How platform engineering is different than DevOps

And, modernizing the legacy ops stack. // Plus, links and strange finds from the World Wide Web

Dec 12, 2024

How platform engineering is different than DevOps, plus, narwhal teeth and spider digestion, with Viktor Farcic

This is a good one, Viktor is great, almost an iconoclast on DevOps and platform engineering:

In this episode, Whitney and Coté talk with Viktor Farcic, Developer Advocate at Upbound, about platform engineering, the evolution of DevOps, project managing a content creation engine of one, and the virtues of imperfection. Also, the strategic avoidance of asking for directions, or, really, talking with people in general.

Listen to it, and make sure to subscribe. Our interviews show is turning out awesome.

Escaping the Legacy Trap: Now for Ops

I've updated my application modernization talk to talk a lot more about operations modernization, not just those pesky developers and their apps. Here's the latest version.

Wasebook

“tinfoil toupee” Warren Ellis.
“excessively negative cultural generalizations” Tyler.
“speeding across a half-finished bridge” if you want to get anywhere in life, that’s SOP.
“Among stupid-rich-people-things, I would class this among the forgivable.” maya.land
“quantity precedes quality.” And/or.
”Unintentional multicloud environments” re:Invent.
Or “What if Pat Gelsinger has bought a leather jacket in 2021…..would the world be different today?” SDT Slack.
“Some people want to stay on the carousel until it stops moving completely.” Noah.
“What’s so horrible about it, you may ask? Well, there’s the fact that, after the 1937 Snow White movie and the 1961 Snow White movie and the 1969 sex comedy The New Adventures of Snow White and the 1987 Snow White and 1997’s Snow White: A Tale of Terror and 2005’s The Brothers Grimm and 2012’s Mirror Mirror and 2012’s Snow White and the Huntsman and 2016’s The Huntsman: Winter’s War – plus all the assorted books, plays, operas, TV shows and video games based on Snow White – there isn’t really all that much meat left on the bone.” // They don’t like the remake.

Relative to your interests

Tanzu Platform 10 is GA’ed - this is a big release and has what you need to do platform engineering for Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry, especially in private cloud.
AI in organizations: Some tactics.
15 Times to use AI, and 5 Not to - by Ethan Mollick - Many great, practical ideas about how to use AI daily. And none of that shitty clickbait crap.
FOMO is not a strategy - Enterprise AI as more "personal efficiencies rather than organisational gains" // Also, you need your data cleaned and structured. And, applying AI at an organizational level is likely difficult.
How Toyota is revolutionizing manufacturing with AI - All your hybrid/multi-cloud stuff like bursting and on-premises access, mixed in with AI uses, including training models. Some notes on introducing agile practices and CI/CD for the AI apps and uses. A Google Cloud customer, too.
Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference 2024 Las Vegas: Day 1 Highlights - Finally, survey says it's working: "Within I&O, 70% of GenAI investments so far have exceeded or greatly exceeded leadership expectations for productivity."
Hybrid cloud solutions drive enterprise IT innovation - "At VMware by Broadcom, the strategy is very simple. We are a private cloud company..."
The State Of Business Buying: Companies Still Struggle To Meet Buyer Expectations - "Buyers are increasingly dissatisfied. Eighty-seven percent of buyers express dissatisfaction with the provider they choose at the end of a “successful” purchasing process. Price is the reason cited most often — but there are others that are perhaps more instructive. Buyers are not satisfied with the technology, domain, and industry expertise that providers demonstrate, nor their ease and flexibility during the process. The disconnect is worse with Gen Z and Millennial buyers, who express dissatisfaction 91% of the time."
Give people something to link to so they can talk about your features and ideas - "Give people something to link to so they can talk about your features and ideas" - I am not overstating it when I say this is the easiest/cheapest tech marketing problem to fix that is the least done.
Legacy Shmegacy - A bad mindset pushes you into the legacy trap and keeps you there. Here's how change that mindset and what to change it to.
Platform Engineering: The Pioneers Who Built It - Thought-leaders of platform engineering.
Why I Let AI Grade My Writing (Just Like My AP English Teacher) - "In business, we don't often receive the relentless coaching of a great teacher, but with AI, the red pen is just a mouse click away."
Running the government like a startup is a bad idea - "but the point is really that public services should be effective, not disruptive."
I want brands - The power of brand in a sea of cheap shit.
Tech Brats Turning 30 - "It's easy to find yourself wondering about the conditions that made that meeting of minds possible and about all the things you could accomplish in your own life if every distraction were removed and you could sit at a desk undisturbed for long enough. Then I realize that what I am imagining is having a wife or mother that swaddles you like a baby."
Indiana or Bust - "It's important to remind drivers that Jesus died at least once every 50 miles."
The Tarot of Pips - Mystic d6.
The buyer of the $6.2 million banana art piece eats it - "To be honest, for a banana with such a back story, the taste is naturally different from an ordinary one."
Note from the Editor-in-Chief - TechTarget acquires the executive focused news/advertorial outfit CIO stuff. Check out all the brands TechTarget now has: pretty much any topic and tech marketer would want to push copy on.

Logoff

End of year coming up. I’ll be in Austin for most of the rest of the year. Very much looking forward to it. Am writing in that old chopped style. Is fun.

I signed up for Midjourney again, it’s been about a year since I’ve used it. I of course use it for my D&D solo roleplaying. It’s gotten much better at sticking to the same character, and the web-based editor it has is very helpful. The web interface is overall great. Here’s some recent images

What’s interesting about each of these is the fidelity to the original. I have many, many pictures of that guy and that tiefling (the one with the horns), and their faces are consistent across them. What you do is you fiddle around until you find one you like, then you feed it back and tell it do to a character study from multiple angles.

The Conan pages are interesting. I fed it some pages from The Savage Sword of Conan volume one and asked it to make more. I’m interested in this kind of thing because the default Midjourney style is really not what I like.

Getting it to make realistic looking images of people is difficult. I’m finding that you have to tell it to make people in middle-aged or their 50’s and then say they’re plump or chubby. And those people come out normal.