Dell’s AI Server Business Now Bigger Than VMware Used To Be - Maybe private AI will really be a thing: ‘“We are still in the early innings, and our AI opportunity with tier 2 CSPs, enterprise, and emerging sovereign customers is immense,” Jeff Clarke, Dell’s chief operating officer,  explained on the call with Wall Street analysts. “Our view is supported by an AI hardware and services TAM of $174 billion, up from $152 billion, growing at a 22 percent CAGR over the next few years. We are competing in all of the big AI deals and are winning significant deployments at scale."'

A Java Language Cumulative Feature Rollup - ‘I found myself asking myself the question, “What’s every new feature Java has introduced since the last time I really cared about new Java language features?”, and didn’t find an easy answer via Google. So, I decided to create that list.'

Does Market Share Still Matter? - “we find that the positive relationship between market share and profitability generally still holds, but that it weakens with greater digital transformation. This means that market share increases translate into lower profitability gains for highly digitalized compared to less-digitalized companies. Additionally, it implies that digital transformation benefits smaller firms in particular because it leads to greater relative profitability gains for them compared to larger firms by removing some of the limitations that traditionally hindered them from becoming more profitable.” // “This means that the more digitalized a company becomes, the less upper management should rely on and prioritize market share to grow profitability. And the smaller a company is, the more it should prioritize digital transformation to boost profitability."

Normally I wouldn’t disclaim this since I think you, dear readers, are wise enough to know that it always applies, but: these views are my own, not my employer, VMware Tanzu by Broadcom. Also, we covered the below on this week’s Software Defined Talk. If you prefer to listen a podcast, it’ll be out on Friday morning, 7:30am Amsterdam time: subscribe!

Private Cloud

Yesterday at my work’s big conference, Explore, there was a lot of conversation about private cloud. It’s pretty straightforward and clear: VMware is your enterprise private cloud platform. From Hock Tan, Broadcom CEO:

“Public Cloud is much more expensive, more so than you ever expected. Complexity – another platform means another extra layer for you to manage. And compliance; you have regulatory policy requirements. It’s more complex, it’s more expensive and compliance is hard,” Tan told attendees. He said many CIOs are now moving their workloads back on-premises to deal with these three Cs, which represents a huge change, but also a huge opportunity. “Here’s my view,” Hock said. “The future of the enterprise is private. Private cloud, private AI fueled by your own private data. It’s about staying on-premises and in control. Of course, you’ll continue using the public cloud for elastic demand and bursting workloads, but in this hybrid world, the private cloud is now the platform to drive your business and your innovation, and we have work to do to make that happen.”

In round-table commentary, analyst Dave Vellante adds in the “AWS of the private cloud” angle. Commenting on the analyst day discussion with Hock Tan, Dave says:

I mean, he said in the keynote today, you basically get AWS on-prem. In the analyst briefing he said, okay we’re gonna to take 30, the top 30 services in the in AWS and we’re going to replicate those. We’re not going to do 300. But we’re going to basically create a substantially equivalent on-prem experience to the public cloud. And that’s their entire strategy. And you know I think if to the extent that they do invest in that road map people are going to stay with it why would you rip and replace VMware all?

Figuring out how many workloads are in private cloud versus public cloud is one of my ongoing side-projects. It’s not as easy as you’d think! Estimates are all over the map. 50/50 is probably a good estimate based on analysts, surveys, and other estimates I’ve seen in recent years. If you like something lower, Daniel Newman of The Six Five/Futurum estimates that only about 20% to 30% of workloads ever migrated to public cloud in the first place.

It’s also hard to find numbers around how many workloads are moving back to on-premises from public cloud, “repatriation” they call it. VMware sponsored an IDC white paper that pulls from IDC cloud surveys, saying this:

Two-fifths of respondents to IDC’s recent U.S. Cloud Migration Survey indicated that they performed or initiated repatriation of workloads from public cloud to dedicated environments in 2023, and 42% said they plan to repatriate some workloads in 2024. Security, data privacy, cost management, and performance are the top reasons companies engage in repatriation activities.”

IDC ROI PDF sponsored by VMware, August, 2024.

Here’s a similar data point from Forrester in 2023:

According to Forrester’s Infrastructure Cloud Survey in 2023, 79% of roughly 1,300 enterprise cloud decision-makers surveyed said their firms are implementing internal private clouds.

Here’s a very DevOps-y idea discussed in another Explore interview: most enterprise IT departments are run very inefficiently, “culture” and organization wise. There are silos for everything, and they are “best of breed,” which actually means the downside of locally optimized: different groups use different tools, you have lots of wait between handoffs, turf wars - all of the things people don’t like about large bureaucracy. The suggestion being that if they focused on organizing better, and consolidation, they’d get the gains that public cloud gives them. After all, that bureaucracy optimization is a side-effect of using public cloud: you no longer have such a large, bespoke IT department. You just have one of the public clouds and how they do things, take it or leave it.

Tanzu Platform 10 - Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes In One Runtime

I work in the Tanzu division, so I’m interested in what’s going on there. Here’s the big wrap-up post of everything.

Here’s my take on Tanzu.

Our main thing is this: the Tanzu Platform is an enterprise-grade PaaS. The primary focus is on private PaaSes (see above!). This can mean running on-premises, or running it in the public cloud with control over your own, single-tenant PaaS in public cloud.

People don't really say "PaaS" anymore, which I think is weird. They say "platform," so I'll use that word here.

The Tanzu Platform1 is composed of two approaches to building a platform:

1. Tanzu Platform for Cloud Foundry2 - a platform with a completely pre-built, turn key PaaS. This is Cloud Foundry, used by many large enterprises, supporting thousands of applications. In this case, you don't build the platform, but you can customize it here and there and add in services (“middleware”) that you need. You trade the ability for infinite customization for stability, consistency, and saving time on building and maintaining your own platform. You get those bureaucracy-busting benefits of going to public cloud.

2. Tanzu Platform for Kubernetes - a framework for building a PaaS on-top of Kubernetes. Added to this are tools for managing the apps running on these runtimes. Also, developers and platform engineers have the consoles needed to manage those apps. In this case, we provide defaults and templates (“opinions” to use PaaS-parlance) but you focus on building the platform to match exactly what you want, and can do so. We layer more usable yaml on-top of Kubernetes yaml, and have a good GUI as well. You can get a sense of what this all is by poking around at our docs on the Tanzu Application Engine.

3. There are data services built into Tanzu Platform as well: Postgres, MySQL, Redis/Valkey, Rabbit, Greenplumb (data warehouse), GemFire (in-memory data grid

4. And, the Tanzu Platform has very tight integration with Spring. Most enterprise applications are written in Java, and many of those use Spring. This means that Tanzu Platform is a great fit for most enterprise applications.

5. And, you know, all the runtime, management, consoles, integrations with infrastructure, etc. stuff you’d expect for a cloud platform.

When you spell it out it seems like a lot, but that’s sort of it. There’s of course a lot of details with such a wide scope. But, you can really simplify it as: the Tanzu Platform is a PaaS that will run Cloud Foundry or Kubernetes. The rest is just details in the yaml.

Here’s more from an interview with the GM of Tanzu, Purnima Padmanabhan:

The first part of Tanzu 10 is: we are bringing the reinvestment and the power of Cloud Foundry back to the Tanzu Platform. And Tanzu 10 brings in a single umbrella the choice of application runtimes. So you can build your application once and deploy either to a Cloud Foundry based application infrastructure, or application platform, or a Kubernetes either one, all within a single platform.

(~0:43)

The return of the Cloud Foundry philosophy and principles:

[There are ] three main messages. [Number One] Keep it very simple for the developer. Never expose yaml files, configuration files, kubectl, and lower level configs, BOSH, none of that. Just give them simple interfaces, say build my container and deploy, that’s it.

Number two, make sure that the deployment is dynamic and it automatically adjusts to the app needs. You just say, I want HA. You don’t have to tell me which cluster, how to connect the network, how to tie it all together, we will take care of it.

And then the third one is, you want to do continuous update, repair and continue security.

All these are actually pages from the Cloud Foundry world that now we are bringing to Tanzu platform as a universal tenant that applies across everything, whether you deploy in Cloud Foundry or on Kubernetes. (~11:00)

There’s something important to notice/know about “Tanzu Kubernetes”:

The core Kubernetes runtime is now baked into VCF, which is called the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, it is made available with VCF, just like public clouds have their runtimes: EKS, GKS, AKS. Tanzu Platform layers on-top of that TKG runtime and gives you the application platform, the ability to build your application fast, the ability to deploy it with a single command, the ability scale it, the ability to secure it.” (~1:50)

This is something that’s still not widely understood: while VMware’s Kubernetes “distort” is still called “Tanzu,” it’s actually part of VCF. The Tanzu Platform requires an existing Kubernetes “dial-tone.” That is, you have to bring the Kubernetes. Of course, per what Purnima says, if you have VCF, you have Kubernetes. This is a minor distinction in the big picture, and maybe, actually, not really important to customers. But it’s worth keeping track of if you, you know, are into these kinds of industry details.

More

• My round-up of the SpringOne content from Monday.

• Here’s a recording of the Hock Tan keynote.

• Tanzu and Spring blog posts: Spring Announcements Blog; Tanzu AI Announcement Blog; Cloud Foundry specific Announcements; Data Announcements Blog; K8s specific Announcement Blog; Tanzu Platform Roundup Summary of Announcements Blog; Tanzu Sessions at Explore.

Conferences

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

This year, SpringOne is free to attend and watch online. Check out Josh’s pitch for the event. There’s an on-site conference as well at Explore if you’re interested. But, for those who can’t, now you can watch all the fun!

SpringOne/VMware Explore US, August 26–29. DevOpsDays Antwerp, 15th anniversary, speaking, September 4th-5th. 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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That should be it for my Explore coverage. There’s a lot of better coverage out there. I’ll be back with links and fun finds next time.

How Platform Engineering Enables the 10,000-Dev Workforce - “60% of companies in the survey said they are releasing code on only a monthly or quarterly basis”

3 ways CIOs can turn strategy into execution - “Less than half of enterprises reach the majority of the strategic goals IT leaders set out to achieve, according to Gartner research."

How Lidl accidentally took on the big guns of cloud computing - A sort of community cloud for Germany and Austria? // “Its IT unit, Schwarz Digits — which became a standalone operating division in 2023 — has signed up clients including Germany’s biggest software group SAP, the country’s most successful football club Bayern Munich and the port of Hamburg. Last year, the unit generated €1.9bn in annual sales and it employs 7,500 staff."

SpringOne

Yesterday we put on Spring One. There’s still sessions going on, which you can watch live if you register for free. Here’s some highlights.

We went over one of the most valuable products the Tanzu team has put out this year: the Spring Application Advisor. You set this up in your pipeline and it continuously scans for Spring and Java components that need to be updated. Using OpenRewrite recipes, it then creates the code you’d need to apply to not only update those components, but also update your own code and configuration.

This is a huge amount of work to do manually - Amazon estimates that it takes about 50 days. Just generating those changes is huge, but then also having the workflow to look at them, approve them, and make them official is a big help too. After the first go at it, you can then set up your CI/CD pipeline to automatically do this checking.

In large enterprises, keeping your Java, Spring, and other libraries up to date is difficult. Well, it’s more like a vicious cycle where people don’t prioritize it and get stuck using a mash-mash of years (and years!) old frameworks and components. This means they get stuck in the legacy trap: they need to upgrade, but they have no idea if it will break things, so they just keep using the old versions.

In a similar vein, Tanzu Spring also includes the Enterprise Spring Boot Governance Starter which puts in enforces various security and policy standards, like FIPS and PCI. Check out this overview as well.

Spring AI

Of course, what you really want to know about is the AI stuff.

There was a great demo of just how easy it is to add generative AI to a Spring app. Josh Long, Cora Iberkleid, and Mark Pollack went over a demo of doing just that. They made it seem effortless, and that’s the point of using Spring AI. In addition to just wrapping APIs around common AI calls, there’s also common patterns, defaults for setting up chat and RAG…in summary, a ready to go Java stack for using AI in your apps.

There’s also, of course, deep integration between Spring AI and the AI services in the Tanzu Platform. This means that if you’re using the Tanzu Platform for Kubernetes (tPCF), you can start messing around with AI now. There’s all sorts of models that work with it if you want to do some “private cloud” AI, and you can also call out the OpenAI APIs and others as well.

I haven’t watched it yet, but my co-worker Nick did a talk demo’ing Spring AI + tPCF. He walks through a couple of demo apps. This shows the coding, of course, but also how it all integrates together in the Tanzu Platform. He goes over the a platform engineer would do to add AI services to their platform, here our Cloud Foundry PaaS. And, there’s more details on Spring AI here.

Tanzu Platform

Today’s focus at the conference is on our PaaS, the Tanzu Platform. I’ll write more about this later this week. In the meantime, here’s the big round-up, and blog posts on our Kubernetes-based PaaS, our Cloud Foundry based PaaS, and the bundle of databases, messaging systems, and other data stuff we have.

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In an effort to find any videos from Explore in YouTube, I came across this recording of the original launch of Cloud Foundry in April, 2011. It’s interesting to ponder how far - or how not far - the industry has gotten since then. I think you could change a few words around (put in “Kubernetes” where “Antiquated Middleware Stack” is in the above - not that Kubernetes is antiquated [it’s only 10!] but that it causes stack-complexity problems), update the clothes, and you’d have pretty much the same situation and general pattern of fixing it as you saw back then. We keep going back and forth with the platform build-out.

Two major items of note: I don’t think ruby ever took off enterprise-wise. You can see how much they try to legitimize ruby for enterprise use. Back then, I guess, open source was still sort of scary for enterprises, and definitely not the way a lot of infrastructure was done. There’s a lot of open source in the enterprise boosting that you just wouldn’t see now: it’d be taken as the default.

Amazon’s CEO says their AI tool has saved them a crazy amount of time - This oddly specific, and a big deal if applicable to other organizations. // ‘The average time to upgrade an application to Java 17 plummeted from what’s typically 50 developer-days to just a few hours," he wrote. “We estimate this has saved us the equivalent of 4,500 developer-years of work (yes, that number is crazy but, real).” The AI is not only fast but seems pretty accurate, too, according to his post. Amazon developers shipped 79% of the AI-generated code reviews without any additional changes, Jassy wrote.'

This week’s Software Defined Talk podcast

We talk about the open source “rug pull” du jour in this week’s Software Defined Podcast: “This week, we discuss CockroachDB's relicensing, the ongoing debate about remote work, and platform engineering. Plus, some thoughts on the use of speakerphones in public.” We both steer us towards a conclusion something like: yup, the open source vendor can change the license and start charging whenever they want, that’s the new reality. You can control that risk if you use foundation-hosted projects, but if you use open source projects, you now need to do some risk analysis of the price going from $0 to $0+n in the future.

Is this good? I mean, no? We all enjoy a social contract where we’re on the free end of getting a lot of value.

If anything, the open source world should figure out the problem of “we gotta make some money.” Historically, that’s been a difficult subject for that community to talk about, and it’s certainly never been resolved.

We also talk about a similar shift in norms when it comes to speaker phone use in public.

Take a listen to the episode!

SpringOne Live-streamed, free, next week!

Next week is SpringOne, our conference all about the Spring Framework, which I think is the most widely used Java framework. It’s free to register for and watch online.

I’ve seen a lot of the content, and helped work on some of it. You can watch it all for free next week, starting August 26th at 9am pacific time. It’ll run for three days.

If that’s your thing, sign-up for it and watch for free.

Wastebook

• In enterprise IT talk, instead of “seamless,” consider saying “easy,” “simple,” “quick(ly),” or just deleting the word altogether. (That said, “seamless” is a term of art in IT, so we sort of all know what it means based on the context of how it’s used.)

• Necessity is the inventor of compromise.

• “‘The Art of Pantomime in Church’ is this weird mashup of clowns and Christians and I have no idea how it even got made. The thesis is that professional clown Randall Bane can teach you how to incorporate pantomime into your church services. I have no dog in this fight, I’m not particularly anti-Christian or even anti-clown, but I literally do not understand how I struggle to get by and yet there was money to produce this thing.” Via.

• ”it’s a reminder that people of my generation, those who grew up watching the original (and best!) Star Wars trilogy, are now the people running the world and its weapons systems” Here.

• Commin' 'atcha with another Coté Footnote(tm).

• Incomprehensible spaghetti.

Relative to your interests

• IDC’s Worldwide AI and Generative AI Spending - “IDC has recently unveiled the latest release of its Worldwide AI and Generative AI Spending Guide, 2024 V2. Presently, the global Artificial Intelligence market stands at nearly $235 billion, with projections indicating a rise to over $631 billion by 2028.” // Something is weird with this estimate. There’s no way companies found an extra $235 billion to spent on new IT projects. And if they’re reallocating that money from other IT projects, like, your grocery buying app is going to stop working because there’s no budget for the computer needed to run it. // Meanwhile…

• C-suite enthusiasm over generative AI wanes, putting pressure on quick wins - “Interest in the [AI] technology fell 11 percentage points among senior executives and eight percentage points among board of directors, respectively, since Deloitte’s Q1 2024 survey.” // I think the people most enthusiastic about enterprise AI haven’t actually used even enough consumer AI to get a grasp on how little AI can actually do. And, as with new tech (like cloud computing in the early 2010’s), they underestimate how expensive it is to use, and how difficult it is the change how their organization functions. // Also, there’s a bit danger that the AI-driven company valuations jumps too quickly drop due to lowered expectations. // Speaking of…

• AI may be distracting organizations from other IT priorities - Well, things are getting better, but enterprise AI is a distraction from keeping the lights on. // “IBM reports that fewer than half of the respondents believe their IT organization is effective in delivering basic services, compared to 69 percent from a survey in 2013. Among chief execs, that figure is 36 percent today, down from 64 percent previously, while for chief financial officers, the figures are 50 percent now, down from 60 percent before…. What might be causing this? The Armonk-based biz says that 43 percent of surveyed tech CxOs indicated that concerns about their IT infrastructure have increased over the past six months due to the focus on optimizing their infrastructure for generative AI.”

• Private Cloud - What’s in a Name? - “Forrester’s ‘Private Cloud Market Insights, 2023’ reporting that 79% of surveyed cloud decision makers are implementing internal private clouds” (Source: "Private Cloud Market Insights, 2023," Forrester). Cf. my past attempt to round-up private cloud usage/market-sizing.

• How public intellectuals can extend their shelf lives - Spend a lot of time steering yourself to be optimistic, and engineer a continuous drip of new ideas and perspectives.

• Platform Engineering: The Next Step in Operations - This is a really good overview/state of thing. // Once again, I think it’s all about introducing product management to operations and continuously building the platform, the product.

• Developer Content That Ranks in 2024 - Educational content attracts the most attention (“how to”). Also content where you define things (“what is”). Converting that content into sales, or at least pipeline, is the secret magic.

• $ git push heroku betty - That sounds like fun. People keep telling me about the revitalization of Heroku. It’d be great to see that happen. If everything just want their own Heroku, what’s been holding them back? Solving that puzzle would be wonderful to see after all these years of PaaS yo-yo’ing. // I like the unstated opinion here: “Many are now facing lots of scattered homegrown production platforms and are starting to feel the pain of maintenance, technical debt, and difficulty in consistently delivering reliability, stability, and security while trying to scale. There simply aren’t enough engineers for every company to support this, nor does it make business sense.” // The opinion is: stop doing that.

• An American came to stay – and completely changed my attitude to water - As Europe gets hotter (not good, sure, but:), hopefully they’ll understand the pleasure of ice water.

Conferences, Events, etc.

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

This year, SpringOne is free to attend and watch online. Check out Josh’s pitch for the event. There’s an on-site conference as well at Explore if you’re interested. But, for those who can’t, now you can watch all the fun!

SpringOne/VMware Explore US, August 26–29. DevOpsDays Antwerp, 15th anniversary, speaking, September 4th-5th. SREday London 2024, speaking, September 19th to 20th. Cloud Foundry Day EU, Karlsruhe, Oct 9th. VMware Explore Barcelona, speaking, Nov 4th to 7th.

Discounts! SREDay London: 20% off with the code SRE20DAY. Cloud Foundry Day20% off with the code CFEU24VMW20.

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I won’t be at Explore and SpringOne next week. I’m hoping to write-up my thoughts and analysis from my Amsterdam perch. Of course, I know a lot of the content already, but actually seeing it presented and thinking about how I’d “live blog” it in the old days is another thing. We’ll see what happens!

//

I’m slowly starting a project called “things that are happy that you’re about to eat them.” I might call it “Please Eat Me” (maybe “Pleased to be Eaten”?) for short. I’m on the lookout out for food labels and ads that depict the thing you’re about to eat as jolly. You see this is a lot with BBQ places, like the old Bill Miller BBQ back in Texas:

Those are pretty tame. That pig seems super chill, though. You see it a lot in candy and hot dogs. The best is when a hot dog is putting ketchup or mustard on itself: getting all ready to be chomped on:

It’s a bit morbid when the food is an animal, but we should have some compassion for the fruit and vegetables too:

Also, there’s a highly-related category of, like, “Please Kill Me” (maybe “Pleased to be Killed”?) where the animal/fruit is happy that you’re buying a device that will help kill it:

If you see any, pass ‘em along!