Category: tech
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Kubernetes is the bottleneck, and you can get through it with a platform
Photo by Daniel Bryant. Another great KubeCon talk from Abby Bangser imploring the Kubernetes people to remember how important platforms are: they make all of his stuff usable for developers and valuable to the organizations that run it all. Without a platform, you’re just put another bottleneck in place. Also, see the go she started,…
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The end of the meat-mouse
The agency in agentic AI feels a lot more like giving the users – the humans – agency they didn’t have. That’s what’s making it useful for me, from sorting out dumb-shit home-networking incompatibilities, figuring out taxes, and otherwise sorting my shit out. When you unleash something like Claude code on all the messy and…
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Art Degrees, Sun Microsystems, and How Kubernetes Scales Contributions, with Josh Berkus – Software Defined Interviews #121
Our interview for this week is up, it’s with Josh Berkus: Whitney and Coté discuss with Josh Berkus (Red Hat, Kubernetes contributor) how liberal and fine arts degrees (philosophy, photography, sculpture, pottery) apply to tech careers. Berkus details how early hardware experience influenced his database performance work, noting hardware’s renewed relevance with AI and multi-arch…
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You Can Feel It Coming – Software Defined Talk
This week, we discuss personal AI hype cycles, bottoms-up adoption, and “The Modern Stack” simplifying cloud. Plus, thoughts on new cars and the dogs that ride in them. See the traditional podcast listing for links and more.
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Progressive Delivery, with Heidi Waterhouse – Software Defined Interviews
See the traditional podcast version for more and Heidi links.
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There’s a lot of business logic in Java, decades worth…
We have invested a lot in domain models, some of which are even very good. And, to be able to leverage that as we move to the new world is really, really important.” Rod Johnson. Source: “GenAI Grows Up: Building Production-Ready Agents on the JVM,” Rod Johnson, GOTO, October 1st, 2025. That reminds me of…
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Tanzu Catsup: The Risk of Relying on AI for Platform Engineering
Internal development teams and executives are increasingly looking at AI to automate the creation of internal developer platforms. However, cobbling together open-source components with AI is a far cry from building a scalable, secure, and “enterprise-grade” environment. In this conversation, we explore why betting your internal infrastructure on AI-generated platforms is a high-stakes risk and…
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Go cheap on innovation. Otherwise you just buy PowerPoints. Jana Werner on using tight timelines and small teams to force real progress. From our interview with Jana Werner.
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Two theories of the AI investor spook-out
First, there is the fear that AI generated apps will replace existing software companies. This from Benji Edwards at Ars: These releases occurred during a week of exceptional volatility for software stocks. On January 30, Anthropic released 11 open source plugins for Cowork, its agentic productivity tool that launched on January 12. Cowork itself is…
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AI, open source, talent, and more, live at cfgmgmtcamp 2026, with Andrew Clay Shafer
This week’s Software Defined Interviews episode was recorded live at #cfgmgmtcamp with Andrew Clay Shafer as a returning guest: Spotting talent, getting innovation adoption and driving use, open source, AI, and developing taste – those are the major topics Andrew and I discussed this week at a live recording. Also, a framework for creating the…
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Here are the slides for the talk I’ll be giving at @cfgmgmtcamp.bsky.social later today, at 2pm. It’s based on the DIY pitfalls paper I revised recently. CfgMgmtCamp #PlaformEngineering
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Internal Developer Platforms – Build vs. Buy
From Abby Bangser’s KubeCon US 2025 keynote: Now, I’m sure that at least some of you are shaking your heads and thinking, I’m saying we have to all build our own PaaS. Haven’t we been there before with platforms as a service? But I am absolutely not suggesting that we walk up to Sisyphus, give…
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Kubernetes use rising, large organizations slowest to adapt, not many people train their own AI model or deploy new AI models frequently
The new CNCF cloud native report shows a continual spread of Kubernetes, and container usage, in organizations. The chart above shows a shift from experimenting with Kubernetes to trying it out in production, to running in production. At the same time, containers, as you’d expect, are also moving steadily into production. Application containers in production…
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This week’s Software Defined Talk: This week, we discuss the end of Cloud 1.0, AI agents fixing old apps, and Chainguard vs. Docker images. Plus, the mystery of Dutch broth is finally solved. I recommend the traditional podcast format.
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This week’s Software Defined Interviews: we talk with Nathen Harvey, who leads the DORA research program at Google Cloud. They talk about what 15 years of DevOps and delivery data actually says about AI. The answer feels something like “it makes you even better at what you’re already good at.” High-performing teams get better, while…
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After the Dream – Software Defined Talk #555
This week’s Software Defined Talk podcast: This week, we discuss Gemini powering Siri, AWS’s biggest competitor, and AWS strategy choices. Plus, when should your next meeting actually start? Watch the video (above), or if you prefer traditional podcasts, subscribe to it.
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Here’s a cynical, but good overview of Anthropic’s attempt to use Claude code for generic knowledge work, a tool called Cowork. One part: Cowork may find fans among knowledge workers who have to create presentations but take no pride in their work. Come on. This is an application of that caustic Protestant belief that godliness…
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Winning in AI, story mode
Winning in AI is now defined as having a great chat app, not the AI infrastructure running that app. Amazon (AWS) has no chat app (that I know of, which is the point!), so people don’t think they’re winning. If AWS did have an app, and evolved it as a product, they would be at…
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This week’s Software Defined Interviews episode is with Lian Li: In this episode, Whitney and Coté talk with Lian, a “cloud-native human” with a 15-year career in tech. Lian discusses her transition from tech to performance art, her experiences in amateur musical theater, stand-up comedy, and improv theater. She talks about platform engineering, the importance…
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