What's the deal with low code? After discussing current IT spending forecasts, Ed, Ben, and Coté discuss some recent thinking on how low code seems to fit into your business. We also discuss the organization structures needed for doing platform engineering and all that.
As ever, with your three friends: @egrigson, @benbravo73, & @cote.
Discussed:
IT forecast Worldwide IT spending is projected to total $4.5 trillion in 2023, an increase of 2.4% from 2022, according to the latest forecast by Gartner, Inc. This is down from the previous quarter’s forecast of 5.1% growth. While that’s declined, software and IT Services still have a lot of growth, hardware is pulling growth down: “The software and IT services segments are projected to grow 9.3% and 5.5% in 2023, respectively. The devices segment is forecast to decline 5.1% this year as both consumers and enterprises lengthen device refresh cycles.” Summary from Coté's newsletter.
What's up with "low-code" - what is Ed seeing, what does Ben think?
On Organizational Structures and the Developer Experience - If you’re working on developer tools, you need a different org structure than working on public cloud services. // “The reality is that org structures that have been designed to iterate and produce services at scale are not likely to satisfactorily address gaps between the services that negatively impact developer experiences without at least some change. If there’s no appetite for that, progress is likely to be limited.”

It’s the last episode of the year so the three of us go over not only predictions in the cloud native space, but also our hopes for what happens. Also, there’s special guest ChatGPT on its predictions and a surprise piece of advice for New Year’s Day.
In the original video of this recording, at the end you get a bonus overview of GNOME from Ben.
A bit of a spoiler for you: platform engineering, more edge, consolidation of the app and kubernetes stack and platforms. Also, a shocking hope about GNOME (Linux desktops)!

In this episode, we discuss the use of accelerators in the Tanzu Application Platform to help developers start programming quickly and efficiently. We also touch on some of the developer-focused announcements made at the recent AWS re:Invent conference. Finally, we have a discussion about ChatGPT experiments and their potential to reduce the amount of tedious work for office workers. Ben expresses some concerns about the technology, but Coté offers a compelling argument for its usefulness.†
Be sure to check out Ben’s new talk about Backstage in the Tanzu Application Platform GUI including: Accelerators (code templates), secure software supply chain visualization, API documentation, and more!
If you prefer video, here is the original recording, it has some bonus monster truck material: 
Links discussed in the show:
We talk about Ben’s recent video on templates (“accelerators”) in the Tanzu Application Platform. Also, we discuss the supply chain demo he does in that same video.
AWS Re:Invent news. Another 2 hr keynote with plenty of new services, many on the data side of things, plus the usual new EC2 instances. We talk about CodeCatalyst and AppComposer. Check out last week’s Software Defined Talk overview for more.
ChatGPT - an AI powered bot that’s been in my timeline a few times this week. From the same people that provide Dall-E, AI assisted drawing from natural language. SpectroCloud gave it a Kubernetes focused interview and it did pretty well. This feels like Boston Dynamics showcasing their robot inventions, in that it simultaneously amazes the public at large and scares them in equal measure. Unfortunately it doesn’t respond to ‘Shall we play a game?’ (for those that remember War Games and WOPR) - that would have been a cool Easter egg! See Coté’s experiments and take on it too.
† This week’s description written by ChatGPT with the prompt: “Can you write a podcast episode summary for me? We talked about some developer tools that help start programming (called accelerators) in our own product (the Tanzu Application Platform), then about a few developer things at AWS re:Invent. And then Coté talked a long time about ChatGPT experiments and his theory about how it can help reduce office worker toil. Ben was a bit scared.”

Ben educates Coté on what exactly native Java is and goes over GraalVM. They also discuss what Spring Native is and why it exists. 
You can also watch the video version of this episode.
Links
More on Spring Boot 3.0.
Spring Native here.

There was a lot going on at VMware Explore Europe last week, so we focus in on the Tanzu related stuff. Then: we do our usual check-in on platform engineering; a brief magic quadrant tour; see if there's any lessons to learn from Twitter the company; and close out discussing VMware's recent open source supply chain survey.
 
VMware Explore EU:
Cindy's round-up.
Tanzu Kubernetes Grid 2.1 - including support for Oracle Cloud.
Tanzu Mission Control - getting air gap stuff working (not out yet?).
Tanzu Service Mesh Advanced - roadmap announcements about: auto-discovering kubernetes and VM things; integrating with TAP to do security policy stuff; adding in running config stuff out of git (for, you know, GitOps).
Aria Graph, GA (previewed/announced in US): "Today at VMware Explore Europe, VMware is announcing the availability of a new freemium offering of VMware Aria Hub powered by VMware Aria Graph. This new free tier offering enables customers to inventory, map, filter, and search resources from up to two of their native public cloud accounts in either Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure."
More stuff: Bitnami updates, sovereign cloud stuff (working with partners to stand-up Tanzu in regional clouds).
Hear Ben’s talk from Explore EU -  “Tutorial: Introduction to VMware Tanzu Application Platform
Big Backstage Feels:
RedHat joins. 
Coté's interview with The Frontside. 
Our always good Gartner paper on internal developer platforms, free to read. 
Also, more hammering away at "platform engineering."
The CNCF’s Platforms Working Group are trying to define what a platform would include - details here.
We're past the "DevOps is Dead" phase, which is nice.
I think we can say "Developer Experience" without feeling dorky too. Even "DX."
New public cloud MQ, for IaaS+PaaS. Rank (first to last): AWS, Microsoft, Google, Alibaba, Oracle, IBM, Tencent, Huawei.
Transforming Twitter:
Finally, an example of the "pathological" column in the Westerum table.
Clearly Elon’s not a fan of Microservice Architectures - some weird monolith/microservices/de-platform stuff to observe.
In the context of the DevOps/cloud native community - planning for a potential loss of the place to talk.
Mastodon growing: 
Coté in Mastodon: @cote@hachyderm.io.
Interesting thoughts from David Heinemeier on the layoffs
State Of Supply Chain Survey
Devs go faster and are more productive with supply chains
New tools: Tanzu Image Builder - for packaging your OSS for enterprise use (amongst other things)
Coté did a little video on the study. Check out that Sam Elliott 'stach!

What’s going on in the Cloud Foundry community? In this episode, Ben and Coté are joined by Nick Kuhn (a return guest!) to talk about the recent Cloud Foundry Day at KubeCon. They discuss Cloud Foundry on kubernetes, build packs, Detroit pizza, and singing the hits of the day back in the late 80s.
Mentioned:
The Application Service Adaptor to wire up Cloud Foundry with kubernetes.
Nick’s demo of the Adaptor.
Recordings of talks from Cloud Foundry Day, 2022.
The Tanzu Application Service, VMware’s Cloud Foundry distro.
You can watch the original video recording if you prefer that.

Coté talks with Charles Lowell and Taras Mankovski about the Backstage work they've been doing with clients. First, they talk about what Backstage is in the first place. Obviously, it's an internal developer portal...thing...but what does that mean beyond, like, a wiki? Check out The Frontside, and also, Taras' talk at BackstageCon.
Watch the video of this recording if you prefer that kind of thing.

Coté talks with Darran Rice about his experience and other's with building and sustaining platform engineering teams.
 
If you haven’t already, check out our conference SpringOne, Dec 6th to 8th. We’ll be talking a lot about platform engineering and you can hear from people like Darran who’ve actually done it. Get the chance to talk with them directly, ask questions, and learn in the hallway track. When you register, use the code COTE200 to get $200.
Links mentioned: 
Darran's advice on KPIs.
Platform as a Product paper.
Gartner paper on internal developer platforms.
Darran in LinkedIn.
Also, watch the original video if you prefer that format.

We check-in on "platform engineering," and ponder the theory that it's "DevOps for kubernetes." Also, Coté gives his theory on the rise of platform engineering. In the news section, we cover some of the announcements from Google Next and Microsoft Ignite.
Before we start: VMware Explore EU is about a week away. There's lots of Tanzu-land talks there, including this one with Coté and Mercedes going over their seven years of platform engineering, from back when it was called "platform as a product."
Also, if you're not registered already, check out the great developers, operations, and management talks at SpringOne. It's December 6th to 8th in San Francisco and will be a great event. As Ben mentions, there'll be a lot of great Spring Framework talk. When you register, use the code COTE200 to get $200 off.
As always, your hosts are: @egrigson, @benbravo73, & @cote.
News and Links
We'll cover KubeCon US next week (hopefully!). In the meantime, check out what our VMware pals are doing there.
VMware State of Software Supply Chain: Open Source survey.
Platform Engineering checkin:
Coté declares it "DevOps4k8s."
We have that Gartner paper about internal developer platforms that the platform engineering crew talks about here, for free: "Innovation Insight for Internal Developer Portals."
Platform Engineering Watch: there's a platform engineering working group at CNCF. 
Our platform as a product white paper.
Google Cloud Next announcements, all 123.
Microsoft Ignite: Azure Deployment Environments.
Service Mesh survey (of KubeCon attendees?) shows that security is the top reason to use it, followed by monitoring/observability. Perhaps Service Mesh will, indeed, be primarily about security - or maybe that's just the concern now, since it's top of the list for kubernetes, usually - table stakes type of stuff for future desires.
Unmentioned, but fun: Forest Brazeal deserves a callout for his "Re-org Rag"! 

Conferences are a great chance, sometimes the only change, to discuss your peculiar problems with peers and experts. In the case of SpringOne, the topics range from programming, operations, and even management. It's the hallway track! Ben and Coté discuss two talks where you can maximize the hallway track and get your questions answered. And, then, stay to listen to and interview with Duffie Cooley about eBPF, networking on kubernetes, and more, from Explore US 2022.
The two talks from SpringOne:  A Study on Soldier-led Software Development to Reduce Security Vulnerabilities and Tanzu Vanguard: Priceless Insights. When you register, use the code COTE200 to get $200 off. Just think of how many hot dogs you could buy with that!
Here is the video version of Ben and Coté talking, and the video of the full presentation and interview with Duffie.