Tag: tech
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Platform as a Product, 2017 to 2026
I updated our Platform as a Product paper recently, available here as a PDF. This paper has a long history: it was first published in 2017, updated in 2018, and then 2021. The concept was core to Pivotal Software – both in Pivotal Labs and with Pivotal Cloud Foundry. After Humanitec killed DevOps, around 2022,…
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How AI change your software development organization
A catch-up with Purnima Padmanabhan, GM of the Tanzu Division at Broadcom, on what her team has actually learned shipping enterprise software with AI for the last year and a half: code generation is the small part, beautiful code is the new uncanny valley, and you cannot solve the agent boundary problem from inside the…
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Enterprise self-harm: cleaning the data is the hard part
I think the critical part of it was really realizing that we had built the original product presupposing that our customers had data integrated, that we could focus on the analytics that came subsequent to having your data integrated. I feel like that founding trauma was realizing that actually everyone claims that their data is…
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50%+ failure is normal
Analyst firm Gartner thinks at least half of all generative AI projects “will overrun their budgeted costs due to poor architectural choices and lack of operational know-how,” and most organizations that try to build custom models “will abandon their efforts due to costs, complexity and technical debt in their deployments.” Yes, and this matches decades…
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The AI Security freak-out: now is the time for platform engineering to shine
The AI-driven security freak-out is a time to see what if your platform engineering strategy is working. A good platform makes it possible – if not easy – to find and patch all these new CVEs. And, of course keep patching them. A good platform will keep track of all these apps and dependencies deployed…
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Now you can react faster than ever to security problems
This is an excerpt from our Tanzu Catsup last week. In that episode we talked all about how this AI stuff is changing – for the better – how you can handle security problems at the app layer. It’s Monday morning. Your boss walks up, says “scrap the backlog, we’ve got a list of CVEs…
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Datacenter NIMBYism: What Did You Think Was Going to Happen?
Tech people are amazingly bad at marketing to The Community. And by “the community,” I mean normal people, not the “open source community.” Take the datacenter problem. Tech companies need more compute, so they need datacenters. They plop them down in some small town, avoid paying taxes, and consume huge amounts of electricity and water.…
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Always taste the digital transformation while you’re making it
At a large enterprise I recently worked with, the board asked the Chief Digital Transformation Officer to develop an AI adoption strategy to drive innovation, growth, and cost efficiency. His consultant of choice conducted stakeholder interviews and proposed a three-phase program scheduled to last 3.5 years: Phase 1: Fix digital basics and address the leftover…
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VMware Cloud Foundation 9.1 – private cloud, private AI, enterprise-grade kubernetes
Our cousins over in VMware announced the most recent version of VMware Cloud Foundation, 9.1, yesterday. We all call this “VCF.” It’s at the center of Broadcom’s strategy to be the private cloud stack for large enterprises. You know: banks, governments, large retailers, manufactures, et. al. Our layer, the Tanzu Platform, sits a-top VCF like…
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Treat AI as a stoner
The right mental model for working with an AI, according to my co-host David. If you’ve spent any real time with an AI, you know exactly what he means. The model can do impressive work in a tight scope. Step out of that scope, or feed it more than fits, and you’re suddenly explaining the…
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Software Defined Talk #122: Emily Long, VCs, startups, Edera, etc.
In this episode, Whitney and I talked with Emily Long, CEO and co-founder of Edera about their hardened container runtime – the kind you can swap in without re-platforming or kicking off yet another zero-trust migration. The pitch is basically: stop chasing detect-and-respond alerts and just fix the foundation. We also got into the messy…
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Tanzu Platform 10.4 Source Coverage
Here’s coverage of our recent Tanzu Platform 10.4 announcements. This is a big agentic AI release, bringing in to Tanzu Platform all sorts of features to secure, standardize, and otherwise make agentic AI work more enterprise-y. My think on 10.4 is listed below too. There’s also the short video I made on the 10.4: Tanzu…
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Let them tinker – hacking developer resistance to sound enterprise architecture and platforms
Developers need to tinker or they’ll reject your platform. That is a lesson that people who build tools and platforms for developers learn. The more ambitious your platform is in scale, the more tinker resistance you encounter – you want it to be the platform that 10,000’s of developers at a bank use, for example.…
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Using a custom CLAUDE_CODE_DIR does not work
I’ve tried to use a different $CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR for several weeks now. This way, I can have partitioned off harnesses for real life stuff, versus code, versus experiments. It doesn’t work, however. Sometimes Claude obeys it, sometimes it doesn’t. This means the wrong permissions, memories, rules, and ways of operating get loaded and mixed in. You…
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If you can’t wait until Friday for the perfectly edited and polished Software Defined Talk podcast episode, you can watch the unedited, full recoding – in glorious color video – in the meantime.
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Tanzu Platform 10.4: a private cloud platform for AI harnesses (or, “agentic AI”)
AI companies are building platforms for running agentic applications. Right now, those applications are primarily for software development, with a little bit of knowledge worker stuff. In each case, you get a “harness,” an application that wraps all sorts of functionality around a model. This harness app is way beyond the chat-based apps we grew…
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What cf push actually does
When I see a platform engineering conference talk about building an internal developer platform on Kubernetes, I think about cf push. Cloud Foundry has been doing this – the actual thing, the single command that takes you from source code to running app – for more than a decade. People keep rebuilding it on top…
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Don’t forget what I told you yesterday – AI memory and the mind palace – Tanzu Catsup
If you’ve spent any real time with Claude Code or Cursor, you know the feeling. The thing you told the agent five minutes ago is now optional as far as it’s concerned. The fix isn’t a smarter model. It’s architecture. This week David Zendzian and I dig into memory for AI agents – what it…
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Hot modems, dinergoths, the platform bottleneck, and the SaaSpocalypse – Related to your interests, Monday
Also: sovereignty’s control plane, 81,000 people tell Anthropic what they want, Google sells its fiber, and oats for the sparrows, and cake Related to your interests My pal Adib Saikali wrote up an MCP security guide covering how to think about securing MCP servers in the enterprise (no lead-generation required, just a straight-up PDF download).…
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Securing AI
More “how do we secure this AI stuff” talk with David Zendzian on today’s live stream. He’s recently gone Claude Crazy so I wanted to get his CISO-supremo talk on thinking through the risk management for AI in enterprises. Each time I tried to come up with a problem, he was good finding the fix.…
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