Coté's Weekly Wunderkammer
I like to write in an over-the-top style. Hunter Thompson is, of course, one of my favorite writers, along with Nietzsche, and then contra to that Hemingway. When I wrote columns from The Register, it was natural then to be…acerbic. I’ve been trying to publish a collection of those columns for awhile now, and after finally getting a solid no from one publisher, I put it together on Leanpub. The experience of using that was fine once I cleaned up some mysterious formatting issues in Google Doc.
Anyhow. You can now buy a mostly done version of the book Digital WTF. By “mostly” I mean that I need to go through and fix typos and other things. Maybe add a piece or two, or take away some. It includes my columns from The Register, other pieces I’ve written in the past three or four years, and my advice on surviving in a large organization whose culture and processes seem stupid.
If you’re interested, you can get $10 off with this link: https://leanpub.com/digitalwtf/c/newsletter.
That’ll work through next week (April 26th) - so act now! ” :)
Software Defined Talk #174: The multi-hybrid kubernetes cloud control plan, just in time for MOM!
In which we tried to figure out the Google Anthos announcement. We were mostly right, but we probably should have done more research.
Pivotal Conversations: The Clever Task of Product Managing Backing Services, with Laurel Gray
Product management - what is it?
There’s a lot of “backing services” in Cloud Foundry: not only middleware like databases, but also operations services like auto-scaling. This week, Richard & Coté talk with Laurel Gray, the product manager for those services at Pivotal. We discuss the services themselves, the open service broker, how to product manage APIs and services, and product management in general. Also, we hop-scotch through the news: a new version of Pivotal Cloud Foundry, Google’s recently cloud announcements, and a new version of kubernetes.
5 Definitions of DevOps, or, ¯_(ツ)_/
Originally posted on cote.io
DevOpsDays Amsterdam - Thursday June 25th I’ve tracked at least three different definitions of DevOps since the days of “agile infrastructure”:
- Using Puppet and Chef (and then Ansible and Chef) to replace Opsware and BladeLogic.
- Full stack engineers to setup EC2, load-balancers, and other Morlock shit.
- Full stack engineers are bad, but sort of the same thing. Also, you can’t have a DevOps “group” or title. But, you know, someone should do all that automation.
- Putting all the people on one team, having them focus on a product, and establishing a culture of caring and learning.
- SRE is not DevOps.
So…actually five. Maybe some of them just being footnotes on the evolving concept. (And, if you, dear reader, feel these are wrong, then let’s compromise and make the list six.)
All of them evolved around bringing down The Wall of Confusion, allowing “developers” to deploy their software to production more frequently, weekly, if not daily. And, of course, making sure production stays up. (You’re supposed to call that “resiliency” and instead of SLAs use SLOs and some other newly named metrics that answer the question “IS MY SHIT WORKING?” Whatever you do, just don’t say “uptime,” or you’re in for it and will be relegated to running the AS/400’s.)
I used to snide that the developers seemed to have been yanked out of DevOps, sometime around 2014 and 2015. All the talks I saw were, basically, operations talks. I haven’t really checked in on DevOps conference talks recently, but at the time, I don’t think there was much application development stuff. (I’m not sure if there ever was?)
None of this means that DevOps is not a thing. Not at all. It just means that the enterprise finds its own use for things. It also means there’s still weekly write-ups of what DevOps is – you know, those ones that are always lists of ideas, things you’re getting wrong, and how to start.
Autonomous product teams
Nowadays, I try to stick to that forth one: you want to setup autonomous teams that have all the skills and responsibility/authority/tools needed to “own” the software being specified, designed, developed, and run. This means you have to, basically, remove-by-automating all the operations stuff it takes to stand-up environments, deploy things, and do all that “day 2” stuff.
(HEY! HEY! WANT TO BUY SOME ENTERPRISE SOFTWARE?!)
Now, I think this product-centric notion of DevOps is, well, kind of an over-extension of the term “DevOps.” But since SRE has sucked out the “ops” part (but, remember, dear reader, don’t commit the embarrassing act of saying SRE is DevOps – no, no, you’d never do that, right? SO SHAMEFUL! (SRE is totally different – no overlap or similar goals shared between them at all. I mean, they have separate groups, silos! COME ON!)), slicing “DevOps” back to just “Dev,” but with a product-not-project focus isn’t too shabby.
Anyhow. I came across a good overview of this product notion of DevOps, all the way back from 2016, while re-reading Schwartz’s evergreen excellent The Art of Business Value:
Agile approaches attempt to bring together developers and the business in an atmosphere of mutual respect and joint contribution. Until now, however, the focus has been on users of the software, product visionaries, and developers. Recent developments in the Agile world—notably DevOps—have broadened this idea of respect and inclusion to encompass Operations and Security. The DevOps model, in other words, looks to break down the silos that have resulted from technical specialization over the last few decades. But the DevOps spirit goes further, looking to eliminate the conflicting incentives of organizational silos and the inhumane behaviors that can result from those conflicting incentives.
Perhaps we can take this idea even further still. There is no reason why the DevOps team’s responsibility needs to stop at the border of what used to be considered IT. The team is part of a broader enterprise, whose collective knowledge, skills, and judgment need to be part of the value creation process.
Look a’ that guy! Business Value just effortlessly jets out of his pores like a peripatetic thought-monarch!
This is from an executives perspective, but it drives home the point we’re always trying to get to with software: doing whatever it takes to figure out, create, and give users features that are actually useful to them. Somewhere beyond that, if you’re lucky, it’ll help out “the business.” Also, it should implement The Unspoken User Story: user would like software to actually work.
Americanizing
It’s annoying to encounter the American striving culture abroad. Here in Johannesburg, in the car to the airport there’s an ad for Kumon, getting your kid started early to thrive in a competitive world. It’s one thing to set yourself up for a good career (some MBA school ads here and there), but another to just throw away calm and serenity.
Links
My generation:
It was the sense that maybe our problems could be put off forever, that maybe the answer to the future was simply that it would never arrive.
Obviously, the sex part of this doesn’t describe my 20s at all. But the tone of it: sort of in a moral-less, strategic-less state, assuming things would be fine.
I’m not sure it’s fully true, though. This was an era of Bush Jr., then Obama. Maybe it’s just us grunge people who dropped out of society. One indicator would be to look at participation in voting of my generation in the 2000s, and then more: was it more or less than expected? How is it compared to “miliniums”?
Interview: Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian on open source, AWS, and working with the military
So for us to grow, the primary thing is to scale our go-to-market organization. And we’re very committed to doing that. We just need to hire and train and enable a world class sales team at scale.
Today we have a great sales team, but we are far fewer in number than the other players. We just need to expand that. And as I talked to customers, they asked us to, one: expand our sales organization and our go-to-market teams. Second: specialize (that sales team) with deep expertise in technology and in industry. And third: make it easy to contract and do business with us. We are extremely committed to doing all three of them.
Dutch now pay more on housing, healthcare and energy than before the crisis: ING
In 2017 basic needs such as housing, healthcare, food and energy accounted for 41 percent of household spending, compared to 36 percent in 2008. Housing and maintenance in particular became a relatively larger cost item, increasing from 19.5 percent in 2008 to 23.7 percent in 2017. Healthcare accounted for 3.8 percent of household spending in 2017, compared to 3.1 percent in 2008. Households also spent a larger portion of their income on food and non-alcoholic beverage, increasing from 10.1 percent to 10.8 percent. According to ING, this is due to faster than average price increases.
Users forge ahead with Cloud Foundry-Kubernetes integration
“There are a million solutions out there to your technical problems, but what we wanted was to solve the people and process problems.”
We’ve detected unusual activity from your computer network
There is an old-timey model in which the key elements of banking are, like, having a local branch, looking customers in the eye and giving them a hearty handshake, knowing their parents, etc. But in modern banking the importance of having a website and a payments app and, uh, “keeping track of customer deposits” is relatively higher, and the handshaking is relatively less important. For big banks, this means that they are increasingly and self-consciously becoming tech companies, building apps and hiring developers and blathering about blockchain. For small banks, it means that they are increasingly and unhappily becoming franchises of tech companies.
A recent survey of IT pros found that Skype for Business is the most popular workplace collaboration app, beating out competitors like Slack and Google Hangouts.
Cloud Foundry PaaS undergoes seismic shifts as IT evolves
“Who cares about buzzword bingo?” said an executive director at a major media and entertainment company who requested anonymity. “How does Kubernetes solve my business problems? How does it improve the developer experience? I’m not sure throwing more flour around necessarily creates more bread.”
