of caring and learning.

As a DevOpsDays sponsor you’re often given the chance to give a one minute pitch to the entire audience. Back stage at DevOps Rex, this week, I was talking with a first timer. One minute seems like such a small amount of time: how could you say anything consequential in 60 seconds? You’re presenting in front of the full audience, anywhere between 150 to 500 people. They probably also loath vendors, or, at least are bored by them.

There are two types of digital transformation. First, literally. You had an analog process (booking appointments at the barber shop with phone and paper, planning tanker refueling schedules with a white board), and now they’re replaced by pure software. These transformations are often about optimizing an existing business process, gaining huge cost and time efficiencies (bottom line revenue, profit) and resulting in higher customer productivity and satisfaction (top line revenue, “growth”).

Coffee is for coders. Whether you’re doing waterfall, DevOps, PRINCE, SAFe, PMBOK, ITIL, or whatever process and certification-scheme you like, chances are you’re not using your time wisely. I’d estimate that most of the immediate, short-term benefit organizations get from switching to cloud native is simply because they’re now actually, truly following a process which both focuses your efforts on creating customer value (useful software that helps customers out, making them keep paying or pay you more) and managing your time wisely.

Thus far, it seems like the large banks are fending off digital disruption, perhaps embracing some of it on their own. The Economist takes a look: “Peer-to-peer lending, for instance, has grown rapidly, but still amounted to just $19bn on America’s biggest platforms and £3.8bn in Britain last year” “last year JPMorgan Chase spent over $9.5bn on technology, including $3bn on new initiatives” From a similar piece in the NY Times: “The consulting firm McKinsey estimated in a report last month that digital disruption could put $90 billion, or 25 percent of bank profits, at risk over the next three years as services become more automated and more tellers are replaced by chatbots.

I get all ants-in-pants about this whole bi-modal discussion because I feel like it’s a lot of energy spent talking about the wrong things. This came up recently when I was asked about “MVP”, in a way that basically was saying “our stuff is dangerous [oil drilling], so ‘minimal’ sounds like it’d be less safe.” I tried to focus them on the “V” and figure out what “viable” was for their situation.

I have a larger piece on common objections to “cloud native” that I’ve encountered over the last year. Put more positive, “how to get your digital transformation started with a agile, DevOps, and cloud native” or some such platitudinal title like that. Here’s a draft of the dread-ROI section. The most annoying buzzkill for changing how IT operates (doing agile, DevOps, taking “the cloud native journey,” or whatever you think is the opposite of “waterfall”) is the ROI counter-measure.

A kingmaker in the making. I’ve talked with an old colleague about pitching a developer-based strategy recently. They’re trying to convince their management chain to pay attention to developers to move their infrastructure sales. There’s a huge amount of “proof” an arguments you can make to do this, but my experience in these kinds of projects has taught me that, eventually, the executive in charge just has to take a leap of faith.

Hey, I’ve not only seen this movie before, I did some script treatments: Chief Executive Officer John Chambers is aggressively pursuing software takeovers as he seeks to turn a company once known for Internet plumbing products such as routers into the world’s No. 1 information-technology company. … Cisco is primarily targeting developers of security, data-analysis and collaboration tools, as well as cloud-related technology, Chambers said in an interview last month.