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.
Episodes
Friday Jul 28, 2023
Friday Jul 28, 2023
"75% of IT and business executives say that their companies’ ability to compete is directly related to their ability to release quality software quickly" reads a recent Forrester Consulting report. If that’s the case, why are so many developer in large organizations have a bad developer experience? Paul Kelly wrote up the case for good DevEx and what it looks like for developers on the VMware Tanzu blog recently. In this episode, Cora and Coté talk with him about the blog. Paul also wrote two books on Visual COBOL so, naturally, we open up by talking about COBOL. Why did we ever need more?
You can watch the original, streamed video if you like that kind of thing.
Links:
A Developer Perspective on Developer Experience, the blog in question.
Paul on CI/CD.
More article from Paul.
Paul’s books: Visual COBOL: A Developer's Guide to Modern COBOL and Visual COBOL: New Application Modernization Tools for the Java Developer.
Paul in LinkedIn.
Friday Jul 21, 2023
Friday Jul 21, 2023
In this episode, Coté talks with Corey Dinkens about Tanzu Mission Control. The most recent version can now run on-premises, meaning those who can't run it as a public SaaS now can run Tanzu Mission Control where ever they like, on or off the Internet. We also discuss Tanzu Mission Control in general and some other new features.
Learn more about Tanzu Mission Control:
- More about the new release here.- Corey's quick demo of Tanzu Mission Control.- More about all of Tanzu Mission Control here.
Friday Jul 14, 2023
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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.