Why you should buy your internal developer platform
Plus, how to get budget for horses: become a VS. And, strange and fun finds from the World Wide Web.
Building your own internal developer platform is a lot of work, buy it instead
Here’s a transcript:
One of the reasons internal developer platforms are so valuable is because they do so much, and that’s something that you run into if you’re trying to build your own platform instead of buy it.
The goal of a platform
The goal of a platform is to remove as much toil wait time, just nonsense work that a developer has to do just to get their applications into production, just to actually run them and configure them.
You want your developers building their apps, not building production or configuring their apps. That’s how you make the business better by changing the applications around, and that’s exactly what a platform is targeting
With your ideal platform, a developer can write their application and then just deploy it without even having to worry about building containers or how it’s packaged, how it’s deployed.
Building your own platform
Now a lot of people think they can get away with building their own platform.
Usually people who set themselves up for this journey don’t realize how much a platform does.
If you look at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s
platform reference architecture, you can get a notion of everything that a platform does. Also imagine each of these little components have to be integrated together and also work with the existing systems that you have in your organization.
Now you look at all this stuff, you’ve got middleware, security management, you’ve even got things like the build tool chain, what a lot of people will call the “golden path” or a pipeline in there.
You now own the entire platform
So let’s say you’ve built all of this, this platform.
That’s just the beginning. You now have to update it. You’ve gotta monitor what works and doesn’t work. You’ve gotta a product manage it. Not only update bugs that you have, definitely apply security patches.
Think about that across all of the different boxes that you have. Also make it compliant, pass whatever audits that you have.
But you need to add actual new functionality that your developers need.
Right now we’re in the middle of a great example of that, adding AI functionality.
What does it even mean to add AI to a platform?
(We’ve got some good ideas at Tanzu.)
But you owning the platform, having built it, you need to add that in, understand it, add that functionality in, and totally own that process.
Chances are high. You haven’t thought about how much work it is to build your own platform. Like a lot of teams I’ve talked with, you probably have a smaller scope, like thinking that it’s just putting Kubernetes out there, maybe with some pipeline integration and doing a baseline container image that your developers use.
But it’s a lot of work as you can see, and when you think about it, it’s nothing that’s gonna differentiate your business, make your business run better.
Year Zero
In fact, it’s gonna be a huge distraction and something that’s probably gonna take you at least a year to get out there. It’s gonna hold you back from improving the way your organization runs.
Just like any kind of undifferentiated thing, it’s basic strategy to not do it yourself and instead offload it to someone else.
More in the paper
If you’re considering building your own platform, obviously I don’t recommend it and I think it’s a bad idea.
Now, if you wanna see some other reasons why I think that, you can check out a free paper that we have going over six other reasons and ways of thinking about the build versus buy choice, I think the answer’s pretty clear. You can get that paper for free if you go to cote.io/diy …and, really, buy the platform.
Relative to your interests
Always lots of AI stuff, this week more tempering expectations, and the usual how to stuff.
Breaking the AI illusion: From adoption to growth - Garbage in, garbage out: “37% of midmarket CMOs believe AI-enabled marketing technologies have potential to help their organizations over the next 12–18 months, according to the Midmarket survey. This includes incorporating tools and workflows to boost content creation and automate campaigns, critical elements of modern marketing success. Still, only 31% of the same CMOs are prioritizing the modernization of their MarTech stacks. This is a crucial metric. Without updated systems and integrated data pipelines, even the most sophisticated AI tools remain disconnected from broader workflows, limiting their value.”
All IT work to involve AI by 2030, says Gartner - ‘AI’s hidden costs mean Gartner believes 65 percent of CIOs aren’t breaking even on AI investments." And: "Plummer said Gartner doesn’t foresee an “AI jobs bloodbath” in IT or other industries for at least five years, adding that just one percent of job losses today are attributable to AI.’ // Still figuring out the ROI.
The Three Faces Of Generative AI - “People today use large language models for three central purposes: 1) Getting things done 2) Developing thoughts, and 3) Love and companionship.”
What if the AI stockmarket blows up? - ‘By our reckoning, the total revenue from the tech accruing to the West’s leading AI firms is currently $50bn a year. Although such revenues are growing fast, they are still less than 2% of the $2.9trn investment in new data centres globally that Morgan Stanley, another bank, forecasts between 2025 and 2028—a figure which excludes energy costs. Meanwhile, the extent to which revenues will translate into profits is murky. A recent study by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology concludes that 95% of organisations are getting “zero return” from investments in generative AI.’
How I Use Claude - “Claude is really good at helping here, mostly because thinking quickly saturates: when you’ve thought about a problem for five minutes, you’ve had all the thoughts you’re gonna have, and it’s time to talk to someone else. Claude lets me sample fresh perspectives and possible actions I had not thought of.”
An ode to “via” - ‘the old ways’ - there are so many of these little things from the 2000’s web/bloggosphere.
Oxide Friday FAQs - These are clever/amazing “brand marketing” assets. You take advantage of a unique and famous asset you have (Bryan) and get some thought leadership and brand definition out there. Also, they have the product right there the whole time.
Blade Runner makes its live-action return next year - 2026 in Amazon.
Being a VC - Software Defined Interviews
In last week’s Software Defined Interviews, Whitney and I talked with Rachel Chalmers. I’ve know Rachel a long time. I’d followed her as an analyst and talked her here and there at conferences. Then in a chance meeting in a hotel lobby in San Francisco, she accidentally recruited me to take over her job at 451 Research when she was going off into VC-land. In the interview we talked about lot of VC stuff, and, of course, a few other topics like horses.
Conferences
VMUG London, speaking, September 18th, speaking. SREDay London, speaking, September 18th and 19th. Civo Navigate London, September 30th, London, speaking. Cloud Foundry Day EU, Frankfurt, October 7th, 2025, speaking. AI for the Rest of Us, London, October 15th to 16th, London, speaking. SREDay Amsterdam, November 7th, speaking.
I’ve got a 20% off discount for AI for the Rest of Us: SDI20. You should go the conference if you can, it’ll be good!
Logoff
Next week I’m back to business travel, in London for two of the conferences above. I’m scheduled to take the train for that trip and the next two. This means it’ll be more work to get my status with KLM. Is that bad? Is it good? Traveling by train is so much nicer and, I presume, earth friendly. It’s not always cheaper, which is odd, but I guess the way of the pricing. But, it so much more pleasant.