- Red Hat acquires tech to lower the cost of machine learning | Computer Weekly - The race to build the private AI stack for enterprises: “All of this translates to lower costs, faster inference and the ability to run AI workloads on a wider range of hardware."

“Here I Gather All the Friends”: Machiavelli and the Emergence of the Private Study - ”Key features of Machiavelli’s personality come out: he can be as vulgar as the villagers; he bickers with them, delighting in puns and innuendos. Minutely attuned to their foibles and peccadillos, nothing is lost on him. He deprecates his now lowly position, all the while gathering information. In sum, he is a consummate observer of human behavior — his own and others.” And: “From Augustine onward, the Christian tradition posits that reading is a dialogue with God. Machiavelli (and before him Petrarch) marked a change: in this new practice, reading became instead a dialogue with the voices of antiquity.” And: “The interior of Montaigne’s tower is textualized [because he carved maxims a proverbs into the wooden rafters], and in turn the microtexts on his ceiling beams form the architectonics of his essays. In other words, for Montaigne there is a continuum between interior spaces, intellectual interiority, and spiritual inwardness: the built environment not only encloses his body but also reflects his inner life."

- Why Developers Are Unresponsive to Traditional Marketing - They just want to try the actual tool without a lot of bullshit. At the very least, they want to see a realistic use of it: actually typing, no business outcomes babbling.

- Review of Seth Godin’s strategy book - “The content is deep. As a long-term strategic planning facilitator, my work confronts issues that most executive teams skim over in their customary short-term, emergency-driven thinking. Getting them to think about abstract questions for long hours at a time, while sitting face to face with their peers isn’t easy.” // The irony, in a good way, of Godin’s work is that it’s mostly aphoristic: short, punchy, and memorable. Less of a book, and more of a chapbook or blog posts, Tweets, etc. The perfect length, tone, and cleverness that an executive likes and can use in bureaucratic knife-fighting.

Private PaaS

Along with our summary of Explore EU last week, around the start of this I go over my thinking about private PaaS, VMware, and Tanzu. At least that’s what I remember doing.

Wastebook

• “THINGS HAVE NEVER BEEN BETTER—BUT THEY’RE IMPROVING” Systemantics. The Systems Bible, John Gall.

• And: “we are interested, not in the process of forgetting to mail a letter, but in the Post Office Box that is too full to accept that letter.”

• “I kept the option for tiling when holding down the Option (⌥) key because I’m a tolerant person at heart.” Good settings.

• “[H]e’s ageing and displaying unmistakable signs of cognitive decay, so we should be paying more attention to J.D. Vance, who is hale and hearty and may be president sooner than we think.” John Naughton.

• One dev’s “abstract away” is always one ops person’s problem.

Relative to your interests

• Broadcom’s VMware strategy is winning despite market friction - The case for the Broadcom acquisition being good, especially for all-in, large companies that want a private cloud stack. Plenty of financial and survey data to move it beyond anecdata.

• Who owns Kubernetes in VMware now? Or, Reflections from Explore Barcelona and the Challenges of Modern App Delivery - “What happened to TKG? One of the lessons I took from the week was that there is still confusion over the Kubernetes runtime we sell and where it sits in the VMware by Broadcom portfolio. Earlier this year, we moved what was known as VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service from Tanzu and included it as part of VCF where it is renamed to VMware vSphere Kubernetes Service. This move was very intentional as the Kubernetes runtime itself is just part of any modern cloud IaaS, and this being deeply embedded into the VCF stack means that more VCF customers will be ready to adopt advanced services offered by Tanzu sooner, without struggling with integration. Many existing Tanzu customers use other versions of the Kubernetes runtime (namely, Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Integrated and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Multicloud) to meet specific requirements. Tanzu will continue to support these versions, but in the end, Tanzu Platform is designed to run on any CNCF conformant Kubernetes runtime.”

• Alaskan telecoms company GCI uses VMware private cloud to boost business value

• “‘This means a shift away from just standard checking and savings accounts to more personalized self-service banking experiences and support,’ he said. ‘The bank felt tied down by the complexity of its legacy technology environment.’ Following extensive analysis, ABN AMRO decided to build a private cloud platform based on VCF and move away from their previous managed service.'” VCF at a Netherlands bank.

• IDC: VMware Explore 2024: A Shift to Private Cloud, AI, and AppDev Simplification - The VMware Private AI Foundation “platform appeals to Broadcom customers because of its ability to deliver advanced security and privacy, granular policy and control capabilities, resource sharing functionality, and centralized operations capabilities that deliver a lower TCO.” // Also, a good write-up of the overall VMware and Tanzu shift to private cloud stack. Lots of Tanzu and Spring coverage as well.

• On-premises private cloud usage grew fastest in 2022 - January, 2023: “⁠⁠last year’s six-percentage-point uptick in on-premises private cloud usage outpaced growth in SaaS (up three points) and public cloud (up four points); hosted private cloud adoption was flat⁠⁠.”

• Taco Bell puts AI front-and-center in drive-thru strategy - “Taco Bell’s drive-thru voice AI was designed for internal and external applications. An AI assistant takes orders and relays the information to the staff. The system is designed to help restaurant employees manage orders, reducing their workload, while enabling more accurate order fulfillment for customers.” // Makes sense. I bet this works pretty good. I could even see that the misunderstanding/error rate would be better with AI taking the orders. It could switch languages too. Also, maybe an edge computing/private AI use case - or you just switch over the humans when the Internet connection goes down.

• Ai, Big Tech, & Markets - “AI is the newest king of the economy and will end up making the rules.” // Plus, huge rise in tech company valuations since the US election.

• Modernizing the Mainframe in Place: Transforming Core Technologies - Improve the mainframe app. // Likely some good patterns for talking/thinking about modernizing any type existing apps “in place.”

• From Agile to Radical: conflict - How management can deal with “at least three consequences of unresolved conflict that I’ve experienced in practice: unaddressed business areas, repeated patterns of unproductive behavior and undoing each other’s progress.” // A little bit on European work-culture too.

• The Counterculture Switch: creating in a hostile environment - Return of the leftwing counterculture, and what it could mean for software.

• Navigating Private Equity ownership. - A memo template for R&D’s plans after private equity. Basically: here’s how we’ll spend less money and use attrition to lower staff costs (hire more junior people as senior people leave).

• SCREAM YOUR ENTHUSIASM (12) - “There’s just one solitary naked boob on the screen — and metaphorically speaking, all life has been sucked out of it. This is Dawn of the Dead, the classic 1978 horror movie that we’re talking about.”

Conferences

SREday Amsterdam, speaking, Nov 21st, 2024. Discounts! SREDay Amsterdam: 20% off with the code SRE20DAY.

I don’t have any conferences schedule for the test of the year. Early next year, I’m hoping to go to CfgMgmtCamp, February 3rd to 5th in Ghent, which I always enjoy despite the cafeteria lunch (it’s become almost charming at this point. There’s also SCaLE 22x/DevOpsDays LA, March 6th to 9th in Pasadena, California.

Logoff

I’m in Bucharest for a day to give a talk at the GoTech World conference. They selected my legacy trap talk as the first talk in the DevOps track. The legacy trap talk doesn’t really fit there, but I've added some commentary on “ops legacy”: the old thinking and mindset of operations people. It’s, you know, my usual stuff on CI/CD, putting platform as a product in place, etc. I have a rehearsal recording that’s pretty good.

When you present this stuff, it feels like cheating because you’re repeating yourself. When I speak, I feel like each time I should be doing new material. But, most people watching it, especially in the room, likely won’t have seen the talk, so it will be new to them. Besides, all the “how to optimize apps and ops” stuff needs to be repeated over and over - per the above: THINGS HAVE NEVER BEEN BETTER—BUT THEY’RE IMPROVING.

(Sidenote: you know, I often bemoan here that I don’t produce enough content. At the moment, I have a stack of about three, maybe even four, drafts of things that either just need a final edit pass [like the rehearsal video] or for someone to finally click the publish button. Doing alright there, I guess.)

Finally, I offer you the chance to contemplate contemporary men’s waistlines by looking at past waistlines:

- Ai, Big Tech, & Markets - “AI is the newest king of the economy and will end up making the rules.” // Plus, huge rise in tech company valuations since the US election.

- SCREAM YOUR ENTHUSIASM (12) - ”There’s just one solitary naked boob on the screen — and metaphorically speaking, all life has been sucked out of it. This is Dawn of the Dead, the classic 1978 horror movie that we’re talking about.”

- Taco Bell puts AI front-and-center in drive-thru strategy - “Taco Bell’s drive-thru voice AI was designed for internal and external applications. An AI assistant takes orders and relays the information to the staff. The system is designed to help restaurant employees manage orders, reducing their workload, while enabling more accurate order fulfillment for customers.” // Makes sense. I bet this works pretty good. I could even see that the misunderstanding/error rate would be better with AI taking the orders. It could switch languages too.

- Navigating Private Equity ownership. - A memo template for R&D’s plans after private equity. Basically: here’s how we’ll spend less money and use attrition to lower staff costs (hire more junior people as senior people leave).

- IDC: VMware Explore 2024: A Shift to Private Cloud, AI, and AppDev Simplification - The VMware Private AI Foundation “platform appeals to Broadcom customers because of its ability to deliver advanced security and privacy, granular policy and control capabilities, resource sharing functionality, and centralized operations capabilities that deliver a lower TCO.” // Also, a good write-up of the overall VMware and Tanzu shift to private cloud stack. Lots of Tanzu and Spring coverage as well.