The DoD: A Compelling Case for Extreme Programming - Good overview of why/how the practices in Extreme Programming (XP) help the needs of the military, and fit the constraints and challenges they have. For example, spreading knowledge with paired programming manages high turn over in staff.

The changing nature of “open”

In our tech world, the idea of “open” has changed a lot in the past few years. Instead of it meaning “open to everyone,” the classic notion of “open source,” now it more means “open to everyone except our competitors.”

Making money with open source is difficult

Running a high growth business on open source is difficult; you’re giving up on the easiest, most obvious thing to get paid for: the software itself. You can do an open core model where you are selling closed source software that uses/wrap around/ships with/improves/etc. the open source software. You can do the Red Hat thing where you sell support for your compiled open source project (and, I think, some closed-ish source “stuff” around it as well - this has become very confusing). But there’s not too much else. You have to come up with some excuse to charge people money for the free software. Or, the open source software can be part of an overall strategy that drives other revenue: the old razors and razor blades thing.

Once public cloud became mainstream, another model emerged: get paid to run and optimize the open source software. Run your Linux servers in the cloud, run your Postgres and Big Data stuff in the cloud, run your Spring Cloud stuff in the cloud, etc. This model works great for open source: the seller and the buyer get all of the benefits of open source and the seller can actually make money.

Attack of the channel!

The problem is that running a public cloud is expensive. Paying for all that infrastructure is expensive, and paying for the people who keep it up and running is expensive. So if each vendor wants to do it, they’re kind of stuck. They need to enter a new kind of business, being a managed service provider…a public cloud. Many have figured out this out as evidenced by the many SaaSes that are out there. I think most of them just use one of the public clouds and run their stuff on-top of it.

However, you then get into the problem of those public clouds wanting your business. Because you have open source, they could do exactly what you’re doing: sell operating the open source project. One of the first cases of this was Amazon running Elastic search. And there’ve been more, and there will likely be more. If there’s enough demand for running an open source project, the public cloud providers see an easy business model. And compared to their resources, the public cloud companies likely are better positioned.

To prevent this, many open source projects have tinkered with their licensing to basically say “this is totally open, except if you’re Amazon, Azure, or Google Cloud. But totally open and free for other people to use.” There’s all sorts of ways of enforcing this: it’s just fine-print shit, so who cares to catalog it?

Recently, Red Hat did this move as well, except it doesn’t really seem to be about public cloud providers. It was more focused on the classic problem of distributed open source projects, here, Linux. There were several “cloners” who would take the Red Hat Enterprise Linux source code, build it, and then sell it as a cheaper RHEL. Red Hat found a loop-hole (though, you only call it a loop hold if you don’t like it, otherwise, you just call “the license terms”) that would allow them to prevent their competitors from easily getting the source code. A close reading of the GPL license they use says that you only have to give the source code to customers, not everyone. So, Red Hat can decide that its competitors can not be customers, and, therefore, can not get the source code. Well, you can imagine the likes of Oracle, SUSE, and the others quickly figured out some tricks to get around that…sort of mooting the whole move by Red Hat?

Closing Up Open Data and APIs

There’s another type of “open” that’s long been morphing. In the 2000s, the people building the web were very interested in open formats: XML, JSON…things that were basically plain text that you could read. They were also interested in fully open and free to use APIs for everything. Famously, Instagram used this openness to help build its social network. You’d create an Instagram account and you could use the Twitter API to suck in all your friends there. Over thousands and thousands of people, this means Instagram can start to duplicate all of the social networks inside Twitter, for “free.” Twitter no longer allows this, and few other social networks do as well.

And, most recently, Twitter has been just shutting down free API access.

In the post-Twitter world, there’s a lot of talking about ActivityPub (the open protocol used by Mastodon) and whatever alternate thing Bluesky uses. While ActivityPub works for Mastodon - and, like, is Mastodon - so far all the promises of open APIs in the mega post-Twitter Twitters has been just that: talk. Perhaps they’ll come out! When they do, we’ll need to see just how open and flexible they are. Could you write a complete clone of the Threads app with full functionality?

And, of course, Reddit also messed with its free APIs locking out alternate clients.

AI

Most recently, Facebook opened its LLM framework, but if I heard right, only for people that have less than 700,000 active monthly users. This means people like IBM could take it and sell it to even their largest customers: JP Morgan Chase, for example, has “only” around 300,000 employees, which is, [checks math] much less than 700,000. (Well, OK, except for use by every solider in the US military, etc., and you’d have to slice up the US government “customer” into agencies and groups of agencies.) But, tp the public cloud companies and Facebook, it’s much more closed than open.

And when I use ChatGPT, the URL includes the phrase “OpenAI.” But…that’s not the type of “open” I knew in the 2000s. Here, I think “open” more means “has an API that you can pay to use.”

Waiting for the close of open

My sense, then, is that the nature of “open” is changing. There is much resisting from us old guard people, but you can start to see the Planck Principle playing out, perhaps not in a morbid way but more in “how much energy do I have left to give a shit” way:

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it

Here, there’s not a “scientific truth,” per se, but more a principle of how the web wants to be. Rather, how the people building the web want it to be.

It feels like those people increasingly aren’t really interested in open.

Here’s some long running experiments to test that hunch:

• Will Red Hat revenue from RHEL increase? If so, the users of RHEL care a lot less about “open.”

• What will ActivityPub look like in Threads, Tumblr, and other mega sites? Will it all naturally fit together with Mastodon, or be, like, weird? If it’s weird, both the people building the web and the users will care less about “open.”

• Will there be more cloud providers who have no commercial relationship with open source projects they run? Same.

We’ll see!

On-premises, air-gap Kubernetes Management

We have a great Kubernetes management tool, Tanzu Mission Control. But it’s only been available as a SaaS up to now. In enterprise sales, you always - always - eventually need an on-premises, off the Internet version. Militaries and spies use this, but there’s plenty of people who are heavily on-premises (based on four years of IDC estimates, I’d say that at least 50% of enterprise workloads are on-premises).

Anyhow! The most recent version of Tanzu Mission Control can run on-premises now. Air-gap and all that shit! Here’s an article about it, as well. Check out this interview I did with Corey Dinkens on the release. If you don’t like video, you can listen to the podcast.

Subscribe to this new .NET newsletter

My co-worker Layla started a new .Net newsletter, “Hooked on .NET.”

Subscribe if that’s your thing!

Who’s freaked out about AI, and who’s chill with it?

From Nicole Greene at Gartner: “38% of respondents to that same Gartner Consumer Community survey stated that they are very comfortable or somewhat comfortable, with an additional 27% taking a neutral position on the use of genAI in Marketing. That means 65% of consumers are mostly ok with marketers using genAI, and there are a lot of low risk ways to bring genAI to your marketing team right now.”

Wastebook

• If you listen to the opening of “Breezin'” at half speed there’s some new magical thing that happens. Somehow it did this by accident today, and I thought I’d put on some kind of super high quality setting that let you hear the studio for real. It was a slow waking up of the song, like morning coming up.

• “I mean, even if the Pope uses it, isn’t the purchase a bit expensive?”

• “A gentle breeze blows, Birds singing in harmony, Nature’s symphony. DevOps buzz abounds, But failures linger around, Words won’t fix the sound.” Here.

• Also: “continuously devops microserverless. with software and humans.”

• ‘The lover of life makes the world his family,’ he wrote. ‘He is an “I”, insatiable in his appetite for the “not-I”.’ Here.

Relative to your interests

• Lines of Code - When there’s no perfect and easy measure, you have to (“end up”?) use the ones you have that are good enough.

• 55 - AI-Powered Content Strategy, Claude 2 from Anthropic, and Major Google Bard Updates - A super-packed episode of using AI stuff for marketing.

• CMOs Need to Give Generative AI a Chance, Before it’s Too Late - “In fact, 53% of respondents in a recent Gartner Consumer Community survey stated that they think that genAI will strongly or somewhat negatively impact society.” // But if you break it down by industry, as they do with a nice chart, things are slightly different.

• People are getting fed up with all the useless tech in their cars - “Unsurprisingly, more people are choosing not to use their car’s native infotainment controls. Only 56 percent of owners prefer to use their vehicle’s built-in system to play audio, down from 70 percent in 2020, JD Power found. Less than half of owners said they like using their car’s native controls for navigation, voice recognition, or to make phone calls.” Meanwhile:

• What connected-car services are consumers willing to pay for? - There’s some fun stated-preferences versus revealed preferences in there.

• Change takes a long time - This is my new thing after five years of talking with large companies about digital transformation: it just takes a long time. There’s usually a lack of urgency, but this is a benefit for most of those large companies. The employees, management, and share holders want stability, predictability. Also, they don’t want to spend money unless they really, really…really…have to. Few people like change unless it’s needed.

• How to Write a Book in Three Days: Lessons from Michael Moorcock - “There’s always a sidekick to make the responses the hero isn’t allowed to make: to get frightened; to add a lighter note; to offset the hero’s morbid speeches, and so on.”

• What the Government Email Account Hack Says About the Future of Cybersecurity - Always be securing all the things.

• personal organization - “Here’s my one piece of advice about personal organization: (calendars, tasks, planning, tracking): Think hard about your needs, pick a system, and then do not under any circumstances change it until at least one full year has passed.”

Things I had ChatGPT summarize for me: Identifying Key Industry Analysts; IBM Acquires Apptio for Hybrid Multi-Cloud FinOps; How Five Companies Built to Outcompete; Product and Platform Shift: Five Actions to Get the Transformation Right; Characterizing People as Non-Linear, 1st Order Components in Software Development; IncrementalOps: A New Approach to IT Operations; If Your Innovation Effort Isn't Working, Look at Who's on the Team; The GigaOm Pivot - Rebuilding the Analyst Business for the Digital Enterprise; What’s Wrong With the “What’s Wrong With Men” Discourse; China notes, July '23: on technological momentum; The New Media Goliaths; VMware’s Alex Barbato on How Agencies Could Enable DevSecOps Teams to Advance IT Modernization; VMware Tanzu Mission Control Self-Managed Announcement; Kubernetes: Innovation Enabler Or Implementation Detail?; Infosecurity Europe 2023, Forrester’s Thoughts; Is DevOps Tool Complexity Slowing Down Developer Velocity?; Dell Technologies Announces Intent to Acquire Moogsoft.

Upcoming

Talks I’ll be giving, places I’ll be, things I’ll be doing, etc.

July 19th Improving FinTech with cloud native think, speaking. July 19th Stop Tech Debt and Start Using Faster, More Secure Paths to Production. Sep 6th O’Reilly Infrastructure & Ops Superstream: Kubernetes, online, speaking. Sep 6th to 7th DevOpsDays Des Moines, speaking. Sep 13th, stackconf, Berlin. Sep 14th to 15th SREday, London, speaking Sep 18th to 19th SHIFT in Zadar, speaking. Oct 3rd Enterprise DevOps Techron, Utrecht, speaking.

Logoff

See y’all next time!

Change takes a long time - This is my new thing after five years of talking with large companies about digital transformation: it just takes a long time. There’s usually a lack of urgency, but this is a benefit for most of those large companies. The employees, management, and share holders want stability, predictability. Also, they don’t want to spend money unless they really, really…really…have to. Few people like change unless it’s needed.

People are getting fed up with all the useless tech in their cars - “Unsurprisingly, more people are choosing not to use their car’s native infotainment controls. Only 56 percent of owners prefer to use their vehicle’s built-in system to play audio, down from 70 percent in 2020, JD Power found. Less than half of owners said they like using their car’s native controls for navigation, voice recognition, or to make phone calls."

What connected-car services are consumers willing to pay for? - There’s some fun stated-preferences versus revealed preferences in there.

Lines of Code - When there’s no perfect and easy measure, you have to (“end up”?) use the ones you have that are good enough.

Ever wonder why there’s not more t-shirts at tech conferences? Marketing people hate getting t-shirts for booths at conferences. In last week’s Tanzu Talk about platform marketing I went over why:

Tech conference attendees love t-shirts. They’re also good for brand- and idenity-marketing: if you’re wearing the shirt, you’re likely a fan. Or, at least, you tolerate the brand.

You don’t see a lot of t-shirts at tech conferences because marketing people usually hate t-shirts. Here’s why

First, t-shirts are expensive compared to, say, pencils or other weird, branded doo-dads. But, there are even more annoying aspects.

Second, you have to decide what’s on the t-shirt. Even if it’s more than just a simple name, do you put that centered on the front, on the sleeve, the back? Then there’s type: do you have a polo shirt, a t-shirt… will programmers wear a polo shirt? How about ops people? And if you want a new, custom design on your shirt: forget about it. That’s going to be a lot of meetings. It’s a bunch of bike shed meetings.

Third, how many of each sizes and styles do you get? Predicting the right distribution of sizes it tough. You have to anticipate how many of each size (XS, S, M, L, XL, XXL, XXXL, etc.) will be needed. Additionally, geographic factors must be taken into account as American sizing differs from that used in other parts of the world. Predictably, American sizes are larger than European sizes.

The cut of the shirts is a related issue: how many “regular” versus women’s cut do you get?

Back when I helped with the planning and booth staffing for DevOpsDays at Pivotal, I used to be pretty good at predicting the size and cut splits for DevOpsDays. But this was built up over years of experience for a specific conference for a specific type of attendee.

You can imagine picking a t-shirt cut adds another uncomfortable dimension to this planning: you have to think about people in terms of body size and gender, and predict how many will be at the conference. This is something our corporate training (and, you know, the general goal of trying to be a better person) tries to rip out of your brain and corporate decision-making machine. You’ll literally be talking with co-workers saying things like “well, this is the American mid-west, so we better order more XXL’s than we do for Amsterdam” or “well, this is Bologna, so order a lot less women’s cut than we would for San Francisco.” (And by the way, should I even be saying “women’s cut”? I guess “fitted”?)

Forth, shipping these t-shirts introduces even more potential problems. If your conference is outside of your country (or, like, the EU), you’re gambling that customs won’t hold up your shipment. Or, you’ve figured out how to pay customs, adding expense and complication. Also, the shipment might just get lost. I’ve seen both of these happen a lot over the years. In addition to being held up and the additional cost and cognitive load of dealing with customers, what do you do when the box does finally show up, days after the conference? Do you talk with the conference people and somehow ask them to ship it back? Will FedEx/DHL/etc. do that for you? Or just you abandon the t-shirts?

Speaking of, fifth, once the conference is over you, there's often a surplus of leftover t-shirts. These typically fall into the extreme size categories of XS or XXXL, leading to unnecessary waste and inefficiency. And, even if you got past customers, you need to figure out shipping the t-shirts back. This is actually the easiest part, really. Most conferences have a courier come to pick things up, or you can schedule the pick up. Then you just ship a return label with the box, ask the people doing the booth work to tape the label on (make sure to ship some packing tape and scissors in the box!), and make sure the box gets the courier.

T-shirts seem like a really good idea, but they’re super tedious and costly to do at a conference. It’s why you don’t see more of them. It does mean, however, that they’re one of the rarer and more valuable things. Also, the bigger and more mature the company, they more capabilities and knowledge they should have about t-shirts. Big companies should be the ones giving away the most! But, since they’re often so penny-pinching, big companies don’t give t-shirts away too much. Oddly, it’s the smaller companies, the startups. This is likely because they’re being asked to burn money (rather than save it), the marketing people are probably more, like, “go getters,” and they might just be a little naive about how annoying it all is.

I think a vendor should always have t-shirts. It’s worth all the problems to get that brand and “in the club” feel. But, I wouldn’t want to be the one in charge of it.

(I wrote a long post years back on designing tech conference t-shirts. I should find that!)

Relative to your interests

• A4 Issue 1 July 2022 – Notes from the Drawing Board - This kind of thing is fantastic.

• Throw someone a pep rally - Two thumbs up!

• “that’s the American spirit!” - Yes, exactly this: “America’s public culture really does valorize pragmatic problem-solving.” As he writes, for example: “I remember going to Germany in, I think, 2009 with a small group of American journalists. We were in some eastern city in a van driving down a narrow alley when we had to stop because there was a Smart Car incorrectly parked in the alley, leaving us with no space to pass. Our van driver couldn’t back out and he couldn’t go forward, so he said we’d just have to wait. A middle-aged American woman in the group said that was absurd, and that yours truly and a few other younger guys on the trip could just get out, pick up the Smart Car, and move it. The driver said, “no, no, no, it’s not possible.” But she insisted that the four of us get out and move the car, and so we did, kind of like in the Mentos ad. We got back in the van, and she said to the driver very definitively, “that’s the American spirit!” // Now, that said: you have to also remember that after millenniums of war, Europe has been at peace for 78 years. So, things are going well on that front, perhaps the most important of all things.

• 202306 - ’If you take a single pull request (PR) that adds a new feature, and launch it without tests or documentation, you will definitely get the benefits of that PR sooner. Every PR you try to write after that, before adding the tests and docs (ie. repaying the debt) will be slower because you risk creating undetected bugs or running into undocumented edge cases. If you take a long time to pay off the debt, the slowdown in future launches will outweigh the speedup from the first launch. This is exactly how CFOs manage corporate financial debt. Debt is a drain on your revenues; the thing you did to incur the debt is a boost to your revenues; if you take too long to pay back the debt, it’s an overall loss.’ Also: “Tech debt, in its simplest form, is the time you didn’t spend making tasks more efficient. When you think of it that way, it’s obvious that zero tech debt is a silly choice.”

• DevOps and Cloud InfoQ Trends Report – July 2023 - Trends!

• The Rise Of DIY In FinOps - “But some DIY efforts do work. These tools are generally powered by teams of between 15 and 45 engineers acting as a dedicated product and support team that builds new capabilities, maintains and updates the tool as new cloud services emerge, and troubleshoots any existing user issues. The most famous example is Target, which dedicates two teams focused on the data pipeline, data acquisition, dashboards, and engineer persona application and has built everything from the ground up.”

• No one has an “appetite for risk” - “I think there is a better way to express what we aim to express when we say ‘risk appetite.’ What we are talking about is the organization’s failure tolerance. How often is it okay for the organization to experience security failures? How big can the failures be (impact) and still be tolerable?”

• IT spending soars, generative AI investments barely leave a mark - These forecasts have been confusing in recent years. They’re always increasing, and yet the trends are always cost savings: ‘“Digital business transformations are beginning to morph,” said Lovelock. “IT projects are shifting from a focus on external-facing deliverables such as revenue and customer experience, to more inward facing efforts focused on optimization." The trend is reflected in where spending growth is highest. Gartner expects software, the fastest-growing segment, to achieve a double-digit growth rate of 14% on the year, as organizations reallocate spending to squeezing more value out of ERP and CRM applications, as well as other core platforms that deliver efficiency gains.’ // Also, yeah: with AI it’s way too early in the corporate planning and strategy cycle to be allocating lots of cash to it. It’ll just be small PoCs for at least a year.

Upcoming

Talks I’ll be giving, places I’ll be, things I’ll be doing, etc.

July 19th Improving FinTech with cloud native think, speaking. July 19th Stop Tech Debt and Start Using Faster, More Secure Paths to Production. Sep 6th to 7thDevOpsDays Des Moines, speaking. Sep 13th, stackconf, Berlin. Sep 14th to 15thSREday, London, speaking Sep 18th to 19th SHIFT in Zadar, speaking. Oct 3rd Enterprise DevOps Techron, Utrecht, speaking.

Logoff

Tonight, I have my last online talk of the month - for a long time actually. It’s with Alvin from Forrester. They’ve put a lot of thinking into modeling and planning taking care of legacy IT stuff. We have it planned out as, you know, podcast-y discussion. I’m looking forward to learning a lot from him. Check it out!

After that, it’s hopefully time for a lot of content creation. Hopefully, this will mean helping out some of my marketing friends with stuff they need and plans for engagement and that shit. Also, I have a list of tiny videos I want to make. Do they work? WHO KNOWS. But, they’re fun and satisfying to make.

A4 Issue 1 July 2022 – Notes from the Drawing Board - This kind of thing is fantastic.

How to Write a Book in Three Days: Lessons from Michael Moorcock - “There’s always a sidekick to make the responses the hero isn’t allowed to make: to get frightened; to add a lighter note; to offset the hero’s morbid speeches, and so on."

Throw someone a pep rally - Two thumbs up!