Tanzu Talk

A collection of podcasts from VMware Tanzu, covering IT modernization and digital transformation from every angle. We cover the week’s news, talk with guests, and have the occasional oddball thing. Topics range from engineers in the weeds of cloud, developers, to executives pushing change within their organizations.

Listen on:

  • Apple Podcasts
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  • Spotify

Episodes

Friday Jul 14, 2023

So you've built an app platform. And those pesky developers aren’t showing up to use. Or, worse, they grumble about it! Did you remember to tell anyone about it, to convince them to use it? You know: marketing! Also, they'll need to know how to use it. And you know what that means! Documentation. 
In this episode, Coté and Ben talk about the basics platform marketing: brand, principles, advocacy, internal conferences, and more. They also discuss the role of Backstage in making platforms better, as well as everyday developer life.
You can also watch the video of this episode, if you prefer that kind of thing.
Be sure to check out VMware’s platforms:
For the Kubernetes fans out there: Tanzu Application Platform.
And for the PaaS fans: The Tanzu Application Service (based on Cloud Foundry).

Friday Jun 30, 2023

This week, Ben and Ed try to help Coté understand what the changes in RHEL open source development mean. We don't figure it out completely, but get close enough. Also, Ed tells us what Crossplane is. Finally, we briefly discuss two new reports from Gartner and Forrester that seek to define the cloud native application stack.

Cloud Foundry Day 2023

Friday Jun 23, 2023

Friday Jun 23, 2023

Right after Cloud Foundry Day 2023, Nick and Coté do a quick re-cap of the day. Taking place in Germany, there were many people from the German community, and elsewhere of course. Nick goes over his little talk which focused on Cloud Foundry usage and metrics. His recent post on The New Stack includes a lot of the same content. Keep an eye on the Cloud Foundry YouTube channel for recordings of all the talks, including Nick’s and Coté’s.

Tuesday Jun 13, 2023

Cloud Foundry is one of the most mature, most proven platform as a service stacks. And it's open source! Ahead of CF Day on June 21st, 2023 (in person and live), Coté catches up with Ram Iyengar, Chief Evangelist at Cloud Foundry Foundation. They discuss Cloud Foundry's integrations with Kubernetes and related projects, organizations that use and contribute to Cloud Foundry, how Cloud Foundry fits into platform engineering think (and doesn't), the Cloud Foundry Foundation, and how Ram ended up being a developer advocate.
Cloud Foundry Day is on June 21st, 2023 in Heidelberg, Germany. It's in person and online, so you can attend whether you're in person, or cozy at home. It's free to attend online.
Register for Cloud Foundry Day here.
Cloud Foundry.
Ram in Twitter.
Ram in LinkedIn.
Also, check out VMware's Cloud Foundry distro, the Tanzu Application Service (formally Pivotal Cloud Foundry).

Wednesday Jun 07, 2023

In this episode, Cora and Coté talk with Abby Bangser about the platform maturity model draft that the platform working group at the CNCF has been working on. While the draft is a work in progress, the model the team is developed is extremely useful for thinking about how you build and run your platform team. Check out the interview, and if you’re interested in more, take a look at the draft paper. If you’re really full of beans, you can also contribute.
You can also watch the video of this episode if you prefer.
As Abby mentioned, you can find her by searching for Abby Bangser in most social and web places. She’s @a_bangser in Twitter, @abangser.bsky.social in Bluesky, @abangser in Mastodon, and, of course, in LinkedIn.

Friday Jun 02, 2023

We talk about getting PCI compliance into Kubernetes, and other security think in the cloud native world. Securing Tanzu Application Service and Tanzu Application Platform. David Zendzian talks with Cora and Coté about what exactly “security” means in the cloud native context. They use his upcoming paper on PCI compliance as an example throughout.
See David in LinkedIn, Twitter, and charming home page.
Watch the video of this interview if you prefer that format.

Friday May 26, 2023

This week, Coté and Ben talk about using AI for software development, and general text use. They check in on Kubernetes usability for application developers, and give their takes on the recent microservices vs. monoliths dust-up. There’s a bonus discussions about cycling in London and regional sausage taxonomies, right at the beginning to whet your appetite.
You can also watch the video of our recording as well.
 
Mentioned items:
The platform talk Coté gave at DevoxxUK.
Steak chips.
Sausage and mustard chips.
Running the AI stuff locally.
Kuberenetes tool usage.
Kubernetes benefits for developers and the business.
Amazon streaming moves from serverless.

Friday May 05, 2023

We discuss what we did at KubeCon, the recent VMware State of Kubernetes 2023 survey, and the smells of platform engineering maturity. Also, some tips on daily logging and to do list management.
Here is the original video recording if you're into that kind of thing.
As ever, with your three friends: @egrigson, @benbravo73, & @cote.
Links and Notes
The 2023 State of Kubernetes Survey is fully out. The new component is looking at the benefits of Kubernetes. Distro/service marketshare - VMware is steadily climbing up, yay!
Coté's multi-cloud usage take. Including a great chart from IDC on where workloads are living. More: we need to start thinking of "multi-cloud" as just meaning "all the computers and stuff we run." Putting the word "cloud" in there makes it seem like magic cloud stuff, when all we are/should be talking about is the entire, heterogeneous IT estate.
Something like 60% of people say it makes developer more productive, even more say there are operational benefits (64%). The developer productive part is confusing given the middling "shorten developer release cycle" figures over the years. But, whatever!
10% drop in developers owning and managing Kubernetes.
Related, from McKinsey engineers: "As a rule of thumb, if developers spend more than, say, 10 to 20 percent of their coding time on container configuration, failover, security, or other infrastructure issues, it makes more sense to tackle these issues via CSP services instead, so that valuable time and skills can be reserved for functionality that serves the business."
An idea for how many apps are running in Kubernetes, finally! While writing blog posts for the survey, I found this: Gartner estimates that "by 2027, 25% of all enterprise applications will run in containers, an increase from fewer than 10% in 2021." We're somewhere in between there in 2021, likely closer to 10% than 25%.
KubeCon EU 2023
What's Ed's take - Edward Grigson actually did some work (unlike social loafers, like Coté)! E.g.: "FinOps for Platform Engineering – I spoke to their CEO at KubeconEU and got a demo. Looks good – very flexible and easy to use." Found three new vendors: Palantir Apollo, Mia.Platform, Port / Cortex.
Jon Collins @ GigaOm: lines still being drawn around the components, WebAssembly. Best of breed vs. integrated platform. Robot: "The cloud-native world is maturing, and a multi-platform architecture will help build better manageability and governance in the future." And, Robot summarizing his platform engineering take: "Platforms are important, but the author argues for the need for multi-platform engineering (MPE) to understand and manage multiple clouds, stacks, and toolchains.The MPE group should be focused on empowering and enabling its users, acting as a product group for the entire organization."
Daniel Bryant on dev stuff, full blog post.
VMware schwag review: people love metal water bottles, not so much bottle openers. There are a lot of gambling service people in EU crowds.
Software Defined Talk at/on KubeCon. Though I was one of the three people (t)here, I don't really remember what we talked about except the Dirk bread claw. So it goes with me and podcasts.
Ben was not at KubeCon EU (sadface) but his YouTube picks are:Evolution of WASM: Past, Present, and Future - Bailey Hayes, Cosmonic
The State of Backstage in 2023 - Ben Lambert & Patrik Oldsberg, Spotify
Choose Your Own Adventure: The Treacherous Trek to Development - Whitney Lee & Viktor Farcic
How to Blow up a Kubernetes Cluster - Felix Hoffmann, iteratec
Platform Engineering Strategy stuff: Platform Maturity Model paper, draft here.

Friday Apr 28, 2023

In this episode, Coté is joined by Fouad Hamdi, to discuss a project he worked on to modernize of a 30-year-old mainframe app. Fouad provides a comprehensive breakdown of how he and his team at VMware Tanzu Labs approached this task, migrating a system relied on by over 3 million users from a mainframe infrastructure to a microservices architecture.
Read the original blog post they discuss here.
Details
Fouad and Coté delve into the initial goals for mainframe modernization, the constraints, and past attempts at modernization that shaped the path they took. Fouad shares how they managed to migrate safely and at a rapid pace, all while maintaining the existing system's functionality.
Listen as Fouad walks us through how the team  leveraged the power of event storming workshops and Domain Driven Design (DDD) to understand the business domain and identify key areas for modernization. They discuss the challenges of working with older technologies like COBOL, and the strategies they used to bring business knowledge to a new generation of developers.
They also explore how the team navigated complex issues such as coexistence between the old and new systems, and how they incrementally built the new system to avoid any disruption of service. Fouad shares invaluable insights into the importance of context in these modernization efforts, and the lessons they learned along the way.
Whether you're a software engineer, an architect, or a business leader looking to modernize your own systems, this episode is filled with practical advice and lessons learned from modernizing a mainframe application. Tune in to learn from Fouad's experience and to understand how you can apply these lessons to your own mainframe modernization journey.
More
Read the original blog post.
Fouad’s Blog.
Fouad in LinkedIn.

Monday Apr 10, 2023

A lot goes into getting a platform up and running. Before you even get to that point, though, you’ll need to put together a business case and the plans for your platform. In this episode, Coté talks with Kerry Schaffer about that business case, but also about the role of developer happiness and platform marketing. We also discuss getting more women into IT and Kerry’s work with the Women’s Security Alliance.
 
Find Kerry in LinkedIn and Twitter.

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