Volo’s Culinary Guide to Icewind Dale - We talk a lot about the downside of the Internet, the web, whatever. But the existence of this as a widely available thing is an example of why the Internet is great. I mean: when would this ever exist otherwise except as some obscure zine on a magazine rack at rundown university coffee shop?

Generated images for non-generated text and video - ‘It’s only a matter of time until “generative art = spammy bullshit” will be the majority position because that’s how the economics of it are playing out. Using extruded synthetic art will not do your writing or video any favours in the long run.’ // I mean, yes, and…the idea is that in the future, the AI generated images will be so good that you won’t be able to tell. But, that is just an ideas.

Java 17 is now the favorite brew of developers, along with - “About a tenth (9 percent) of applications were using Java 17 in production in 2023, and now 35 percent of applications are using Java 17, representing a nearly 300 percent growth rate in one year. It took years for Java 11 to reach anywhere near that level.” And: “While Oracle retained the top spot in 2022 (34 percent), it slipped to 29 percent in 2023, and it’s now at 21 percent – which represents a 28 percent decrease in one year.” // Sure, but what matters more is: is Oracle making more money off Java or less?

A Letter from Paul Auster - When the rejection is more comforting than the confirmation.

Supercharged Developer Portals - Spotify Engineering : Spotify Engineering - Spotify is really going for the enterprise product thing! Most importantly, check out the legacy of the Drunk & Retired podcast with The Frontside mention.

Kubernetes is popular. If you’re in my business, you know that it’s widely considered to be how enterprises run and will their applications. So, it must be a huge market right? Lots of money flowing around.

Well…not really! Let’s look at some numbers:

1. "The container management market has seen accelerated growth of 28.6% over the past year with a market value of $1.6 billion in 2022. The market is forecast to exceed $3.6 billion in constant currency by 2027, with an 18% CAGR." // Includes both private and public cloud. (2023 Gartner Container Management MQ)

2. $1.46bn in 2023, growing to $2.85bn in 2028. (451 Research)

3. $5.56bn in 2027. (IDC)

What this means is that there “isn’t any money” in the Kubernetes market. Imagine having to share that pie with the three public cloud vendors, IBM/RedHat, VMware (hi!), SUSE/Rancher, and all the others. Those are small pie-slices.

Or, those forecasts could be weird! With TAMs, knowing the market-definition is incredibly important. The Gartner one has a pretty good overview of the market definition.

But, the size of the market just tells you that there’s not a business in it. Which, I think, is the point. Google didn’t want there to be a business, they wanted AWS to have less of a business and less of a hold on public cloud: shake the snow globe. It worked! And, people are really into Kubernetes, so it’s like win/win for vendors and users. Kubernetes is probably the current, best example of using open source to commoditize complements - as a strategy to mess with your competitors’(s) competitive advantages and change the market to your favor.

There is probably tons of money in all of the stuff built around Kubernetes. After all, the core is pretty small and designed (I think?) to need all that extra stuff. When people talk about Kubernetes, they’re usually talking about building a platform - a “cloud” even! - around a core, but small engine for running apps in containers.

Which is to say, assessing Kubernetes based on its market size (how much people are buying) is the wrong question. First, it’s better to track how much it’s used, how many apps/workloads are running in Kubernetes. Second, the money number you want to track is the spend on that bigger platform.

What’s different about that number than, say, in the 2000s or even 2010’s is that public cloud vendors are part of that TAM. This makes things weird to track. In the old days, you would track license sales for platforms. But now, what you pay for a platform includes actually running that platform: servers, networking, storage. You can slice out just what you pay for any layer…but that feels weird to me.

(And, to apply some Adam-kindness Wisdom: don’t get distracted by money talk, look at all they’ve done to change and improve things, that community is doing a great job.)

Platforms

Speaking of platforms, here’s a sort of virtual EBC about my work. If you care about the above, here’s our take at Tanzu:

Relative to your interests

• IBM Is Buying HashiCorp. What Comes Next? - Good analysis of the possible business strategy, the synergies to activate. // “Customers in specific industries, often highly regulated and conservative in outlook, have often chosen IBM and continue to do so. For them, the value of cloud is complementary at the margins, not a wholesale change to the core. They are pragmatic, serious guardians of the established order, not revolutionaries hell-bent on destroying and replacing the Ancien Régime.”

• OK Cloud, On-Prem is Alright - A case for private cloud, or, if you prefer the “a nicely automated VM or container environment” view: on-premises. I’d summarize it to: there isn’t enough ROI to motivate everyone to change, even spend the time to decide to change.

Wastebook

• “He is surely the friendliest little goblin you have ever met.” Caught In A Wizard’s Web.

• “exploring the latent space of visual styles” Midjourney release notes.

• “I used to get frustrated by people who I saw as uncurious.” Lauren Pope

• “Well, I had all kinds of plans for this morning, and then one of the chickens died in their sleep” 26apr24

• “Sorry, I was ranting and I forgot what the original question was.” A. Savage.

Have you had a chance to check out my series of videos full of my advice for working in a large company? WHAT?! If you have access to O’Reilly’s stuff, you can watch these. If you work at a large company, there’s a good chance you have access. Anyhow, check them out. There’s four four star reviews, including these accolades:

That’s right. Watch em!

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I’m supposed to be on vacation, so I hot-wired this one to send out automatically in the future. Well, what is now my future, but is - I mean - to you, in your now…ahem…what is now your now! And, then, actually, I unscheduled it so I could write more on Monday. Which future am I in now?

Don’t Taste One Coffee - “Humans are really good at comparing.” // So, when you want to make a decision, put look at a lot of options. Not just the trick of the one you want, a middling one, and an obvious no, but lots.

OK Cloud, On-Prem is Alright - A case for private cloud, or, if you prefer the “a nicely automated VM or container environment” view: on-premises. I’d summarize it to: there isn’t enough ROI to motivate everyone to change, even spend the time to decide to change.

IBM Is Buying HashiCorp. What Comes Next? - Good analysis of the possible business strategy, the synergies to activate. // “Customers in specific industries, often highly regulated and conservative in outlook, have often chosen IBM and continue to do so. For them, the value of cloud is complementary at the margins, not a wholesale change to the core. They are pragmatic, serious guardians of the established order, not revolutionaries hell-bent on destroying and replacing the Ancien Régime."

This week’s Software Defined Talk podcast episode is an interview I did with Jana Werner. If you’re into software, DevOps, agile, product management…all that “digital transformation” stuff, you’ll like it. We go over a deck of cards she’s put together that are meant to provoke executives and managers to start thinking about they could change to start changing how people work in their organization, you know: culture.

Here’s one fun excerpt:

Check out the rest of the interview, either in the usual podcast form or in the glory of full color video!

Three Takes on IBM Buying HashiCorp

Here’s three good takes on IBM acquiring HashiCorp

1. Timothy Prickett Morgan - revenue growth slowed down too much.

2. Fintan - “the level of new customer growth, the wider base for the $100K customer funnel, slowed dramatically once Terraform was relicensed, dropping to a low of a 1.5% quarter on quarter” // not enough converting free to pay.

3. Adam Jacob - “The primary business issue, I think, lives in two things: the huge amount of value received by users of Terraform, Vault, Consul, and Nomad for $0, and the relatively low ASP they do extract (they do better than Chef or Puppet did!).”

Per Adam’s take, this M&A analysis overlooks the accomplishments: they all built a great company, technologies, community, and whatever else, our whole infrastructure, programming, and cloud community has benefits and will keep benefiting for a long time.

Conferences, Events, etc.

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

Atlanta Executive Dinner, May 22nd. DevOpsDays Amsterdam, June 20th, speaking. NDC Oslo, speaking, June 12th. SpringOne, August 26–29, 2024.

This year, I won’t be at Cloud Foundry Day (May 15th in NYC), but if you’re going you can get 20% off with the code CFNA24VMW20.

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It’s school holiday next week, so no promises on the newsletter episodes. I’m reminded of another American expat who wrote in their newsletter along the lines of "I don’t know how anyone gets work done around here…but see you in a week!” Rest-assured you vacation-hating Americans, though, we have short summers.