What Computers Do At Banks, deployment frequencies, some platform engineering, microservices nothing burger(?)
Plus: catsup chips, would you eat them again?
What Computers Do At Banks
Here’s two diagrams from a 2021 BCG report on banking that show, basically, everything that IT does for the business part of retail banking.
First, the “value streams,” or lines of business and products:
Second, what the typical IT stacks look like to support these value streams:
Pretty good stuff! And, if you’re into that, I also liked this white paper that goes over the general deal with modernizing banking apps, services, etc.
Relative to your interests
CD Foundation Releases Fourth State of Continuous Delivery Report, 2023 - In these surveys (based on big SlashData surveys), since 2020, the reporting on the deployment frequency breakout has held steady: 35% more than a month, 32% a week to a month, 22% hourly to weekly, 10% multiple times a day. These are a lot different than what analysts (like Forrester) typically track, as well as the old State of Agile surveys (digital.ai seems to have stopped tracking deployment frequency after, like, 13 years. Too bad!)
Enterprise interest in sovereign cloud on the rise, survey - “In a poll of 1,000 enterprise leaders from 10 countries, including Australia, France, Germany, India, and the UK and US, 69% of respondents cited potential exposure to extra-territorial laws when using cloud as being a top concern.”
Five Cost Management Tips for IT Leaders, IDC Blog - Good chart of what people are doing to optimize cloud spend (only n=69 from Dec 2022, though). Also:“In a recent IDC poll of CIOs, 64% of respondents said they were spending more on the Cloud than they budgeted. Over 50% of CEOs are concerned about Cloud Spend.” And: “companies that regularly employ cost benchmarking typically find 5–10% efficiency opportunities. However, companies that have never performed cost benchmarking can see up to 30% opportunities for cost efficiency.”
Build A Platform Engineering Team To Support Your Organization’s Prize Talent
Spring Cloud Gateway: The Swiss Army Knife of Cloud Development - Hooking up your applications and the services they depend on, microservices or whatever.
The Cloudcast: How AI will Impact Cloud-native - This is incredibly comprehensive.
Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey? - “Today, we find ourselves in a situation in which technology has become conflated with capitalism, which has in turn become conflated with the very notion of progress. If you try to criticize capitalism, you are accused of opposing both technology and progress. But what does progress even mean, if it doesn’t include better lives for people who work?”
Another bank bites the dust. Three recommendations to wring opportunity out of this so-called crisis. - “Continue investment in critical modernization initiatives. Digitize your commercial banking offerings Create actual offerings for small and medium enterprise clients, inclusive of start-ups and scale-ups.”
News Minimalist - AI sends you only significant real-world news.
Even Amazon can’t make sense of serverless or microservices - He’s not a fan: “SOA makes perfect sense at the scale of Amazon. No single team could ever hope to know or understand everything needed to steer such a fleet of supertankers. Making teams coordinate via published APIs was a stroke of genius. But, as with many good ideas, this pattern turned toxic as soon as it was adopted outside its original context, and wrecked havoc once it got pushed into the internals of single-application architectures. That’s how we got microservices.” And the rebuttal, which is kind of like: nothing burger.
The Polaroids of Andrei Tarkovsky : The Mystery of Everyday Life
Wastebook
How to feel good without saying, “well, things could be a lot worse”?
“The headwinds of optimizations” here.
Big shift in thinking on Sharp Tech: judging companies based on growth and valuation is an anomaly. Companies should be value on profit, cash flow: money made. Infinite profit loss to drive growth doesn’t work: you have to make money at some point.
Upcoming
Things I’ll be doing, places I’ll be going.
May 11th, 2023 Devoxx UK in London. Get 25% tickets with the code SEEMESPEAK23. June 1st VMUG Belgium in Brussels , free. June 7th State of Kubernetes overview, online. June 8th to 9th PlatformCon, online. June 22nd to 23rd DevOpsDays Amsterdam, attending. August 21st to 24th SpringOne & VMware Explore US, in Las Vegas. Sep 6th to 7th DevOpsDays Des Moines, speaking. Sep 18th to 19th SHIFT in Zadar, speaking.
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These chips taste like catsup: