Chris Aniszczyk is the CTO of the CNCF. We discuss how he got into open source, what it's like to work at Twitter and how he helped start the CNCF. Plus, Chris gives us an overview of the different kinds of CNCF projects and offers advice on how to get started with Kubernetes.

Show links:

• Hatching Twitter
• GORILLA.BAS
• IBM Extreme Blue
• Eclipse Marketplace
• Eclipse Foundation
• CNCF Charter
• The universal data plane API
• Universal Data Plane API Working Group

Contact Chris:

• @cra
• LinkedIn

More Software Defined Talk

• Subscribe to Software Defined Interviews Podcast
• Subscribe to Software Defined Talk Podcast
• Follow @SoftwareDefTalk on Twitter
• Send your postal address to [email protected] and we will send you free laptop stickers!
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Special Guest: Chris Aniszczyk.

Matt and Brandon interview Adam Jacob the co-founder of Chef. We discuss Adam's career, what led him to start Chef and Chef's recent decision to open source 100% of its Software. Plus, Adam give us some tips on Dungeons & Dragons and transitioning from being a founder to an executive.

Links

• Goodbye Open Core — Good Riddance to Bad Rubbish
• We need Sustainable Free and Open Source Communities
• Sustainable Free and Open Source Communities

Follow Adam at @adamhjk

Check out the Software Defined Talk Podcast for the latest news in Enterprise Tech.

Special Guest: Adam Jacob.

Jeff Meyerson is the host of Software Engineering Daily. We talk about his career and what led him to start a daily tech podcast for software engineers. We also talk about current trends in cloud computing and Jeff recounts his career as professional poker player.

Topics:

• Darknet Diaries Chartbreakers Episode
• Who Is Michael Ovitz?

Where to find Jeff

• Software Engineering Daily
• Jeff Meyerson
• @the_prion

Special Guest: Jeff Meyerson.

Version control has changed a lot over the past 15 years: we’ve moved from a centralized to a distributed model at the basic level. But the practices people follow have changed and grown as new methodologies like DevOps and continuous delivery have relied on version control for operational stability and reliability. In this interview, Coté talks with Plastic SCM’s Pablo Santos to get the low-down and some tips on doing version control better. We also discuss Plastic SCM and how their approach to semantic merging and mergebot-driven automation addresses version control toil.

This episode is sponsored by Plastic SCM, that is, it’s a paid interview.

Special Guest: Pablo Santos.

Sponsored By:

• Plastic SCM: Plastic SCM is a version control to help teams focus on delivering work, one task at a time. Signup today for a 30-day free trial and get a sassy T-Shirt.

Brandon interviews Umair Khan about his experience working in AI Ops and Cloud Security. Umair recently joned Scytale and he explains how the SPIFFE open soruce project can help secure communication between cloud services.

Contact Umiar:

• LinkedIn
• @UmairMoheet
• Why I joined Scytale

Special Guest: Umair Khan.

Jake Moilanen started and sold two companies and is now joining the ranks of Venture Capital. We discuss his career, his approach to investing and he explains what it is like to bringup the Linux Kernel on a supercomputer for the first time.

Connect with Jake:

• @moilanen
• LinkedIn

Special Guest: Jake Moilanen.

Zane Rockenbaugh specializes in working with early stage startups. Most of the time his clients are boostrapping their new compnay and need someone technical who can help build version 1.0. In this episode, we talk about Zane's career and what it's like to be a "Startup CTO." Most importantly, we talk about his experience of taking raw ideas and turning them into real products.

To work with Zane contact him at Liquid Labs

Special Guest: Zane Rockenbaugh.

Coté talks about his job being an "evangelist," a word people no longer seem to use but everyone understands. Brandon interviews Coté about what the job is, what the work's like, and some examples (other than himself) of people who do it well. Call it "developer advocacy," "developer relations," being a "thought leader," or just a straight up hustler - it's a job that most companies in the computer industry have at least one of. Most of the successful software and projects out there get a big boost from key evangalists.

Brandon interviews Coté about what the job is, what the work's like, and some examples (other than himself) of people who do it well. As the two discuss, it's a weird job.

Links:

• The Man Who Would Be Khan — March 2004: "A new breed of American soldier—call him the soldier-diplomat—has come into being since the end of the Cold War. Meet the colonel who was our man in Mongolia, an officer who probably wielded more local influence than many Mongol rulers of yore."

When Coté says he doesn’t know how numbers work, he actually means it. To help out, he talks with Rachel Stephens, from RedMonk, who not only explains ratios, but also finance numbers.

Fine more from Rachel on her RedMonk blog, and in Twitter.

Special Guest: Rachel Stephens.

Links:

• Five Minute Finance — Have you ever felt utterly out of your element when meeting with your counterparts in the finance or accounting department? If you find yourself lost when discussing financials, here’s a quick primer on some of the key concepts you should be familiar with at a high level.
• Developers and Social Responsibility — “We do, however, want a world where developers are cognizant of their impacts. We need developers to analyze their products and think about second order effects from a variety of perspectives as part of the software development process. We want to encourage technological progress, and we want to do right by people. This is one minor example that illustrates the difficulties of anticipating unintended consequences and considering who is empowered/disempowered with technology products. With one in four workers expecting their job to be eliminated via automation in the next decade, this small example is indicative of a much broader economic shift underway.”

Dustin Kirkland joins us to discuss Linux, Cloud Computing and making wine. We talk about Dustin’s career journey from entry-level developer to Google Product Manager. He shares his experience working at IBM, Canonical and now Google. Plus, he tells the story of how working on his own open source project helped him land a job at startup.

Links:

• Dustin’s Blog
• Dustin on Twitter
• Dustin’s presentation at Google Next
• Run-one
• Vasa Museum

Special Guest: Dustin Kirkland.

How do you implement IT Automation best practices at a large company? What's the best approach to convince stakeholders that IT Automation is worth the effort? In this interview with Acxiom's Chris Donaldson we talk all about the good, the bad and ugly of IT Automation.. We discuss his career and how his previous experiences shaped his view of IT Automation. He offers practical advice on automation, weight lifting and how best to secure shade at the beach.

Links:

• Jobs at Acxiom
• Floret Microservices

Special Guest: Chris Donaldson.

Brandon speaks with Matthew Brutsché from 500 Rockets Marketing. Matt gives us his bold predications based on his recent shopping experience at the Amazon Go store in Seattle. Plus, we talk about the evolution of digital marketing and what it means to launch a product into the market.

Links:
Amazon Go Store
500 Rockets Marketing
Quick Concall iPhone App

Special Guest: Matt Brutsche.

Brandon interviews Satish Kodukula about product management. We compare product management at large companies and startups, discuss how to validate your next startup idea and when to build your minimum viable product (MVP).

Notes:

Marc Andreessen on Product/Market Fit

More about Satish:

• Chief Winning Officer
• Austin Software Consulting
• All Star Pick

Wrap up with Software Defined Talk plugs

• Check out our other podcast: Software Defined Talk. A weekly round up of all the news in Enterprise Tech.
• Keep up with the weekly newsletter.
• Join us in Slack.
• Buy some t-shirts! DISCOUNT CODE: SDTFSG (20% off)
• Send your name and address to [email protected] and we will send you a sticker.

Special Guest: Satish Kodukula.

Getting familiar with analyst relations is a key component of an enterprise software business. “Analyst relations” is sort of like PR, but actually pretty different. You want to, of course, drive influence with the analysts, but also consume the content and advise they’re putting out. And while there’s two major firms in the tech world - Gartner and Forrester - there’s plenty of other firms and individuals to work with. In this episode, Coté talks with Rita Manachi who’s been doing AR for over a decade about all of this, plus some advice on selecting drinks and using iPads in meetings.

Special Guest: Rita Manachi.

Sponsored By:

• Software Defined Talk: You know you want a Software Defined Talk t-shirt! With this code, you can get 20% off. WHAT A GREAT DEAL! Promo Code: SDTFSG

This is a great conversation with John Mitchell about Duke Energy improving it’s software capabilities, doing “digital transformation,” as the kids like to call it. We start from the beginning of what kicked the company off, a shift from COTS software to mobile apps and analytics. We then discuss a couple initial projects that Duke transformed, including one that didn’t work out so well, and one that did. Throughout, John shares what he team learned and how they made it happen. Also, we discuss the use it or loose nature of the electricity grid.

Apologies for the audio quality on John’s end, I neglected to ask him to make sure his mic was set-up properly.

Special Guest: John Mitchell.

Sponsored By:

• Software Defined Talk: You know you want a Software Defined Talk t-shirt! With this code, you can get 20% off. WHAT A GREAT DEAL! Promo Code: SDTFSG

Security, security, security! Everyone wants security, at least they say so. How it’s actually managed and even conceptualized in organizations is a lot more than just patching software and using CAPTCHA’s. In this discussion, Coté talks with Javvad Malik who’s been in the security business for countless years. In addition to talking about how security is done well and poorly, they discuss controversies in the space and establishing a good baseline for securing organizations. Also, there’s talk of being an industry analyst, British patriotism (or lack thereof?) and webinars, among many other topics.

Relevant to your interests

• Russel Crowe is actually a Kiwi, apologies.
• AlienVault - unified security for threat detection, incident response, and compliance.

More

• Javvad in Twitter: @j4vv4d.
• Javvad over at AlienVault.
• Javvad’s fantastically funny and informative YouTube videos.
• J4vv4ad.com - all Javvad, all the time.
• Javvad’s 451 work.

Special Guest: Javvad Malik.

Sponsored By:

• Software Defined Talk: You know you want a Software Defined Talk t-shirt! With this code, you can get 20% off. WHAT A GREAT DEAL! Promo Code: SDTFSG

If you only followed the daily headlines, AI and machine learning seem like a magical technologies that will either solve all our problems or put everyone out of work. In reality, there’s little to know AI and machine learning, though complex, has many practical uses. While they’re often delightful, there’re not mystical. Coté discusses how to think about machine learning, how it works, and some examples of what it can do with Dominic Wellington.

Relevant links & select articles from Dominic

• Think Outside The Black Box: “The problem is that each time, the definition of AI has been updated to exclude the recent achievement.”
• New Paths to Helicon.
• Replace of Augment?
• Not Biting My Tonge: “Where things go wrong is when stodgy enterprise vendors put on their dad-jeans and go down to the skate park.”
• Algorithmic Reality: “We can see the beginnings of this process already: we drive where the algorithms tell us to drive, we exercise the way the algorithms tell us to exercise, and we even date whom the algorithms tell us to date. We buy films, music, and books that the algorithms recommend, go on holiday where they suggest, and take jobs that they set us up with. In the future, what other decisions will we hand over to algorithms - unquestioning and unconcerned?”
• The paperclip maximizer.

More

• In Twitter: @dwellington.
• His blog.
• Articles at DevOps.com, IT Chronicles.

Special Guest: Dominic Wellington.

Sponsored By:

• Software Defined Talk: You know you want a Software Defined Talk t-shirt! With this code, you can get 20% off. WHAT A GREAT DEAL! Promo Code: SDTFSG

How do you implement Agile? Why does Agile matter? How has Agile changed in the last decade? Where do you get a beer in Austin? Walter Bodwell answers all of these questions and more in this episode. Plus, we hear the story of how Evity was sold for $100 Million.

More

• Planigle
• www.walterbodwell.com
• Agile Austin
• Keep Austin Agile 2018

Image Credit

Special Guest: Walter Bodwell.

Sponsored By:

• Software Defined Talk: You know you want a Software Defined Talk t-shirt! With this code, you can get 20% off. WHAT A GREAT DEAL! Promo Code: SDTFSG

Why does kubernetes even exist, why don’t existing things work just as well for it? And then what kind of applications can you run on it, at least following the original intentions. Once we sort that out, we talk about the same for Istio. We also discuss hospital IT and how large companies like IBM decide which open source projects to work on.

More

• Recorded Talk on Istio.
• Twitter: cmluciano_
• His website.
• His LinkedIn.

Special Guest: Christopher Luciano.

Sponsored By:

• Software Defined Talk: You know you want a Software Defined Talk t-shirt! With this code, you can get 20% off. WHAT A GREAT DEAL! Promo Code: SDTFSG

JJ Asghar from Chef explains how he found his way into DevOps and why DevOps makes Christmas better. We also discuss the latest news about Uber's security breach and how it could have been prevented. Finally, we find time to talk about gas grills, building Linux from scratch and what it takes to be an Eagle Scout.

One more thing, we also explain how JJ got his nickname "NO_SSH_JJ."

JJ wants you to go to ChefConf in Chicago May 22-25. Tell him his friends at Software Defined Interviews sent you.

More stuff from us:

• Listen to our other podcast Software Defined Talk
• Subscribe to the Newsletter
• Join us in Slack
• Buy a Software Defined Talk T-Shirt use code SDTFSG for 20% off.
• Send your name and address to [email protected] and get a free laptop sticker!

Special Guest: JJ Asghar.

This is a really fun and great episode with Nancy Gohring on monitoring, log management, DevOps, M&A in the space, and tech journalism. Also, we finally get the most concise analysts of the $3.7bn Cisco/AppDynamics deal that I’ve ever heard. If you’re the type of person who knows the words “observiblity,” “The Big 4,” SNMP, or even just DevOps, you’ll like this episode.

Nancy Gohring covers application and infrastructure performance for 451 Research, including IT monitoring, application performance management and log management. Check her out in Twitter: @ngohring.

You can now buy Software Defined Talk t-shirts and fill out the contact form with your mailing address if you’d like some free stickers!

There’s some more detailed show notes as well.

Special Guest: Nancy Gohring.

Sponsored By:

• Software Defined Talk: You know you want a Software Defined Talk t-shirt! With this code, you can get 20% off. WHAT A GREAT DEAL! Promo Code: SDTFSG

Links:

• Nancy in Twitter
• Nacy's 451 research
• Nancy's recent report on the Application and Infrastructure Performance Market

“It’s quite good to see GDPR as an evolution, not a revolution.”

The EU is rolling out a huge privacy data regulation policy this Spring, the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR. If you do anything with “customer data,” you should probably at least take a look at it. Companies like Facebook and others who use customer data to work with third parties are gonna have GDPR all up in their grills. In this interviews episode, we talk with Jon Collins who’s been writing about GDPR of late from his perch in the UK. Jon’s an excellent analyst and always has incisive takes on enterprise IT related matters, as well as music (sadly, not featured in this episode).

You can now buy Software Defined Talk t-shirts and fill out the contact form with your mailing address if you’d like some free stickers!

Brandon Whichard, Coté, guest Jon Collins.

Show

• Putting people on the line for data handling problems.
• Defining legit use for data: like updating on products bought, recommending other things to buy based on past buying. But, when it comes to holding you’re kid’s interest and other creepy thing, stuff comes into effect. Can’t hoard data now, have to justify why you’re doing it at least.
• So, sort of: if a third party gets ahold of the data, you need to spell out to the end-user what the data is and how it’ll be used.
• They started thinking about GDRP in 2005; it’s taken then 12 years for them to come up with this.

Jon on GDPR, and more

• “GDPR, a topic about which I feel strangely sad [about]”
• Summarize it - ensure data can be encrypted, provide data on-demand, notify of data breaches (but just in unencrypted?), appoint CDO, somehow describe policy to end user (is this a set policy or can organizations differ it?), data must stay in EU (unless protection stuff is done off-shore)
• How’d this come about?
• “IT professionals expect that compliance with GDPR will require additional investment: over 80 percent of those surveyed expect GDPR-related spending to be at least $100,000.” (Book of all knowledge)
• In use: “Facebook needs to ask people if it can use status posts as input to its advertising engines, whereas Google does not need to know someone is — its AdWords algorithms generate information based on search requests, location and so on, without being personally identifiable.”
• Meanwhile, “we will consent to have our privacy even more eroded than it already is.” What exactly should we care about with data privacy: how does an individual think through what Facebook does, Axcion, Target, the government, foreign governments, etc. - aka, Jon vs. The McNealy Privacy Principal (it’s dead, get over it).
• Generalizing to Jon’s five rules of cyber security.

Background

• Covering tech: “It’s a conundrum: when to say something out loud, even if it’s been said before?”
• @jonno
• Jon’s author page on Amazon
• Newsletter
• Podcast
• Gigaom Column

Credits: header image from warrenrandalcarr.

Special Guest: Jon Collins.

What do these financial, equity analyst types do? Well, if the stock market was rational, we could probably tell you. This week, we look at one PDF reporting on cloud and try to make sense of it. Also, we discuss enterprise software pricing, THE DANCE!

More detailed show notes, including the charts, are available.

Everyone’s freaking out about tech companies. What they mean by “tech companies,” of course is the combination of Facebook, Google, Twitter, Amazon, and maybe Netflix. They (mostly) mean companies who are using tech to disrupt their industries (media, retail, entertainment) and using the business models of tech companies. The line is, to be sure, fuzzy, but these are not companies that make their money from selling hardware, software, or even IT services (like Microsoft, Oracle, Red Hat, SAP, Pivotal, etc.).

This week, we look at one write-up of this freaking out from The Economist. They also have a smaller version in their “Leaders” section. As always, there are much more extensive, detailed show notes available as well. 

You can now buy Software Defined Talk t-shirts and fill out the contact form with your mailing address if you’d like some free stickers!

With Cotê and Matt Ray away on vacation, Brandon takes over the feed to talk all about security. Andy Land from the CISO Exec Network joins us to breakdown what CISOs are worried about and what developers should know about security. 

In this episode we look at two tech world artifacts: weekly, curated links in email newsletters and the trends and predictions presentation. Ben Evans does both of these and provides great pieces to do some deep reading.

If you're not a man, make sure you take the listener survey. (We got plenty of male-responses.)

See the detailed show notes.

This week, we look at the tech editorial page, columns that people like Matt Asay and Coté write. First we discuss if this is even a category, and then go over three columns Coté has written recently.

(Slightly) more detailed show notes over in paper.

Community surveys are a handy tool for tracking momentum, proving legitimacy, and, of course, understanding the state of the community. “Community” doesn’t have to be all rainbows and sandals - open source - but it often does. This week we look at the most recent OpenStack Community Survey.

See more detailed show notes.

Murder and comedy podcasts are all fun and dandy, but they’re strategically used by tech companies as well as marketing. This week, we look at some common formats, how they’re done, and how to consume them.

Detailed show notes: https://paper.dropbox.com/doc/The-Corporate-Podcast-EBCing-azErWSniyTIDSTn8cQn1U

This week, we look at one of the new analyst models, and what they do, by way of Ben Thompson. Horace Dediu and RedMonk are other examples of this model, but Ben Thompson is the highest flying, most interesting practicer now. Ben’s business model is pretty straight-forward: a partial paywall around his some of his weekly content, podcast sponsorships, and (maybe?) consulting.

Also, the DC steak scene, BLT Steakhouse’s odd way of cooking a steak. Brandon says to go to Charlie Palmer’s.

Check out the more detailed show notes and links.

This week we look at The Four. Coté had high hopes. More importantly, we look at the medium and mechanics of a business book.

More detailed show notes and such.

The big fluffy, leather chair interview is a staple of the tech world now. A big named executive (usually) comes up on the stage with a big name journalist and is interviewed in a “wide ranging” discussion. In addition to videos of these being broadcast, tech outlets often write summaries - news stories even - based on the interviews, and others sometimes post “lighted edited transcripts.” One of our favorite news sites, CRN, does this often. And while they do the sleazy thing of making 20-35 pages out of what should be a, at most, two page story, they’re usually good interviews if you’re into the the topic. Continuing a discussion we started in SDT #108,  we look at three of these interviews, giving us the chance to a close reading of the interviews 

themselves and talk about the format in general.

The three interviews: (1.) Meg Whitman, HPE; (2.) Steve Singh, Docker; (3.) Pat Gelsinger, VMware. All of them, of course, are CEOs.

See the more detailed show notes for more.

This week, we look at an article from Susan Hall at The New Stack. Susan is a solid reporter, so looking at her piece allows us to discuss the world and machination of the tech press, what it’s like to brief them, and our imagination of what it’s like to be a tech reporter.

See the detailed notes for more.

This episode was made free since we haven't been recording the regular show.

Press releases are a high art in our trade. There’s certain formats to follow, the audiences are always precise, and making a good one is a sign of a cunning PR pro. This week, we look at  a funding announcement from Heptio. It follows the classic form fairly well, so you’ll see how general press releases are done and some attributes of the funding press release.

See more detailed show notes.

In part two of our cloud-native enterprise architect talk, we discuss the more technical functions of the EA. We think of these as the "southbound" functions.

Special Guest: Matt Walburn.

We discuss a recent Forrester Wave: “The Forrester Wave: Continuous Delivery And Release Automation, Q3 2017.” 

See more detailed notes here.

On the DevOps question: sure they do, but there are many variations depending on the company.

Links:

• Tommy's Margarita
• Anthony Lee and David Brock talk platform operations — The Pivotal Conversations episode mentioned.

This week, we talk about two PDFs setting out to briefly describe the kubernetes and great container orchestration landscapes. See [the usual more detailed write-up and analysis elsewhere](https://paper.dropbox.com/doc/WP006-Kubernetes-container-landscapes-from-Forrester-Gartner-pnTuTycrvQribNjWNB7tE).

This episode was also made free in the regular Software Defined Talk podcast feed - marketing!

This week’s paper is sent in by Matt Ray: “Continuous Automation for the Continuous Enterprise.”

See detailed, typed analysis in the show-notes, find the paper attached, and enjoy the podcast in your members only RSS feed.

We look at the 2017 Gartner PaaS Hype Cycle, just released. See more show notes, though not very detailed here.

As always, thanks for being a supporter!

It’s another in the Matt Curry discussions sub-series! We discuss how enterprise are shifting over to a microservices approach, or not. As Matt explains:
“A lot of enterprise are trying to figure out how to do microservices…but what they’re actually trying to figure out how to do is small, empowered teams that can independently release.”

We discuss what the deal is with Canadian whiskey and then talk about why we like The Economist.

Your pals, @cowboyd & @cote.

IoT will be big by 2035, a trillion devices driving a $1tn of spend/year, according to this paper. How does one come to that figure, and what exactly is IoT. Even better, how would you put together the business case to justify doing an IoT project? Well, you’ll get an average of 5x returns, the paper says, so that’s a compelling start. Also, you should buy some ARM chips. Put together by one of ARM’s investor relations people, this paper is squarely targeted a money people interested in IoT and ARM.

See also the raw notes on the paper, references, and more details on the paper. Also, of course, available as a PDF attached here.

This paper in question (attached here, as well) was suggested by Alek.

As always, thanks for being a patron of Software Defined Talk, it's super-encouraging and meaningful. If you liked this episode, perhaps send the attached PDF (as all great white papers are transmitted) and encourage your friends to check out both Software Defined Talk and to become a patron get our exegesis episodes.

Please tell us what you think and suggest any white papers, talks, press releases, or other tech world ephemera that'd be fun to over-analyze!

This week, Brandon and Coté talk analyze Coté's 2016 stump-speech, Not a DevOps Talk. We talk about the process of putting together a talk like this, how it flows, and the desired effect and rhetoric behind it all.

See the extensive show notes and much more detail in the attached PDF or online. There's also a bonus write-up about two of Coté's Register columns.

As always, thanks for being a patron of Software Defined Talk, it's super-encouraging and meaningful. If you liked this episode, perhaps send the attached PDF (as all great white papers are transmitted) and encourage your friends to check out both Software Defined Talk and to become a patron get our exegesis episodes.

Please tell us what you think and suggest any white papers, talks, press releases, or other tech world ephemera that'd be fun to over-analyze!

Let’s finally get to the punchline on this “cloud-native enterprise architect” quest. Here, Matt Curry, Andrew Clay Shafer, and I discuss the things that would motivate such a role and try to chart out what functions the cloud-native EA would serve. This still doesn’t answer the question perfectly, but it does point towards good why’s and even some how’s. We do alright at trying to pull it all together.

Rough Outline

• Business “outcomes.”
• “So what is it you’d say you do here?”
• Marketing and sales for tech decision making - getting budget, etc.
• The EA Strawperson - biz/IT alignment, governance, proscribing stacks
• Risk-modeling and procurement costs get better
• EA as the ROI whisperer.
• SRE book discussions, Pivotal Conversations #58 (Andrew and Coté).
• The technology, and what’s new? AWS RDS as an (almost) end-to-end example.
• So, EA’s jobs to this point: business stuff… versus defining the platform and tech choices (e.g., “use this pagination library or die!”).
• But: product people do the business stuff… you prescribe one platform/PaaS… and then most teams now choose their own stuff above the platform.
• And doesn’t microservices do the rest…?
• Cloud-native EA’s probably spend a lot more attention to process, like SRE-thinking… reducing duplication of services… someone has to have a global, big picture view of everything.
• Being a change agent: boot-strapping to this DevOps/cloud-native/blah blah
• The ultimate goal: the business wants to evolve quickly, try new things to try to grow and defend itself quicker; the IT must work, or, at least, be resilient; I don’t want to pay a lot for this muffler; making it easy to do the right thing. # Background
• Past discussions on cloud-native EA: Pivotal Conversations #72 and Coté Show #36.
• Some rough notes on research.
• Books: Enterprise Architecture as Strategy and Continuous Architecture.

Our first white paper review, starting with "what is digital, and what are/should enterprises do about it. See the detailed notes on it, either in the attached PDF, or in Dropbox Paper.

You should be able to find your members only RSS feed and add it to your podcast listener.

First, thanks to our initial, super-fan handful of members who'll be getting this.

Second, tell us if you like this show, format, and, if so, some studies/papers you'd like us to go over.

Third, if you can help us promote this, and grow membership (or at least envy that you get access to!), that'd be awesome. Feel free to email the PDF around, a link the notes, or even the MP3 if you want to be a bit of a privateer.

What’s the “business” side of enterprise architecture? And how does EA’ing start mapping to DevOps, cloud-native, and all the new stuff? In part one of this discussion, I talk with Matt Walburn about how EA’s fit into The Business.

Rough Outline

• Rorschaching “Enterprise Architect” (EA)
• The bad parts of EA - governance
• “Neo-classical DevOps”
• Matt Walburn - AWS, Pivotal, Target.
• DIY Whitepaper
• Understanding how the business works, the customers (internal and external), what IT is in place.
• What’s the “operating model” for figuring out what IT does: deciding on the plan, finance, HR, translating things to developers.
• Taking out COTS and desktop management - however, commoditizing by going SaaS and IaaS is likely important.
• Figuring out how the business works. Experiences their customers work with that are supported by IT, e.g., eCommerce, mobile device, call-center.
• Figuring out the stick figures and the lines to boxes - user-centric design and thinking.
  • Agile, value-streams.
• Outcomes/What is “strategy”?
• Outcomes - result (monetary, usually) you want. How you’ll achieve it (e.g., sell through mobile apps)… working backwards to the things required (in eCommerce, I need to show a catalog of products, get them to pay for it, ship it, handle returns, etc.)
  • The value of TOGAF and ITIL side-note.
  • How to ferret them out - sit in people with a room and walk back the business, a bunch of questions. “Boardio.”
  • How to “model”/document them - taxonomy.
  • How do these workflows/outcomes align to what the business is doing.
  • Finding duplication that’s wasteful - if we want faster cycle-times, we want to democratize data access (more transparent, well-known data sources, etc.)… not burdened with re-creating. Not so much (or only) an “IT service” that’s duplicated, but sort of logical pools of data. Cost-removal is fine, but also removing conflicts and dealing with conflicts, and removing time-to-understand how all these different things work.
• Define future vision, aka, “what do we [in IT] do now?”
  • First step, how decoupled is the business from IT

Special Guest: Matt Walburn.

In this Drunk and Retired cameo episode: What's up with Irish and Italian names, and why is the Irish brand so much bigger than the Scottish brand? Also, it seems like there's a lot to learn from 2,000 years of Europeans fighting. Charles and Coté quickly meander through all of this.

Links:

• Ongoing topics list — Rolling list of ideas for things to talk about here.
• Gulf Shores, Alabama — A fine place for a beach vacation.
• The Horse of Pride — It’s like _Hillbilly Elegy_, but for 20th century France.
• frontmacs.el — "A package-based, web-centric, customizable, awesome-by-default, acceptance-tested Emacs distribution curated by your friends at Frontside."
• swiper.el — "Ivy - a generic completion frontend for Emacs, Swiper - isearch with an overview, and more. Oh, man!"

Without a build pipeline, you might as well pack it up and go home. Matt Curry and I talk about his team’s experience with putting a pipeline in place and dip a bit into how Concourse and other options, like Jenkins. Matt also goes over some of the common meatware barriers to getting CI/CD in place.

Find us here: @mattjcurry and @cote.

All these cloud-native apps don’t magically figure out how to talk with each other themselves. They need to usual help with finding each other (registries) and then mediating and managing their ongoing “chatter” with one-another (API gateways). While killing time at the Pivotal booth at OSCON, I talked with Spencer Gibb who works on these things and more in Spring.

As organizations get deeper into improving how they do IT, they’re interested in replicating the collaborative benefits of open source communities. Jono Bacon has worked in this space for many, many years and shares some of his experiences here with Barton George and I, while we were all at OSCON. Jono also goes over some of the important parts of community management.

See also the video of this interview.

Special Guests: Barton George and Jono Bacon.

Abby Kearns talks with Barton and I about what's up at the Cloud Foundry Foundation. We also discuss the encouraging people at enterprises (users of software, not vendors) to share more of best/worst practices and knowledge with each other.

See also a video of the interview.

Special Guests: Abby Kearns and Barton George.

At DevOpsDays Austin, 2017, Barton George and I talk with Patrick Debois.

See also a video of this interview.

Special Guests: Barton George and Patrick Debois.

At DevOpsDays Austin 2017, Barton George and I talk with Diego Lapiduz about his experience introducing and managing a cloud platform for the US government and, now, his work at Pivotal.

Special Guests: Barton George and Diego Lapiduz.

Just under a year later, Brian Gregory is back to tell us how changing over Express Script's approach to software is doing. As ever, it's mostly about meat-ware and Brian gives good, casual overview of management tactics to get everyone to the seemingly simple state of doing the right thing.

• Last episode Brian was on, #12.
• In Twitter: @mrbriangregory

Special Guest: Brian Gregory.

Coté doesn't like asking people to do things for him...or people in general.

Links:

• 070: Kubernetes with Joe Beda, The Frontside Podcast — Always be DevOps'in'.
• Paleo French Cuisine - Kindle edition by Chef Alain Braux. Cookbooks, Food & Wine Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com. — Less beans, more fruit.
• Southern Culture On The Skids: Dirt Track Date — Good hold music.
• Frijoles charros - Wikipedia — These are the best means that humanity has come up with to date.
• Pivotal Conversations: Cloud-Native Monitoring & PCF Metrics, With Todd Persen (Ep. 65) — In an open source business, you have to figure out how to ask people for money.
• Show Topics and notes — Our ongoing list of show topics and scratch-pad for shows.
• What Makes People Do What They Do? Freakonomics — The Israeli pay for being late to pick up your kid story.
• The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable — Actually pretty good.
• Maestro's Classic Beard Butter Wisemen's Blend 8 Ounce — This is what Coté uses, but you can feel free to skip caring about beard-care for the first two years or so.
• GitHub - felipeochoa/rjsx-mode: A JSX major mode for Emacs
• Menlo Font

Matt Curry is back! In this episode recorded at OSCON 2017, we discuss the problems with getting people to change, from staff to management, private sector and government.

We hear about the days when Charles was drilling for oil. Also, waffles: "I suffered years of floppy-waffles." We also discuss the deal with kombucha, to no effect, really.

And, as always, Charles' emacs configuration tip of the week.

Links:

• The Wheel of Time series
• Show Topics
• Planet Money buys oil
• There Will be Blood
• Big Oil profit margins — Something like 6-7%
• Avocado Oil
• Whale oil — "nearly 236,000 whales were killed in the 19th century"
• The 4-Hour Body
• Coté's Belgian waffle iron — Oster CKSTWFBF21 1-1/2-Inch Thick Belgian Flip Waffle Maker, Brushed Stainless Steel
• The Wirecutter
• Arlo cameras
• The Sweethome
• Kombucha
• Charles' emacs configuration tip of the week — crux.el
• Austin Emacs Meetup
• Charles on the Emacs.el Podcast
• Coté on The Frontside podcast

When you travel, people have a lot of thoughts about Texas.

Links:

• Skype Call Recorder
• Topic list
• That podcast we used to do
• “You may all go to hell and I will go to Texas.” — It was Davy Crockett.
• "Don't mess with Texas" — “The campaign is credited with reducing litter on Texas highways roughly 72% between 1986 and 1990.”
• O'Tacos — Panini "tacos" in Paris.
• Cooper's now in Austin
• The Splendid Table with Lynne Rossetto Kasper
• Original My Little Pony theme song
• South American pan pipe sounds
• Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio are top 10 US cities, by population — Austin is #11.
• Who invented the breakfast taco?
• Header image of blue bonnets from rubengarciajrphotography

Charles & Coté reboot their old podcast about regular things. Also, a rant on photo management in Apple-land and how terrible enterprise IT news it. Plus, upcoming topics.

Links:

• Screenhero
• Oracle's financials, past three years — They're pretty much "flat."
• The Software Paradox — Among other things, Stephen O'Grady analyzes Oracle's finances and what it says about their software portfolio and what companies are now buying, i.e., SaaS.
• Kubernetes tool saves eBay from its OpenStack woes
• Kara Swisher on the Ezra Klein show
• 451 Research

Having worked in cloud since before cloud, JJ and I talk about what companies are using various cloud things for. We also discuss the conceptual history of cloud, and what exactly he does as a "business development" person at Chef.

You might also know him from his "being an introvert at conferences" talk.

Check him out in Twitter @jjasghar

Special Guest: JJ Asghar.

What's up with all those cash numbers in quarterly reports, and what's the deal with "analyst expectations"? In this brief episode I talk with RedMonk's Rachel Stephens to get some quick tips on what to do with all that stuff.

Find her in Twitter (@rstephensme) and on her RedMonk blog. See also this fine mound of cheese.

Special Guest: Rachel Stephens.

We discuss all the human and process changes needed to do good things with computers.

Special Guest: Bridget Kromhout.

Links:

• Video recording of this episode — The livestreamed recording we did.

Josh Long and I discuss “reactive programming."

Special Guest: Josh Long.

Links:

• Video recording of this episode — The livestreamed video of Josh and I's talk.

Sometimes you have to live with bad code. No one will let you change it. There’s many good and bad reasons, so make sure you’re consciously making the decision instead of accidentally doing it. I discuss some reasons people would keep bad code, how management should think through it, and then some options for coping as needed.

It was Joel, back in 2000, who said not to re-write code.

I recorded this with a Mevo, hence the kind of echo'y noise. See the video over in Facebook where I LIVESTREAMED IT!

Somewhere around just 20% of people do pair programming. It seems to be an incredibly effective technique, according to people who follow it. I go over some of those reasons and micro case studies of organizations having success with pair programming. It seems like the right thing to do.

Links:

• My Pairing column from October at The Register — The comments section is especially good for common sentiment about pair programming.
• Charles Lowell — We used to do a podcast.
• Gartner survey on pair programming adoption — I got the number wrong: it's actually around 20%, not just 10%.
• Mark Ardito goes over HCSC’s astonishing success with pair programming — They thought it'd take 12-15 weeks to get their MVP done, but it actually took 5.5 to 6 weeks we finish.
• Selecting people for pair programming and their enthusiastic response — More from Mark Ardito on HCSC's adoption of pair programming.
• Phil Horowitz talks about how exhausting pairing is at first — At Perforce: "This makes pair programming intense, especially at the beginning. At the end of the first day, I couldn't go home. Before I could face humans again, I put my phone on airplane mode, ignored my usual online accounts, and went to the gym for two hours of self-imposed isolation."

The idea of “failing fast” is popular in DevOps and agile think. That sounds like the exact opposite of what managers at large organizations would like to do. How do you get them to feel all warm and fuzzy about it? Here’s the top three tactics I’ve seen work.

Links:

• Failing fast for the uptight — One of my explanations of "failing fast": it actually means learning; here, a recording of a March 2015 talk.
• Getting Started — picking your first cloud native projects, or, Every Digital Transformation Starts with One Project — My tips on picking a series of small projects to build up internal momentum to do larger ones.
• Digital transformation: the what, the why and the how — The sad donut: "Less than 25% of organizations that participated in a recent 451 Research survey (451 Research VoCUL, April 2016) said they had a well-defined formal digital transformation strategy."

"I get to see your face during this podcast," Matt says as we start talking about SpringOne Platform. Both of us were there and we recap Matt's talk on managing 10 Pivotal Cloud Foundry instances, namely, how they figured out using a Concourse pipeline to automate much of that management. We discuss "how to do the transformation" talks we liked, like the Citi talk.

In addition to some other random digital transformation topics, we also discuss how HR policies are struggling to change with things like pair programming and DevOps.

Subscribe: iTunes, RSS Feed

Show-notes and Links

• Matt Curry: @mattjcurry
• Coté: @cote, cote.io

Libsyn downloads as of 20160912: 643

Summary

I've had a theory that the hard-line philosophy of open source has softened in recent times. Rather than thinking closed source is to be avoided at all costs, I think most developer types are a lot more willing to accept closed source bits mixed in with open source bits. That is, open core has "won." I discuss this topic with my long time pal, Barton George, while at SpringOne Platform, plus the work he's doing in the developer and OSS worlds at Dell.

We also talk about Hawaiian food.

Subscribe: iTunes, RSS Feed

Show Notes and Links

• Find Barton George at bartongeorge.net and in Twitter at @barton808.
• Cuisine of Hawaii
• Coté: @cote, cote.io

Libsyn downloads as of 20160912: 219.

Special Guest: Barton George.

Introducing cloud in a large enterprise can be challenging, and the technology is usually the least of your worries. Matt and I talk with Brian Gregory of Express Scripts who's been working on transforming Express Scripts to a more cloud native approach to IT and tell us some the history and some of the tactics that he and team have been working through.

Subscribe: iTunes, RSS Feed

Show Notes and Links

• Matt's CF Summit talk, "Building a Brand Around a Technology and Cultural Transformation". If you want to go, use the code CF16COTE to get 20% off CF Summit registration.
• Brian Gregory with Express Scripts - check out Brian in Twitter (@MrBrianGregory) or LinkedIn.
• Express Scripts - 30,000+ employees, $100bn in revenue, 20th largest company in the US,
• Starting with a large, mature IT portfolio including lots of assets from M&A.
• Winning over the various stakeholders and groups, including developers and enterprise architecture council.
• Working with legacy services.
• Matt Curry: @mattjcurry
• Coté: @cote, cote.io
• See my promos and discount page for conference discount codes and other stuff

Libsyn downloads as of 20160912: 529.

Special Guest: Brian Gregory.

Summary

Matt and I talk about lessons learned from almost a year of helping transform IT at Allstate. When it comes to scaling up agile and cloud-think the real challenges are in functions other than development, like budgeting, planning, training, hiring, and how the overall IT department is organized. We discuss those topics - esp. budgeting! - and also how to set one's personal expectations about going on the transformation journey. Then we discuss an upcoming column on mine in The Register on the benefits of small batches thinking.

Subscribe: iTunes, RSS Feed

Show Notes and Links

• After a year, the question becomes "can it scale?"
• How do we do: Budgeting, training, hiring, how do we organize teams
• We only plan with good information, not bad information.
• You need to establish an overall vision, but avoid being too specific on tactics. For example, with a claim application, we know the general product, the vertical, the line of business we have roughly an idea of what claims are, who the customer is, and what that experience is like. Delivering a better experience for claims, what that feels like, and how do we measure it - these things we don't know perfectly up-front, so we have lots of discipline around iterating and experimenting to deliver good product.
• How budgeting changes in this small batches approach.
• With a lot of this, you can't talk someone into doing these things up-front. They have to experience it first hand: you have to walk them through it.
• "Sometimes 'nothing' is a big win."
• Coté's DevOps columns at The Register.
• Not mentioned, but good thinking to be had in Larman's Law
• Matt Curry: @mattjcurry
• Coté: @cote, cote.ios of small batches thinking.

Libsyn downloads as of 20160912: 477.

Ernest Mueller has worked helped introduce DevOps in several organizations and has been talking about those stories at two companies he's worked for, National Instruments and BazaarVoice. Matt and Coté hear these stories (mostly at National Instruments) and we discuss how Ernest and others helped transform these companies to the new way.

Download directly, listen above, or subscribe to the feed: iTunes, RSS Feed.

Show-notes and Links

• If we automate, we'll loose our close touch of the systems.
• Being on call, globally, back when there were actual pagers.
• Persuading people to change with tyranny, demo's, trust, and any other tactics you can get your introverted mind around.
• Recording Ernest's talk on all this, from DOES 2015: DevOps Transformations At National Instruments and Bazaarvoice (And Infosec!)
• From DevOpsDays Austin 2012, here's a panel discussion of DevOps at NI.
• Slides for DevOps Transformations at National Instruments and BazaarVoice, his presentation on DevOps at NI and BazaarVoice.
• One of the most comprehensive presentation on DevOps from Ernest and the other DevOps Austin crew.
• Ernest Mueller: @ernestmueller, The Agile Admin blog.
• Matt Curry: @mattjcurry
• Coté: @cote, cote.io

Libsyn downloads as of 20160912: 655.

Special Guest: Ernest Mueller.

Summary

You don't hear too many stories about microservices in "normal" companies. In this episode, I talk with Nate Foreman about microservices-driven work he's been doing with a large enterprise recently. We discuss the goods and the bads of this approach and, overall, how it's working out. It's a good discussion of how all the usual "cloud native" concept actually play out in the real world.

(As you can guess, it's not actually an "action figure" company, we just used that example to mask the actual company.)

Subscribe: iTunes, RSS Feed

Show Notes and Links

• DevOpsDays Detroit
• Nate in LinkedIn.
• Coté: @cote, cote.io

Libsyn downloads as of 20160912: 529.

Summary

What organization could be larger than the US Federal government? Not only that, the chance to transform how software is done in the government has perhaps one of the largest possible impacts of transforming any "IT department." In this episode, Matt and Coté talk with Diego Lapiduz who works in the GSA's 18F organization helping government agencies develop their software in new, more agile and cloud-driven ways. We discuss the background of 18F and the broader government initiatives to transform how software is done and also walk through some of the learnings 18F has had in trying to make such a huge transformation.

Subscribe: iTunes, RSS Feed

Show-notes and Links

• Hiring is the biggest problem around government processes.
• To build empathy and different teams working together, try to tackle a common goal.
• Building credibly by demonstrating that your method works.
• The Ugly Baby Problem - winning over people who think they're already doing it right.
• Measuring success.
• 18F in github. github.com/18F and 18f.gsa.gov.
• Examples of project: NotAlone.gov, The College Score Card.
• Explaining "failing fast" in government. People start to understand it as they have more experience.
• How open source is helpful here, how non-government folks get involved and contribute to the open source projects.
• Diego's recent talk at the Cloud Foundry Summit 2014.
• As more background on IT change in the government, check out this overview from Mikey Dickerson at OSCON 2015.
• Diego Lapiduz: @dlapiduz
• Matt Curry: @mattjcurry
• Coté: @cote, cote.io

Libsyn downloads as of 20160912: 458.

Summary

In this first part of a new series, Matt Curry and I discuss many of the problems with transforming how a large company uses IT. From dealing with businesses cases, the finance department, and changing how the business thinks about using IT, there are numerous organizational change problems to chew on. This launches a new series of episodes in Lords of Computing where Matt and I will talk interview various folks out there who are going through transformation at their company. We're interested in hearing what's work and not worked for them.

Subscribe: iTunes, RSS Feed

Show Notes and Links

• Matt in Twitter, Coté in Twitter
• Avatar pictures
• Excel is a white-collar battering ram.
• Management as programming the orginization
• The Wolf in CIO's Clothing
• Despite a mandate, you have to convince people to do their job
• Leading the Transformation and A Practical Approach to Large-Scale Agile Development
• Negotiating a business case - finding out what's "really" needed.
• "The Business doesn't know what they actually want."
• Getting the business to understand programming, and vice-versa.
• Having a roadmap vs. documented features - flow vs. fully specified goal

Libsyn downloads as of 20160912: 558.

Summary

After catching up about movies and OpenStack, John and I discuss how difficult it is to properly integrate acquired companies into the larger company. We also discuss what VCs are looking for to say yes now: a good team, it seems.

Subscribe: iTunes, RSS Feed

Show notes and Links

• Aloha.
• State of OpenStack talk.
• Andrew Shafer's To Whom it May Concern
• If A rounds are easy, what are investors looking for?
• The three P's: people, process, philosophy/priorities
• Toyota Kata - Learning to See.
• That Matt Curry/Andrew Shafer conversation, the original Hangouts video.
• DevOpsDays DC talk on government DevOps use?
• DevOpsDays AMS up next

Libsyn downloads as of 20160912: 500.

We discuss how you (slowly) introduce new technologies into the market by looking at past tech cycles John has gone through. We also catch-up on the Craft conference and John’s travels in Europe.

Show-notes and Links

• The Bruce Sterling Web 2.0 European Conference Circuit
• Craft conference Prezi
• Consul, Teraform, etc.
• Johnaform
• How do you install the thing, how do you fix the thing?
• DevOps Weekly email list.
• The 5 why's of cloud
• Damon and those guys.
• Simon Wardly's evolution of practice
• "The practice of using the tool is novel."
• When the wave finally broke
• Defined vs. constrained by the tools you use.
• Learning to See
• How does this compare to the rise of VMware?
• Don't be constrained by billing.
• How are you measured?
• Bruge, beer museum, churches, chocolate and beer

Libsyn downloads as of 20160912: 337.

Summary

It can take a long time to get "the mainstream" to use new technologies. One would assume that this would be true in supporting the government, as Robert Brook does in his day job. In this brief episode, over the din and bottle collection activities at Monkigras, I catch up with him on just that topic and how he tries to manage being a change agent for the benefit of the UK Parliament.

Subscribe: iTunes, RSS Feed

Show notes and Links

• Roland R09 vs. the Zoom H4n.
• Monkigras 2015, London
• Robert Brook, working at the UK Parliament. What does this guy do exactly?
• Reducing friction in the existing systems. How does one do this?
• Digital enterprises as seen in my "Why I'm working at Pivotal blog post."
• Fun things like "Is my MP sitting?"
• Jon Udell on getting iCal files from the library

Libsyn downloads as of 20160912: 289.

Summary

While he's in Paris for the local DevOpsDays, John and I discuss the next big step for DevOps: getting "The Business" involved to tie-break the process deadlock. Plus: the Dutch are delightful!

Sponsor: The Cloud Foundry Summit is coming up on May 11th and 12th, in Santa Clara. It's a great chance to dive into Cloud Foundry ecosystem both on the technology side and to hear how organizations are using Cloud Foundry to become Software Defined Businesses. Register now with the discount code COTE and get 25%, which will bring the price down from $250 to about $187.

Subscribe: iTunes, RSS Feed

Show-notes and Links

• The Dutch are DevOpsing, brother.
• John at DevOpsDays Paris. What's it like there?
• Fighting "them" when it comes to DevOps. Docker is the Millennium Falcon
• The Why guy
• The Wall of confusion, 2010.
• Where's "The Business" when it comes to DevOps and cloud? Are they showing up?
• "What kind of company do you think we are?"
• Chad Dickerson Duke interview on Etsy.
• The Goal - make sure you read it.
• JPMC says the nerds are coming.
• Flash Boys: DevOps Cafe Episode 58 - Zoran Perkov
• A Sense of Urgency
• The Halo Effect - you can't just learn from success.
• Good to Great
• This week's pic: my old Apple and work-Dell side-by-side.

Libsyn downloads as of 20160912: 298.

Summary

How do you go from playing baseball in France, to getting shot at, to covering the tech industry? I talk with Alex Williams about how he did just that and eventually launched thenewstack.io, one of the more interesting, new technology news sites.

Sponsor: The Cloud Foundry Summit is coming up on May 11th and 12th, in Santa Clara. It's a great chance to dive into Cloud Foundry ecosystem both on the technology side and to hear how organizations are using Cloud Foundry to become Software Defined Businesses. Register now with the discount code COTE and get 25%, which will bring the price down from $250 to about $187.

Subscribe: iTunes, RSS Feed

Libsyn downloads as of 20160912: 281.

What does it take to demo a cloud software? It's not easy! Also, lamb considered and memories of barcampESM. Our first re-boot of the IT Management and Cloud Podcast, renamed the Lords of Computing Podcast.

Your friends, @cote and @botchagalupe.

Subscribe: http://feeds.feedburner.com/LordsOfComputing

Show-notes and Links

• Lamb and DevOpsDays Mama Mia.
• Memories, barcampESM - the first IT Management and Cloud podcast episode.
• The need for Disaster Kitchen Apps - getting to better demos for cloud infrastructure
• The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs - always have an enemy!
• The Anti-corruption layer pattern for integrating with old IT.
• Netflix documentary of VCs, Something Ventured - Ben Thompson essay on venture capital and tech companies.
• Our plans for the Lords of Computing Podcast.

Libsyn downloads as of 20160912: 633.