Tanzu Talk

Sausages and Cycling - Coding with AI/LLMs, microservices vs. monoliths, kubernetes vs. application developers

This week, Coté and Ben talk about using AI for software development, and general text use. They check in on Kubernetes usability for application developers, and give their takes on the recent microservices vs. monoliths dust-up. There’s a bonus discussions about cycling in London and regional sausage taxonomies, right at the beginning to whet your appetite.
You can also watch the video of our recording as well.
 
Mentioned items:
The platform talk Coté gave at DevoxxUK.
Steak chips.
Sausage and mustard chips.
Running the AI stuff locally.
Kuberenetes tool usage.
Kubernetes benefits for developers and the business.
Amazon streaming moves from serverless.

The Smells of the Kubernetes Community

We discuss what we did at KubeCon, the recent VMware State of Kubernetes 2023 survey, and the smells of platform engineering maturity. Also, some tips on daily logging and to do list management.
Here is the original video recording if you're into that kind of thing.
As ever, with your three friends: @egrigson, @benbravo73, & @cote.
Links and Notes
The 2023 State of Kubernetes Survey is fully out. The new component is looking at the benefits of Kubernetes. Distro/service marketshare - VMware is steadily climbing up, yay!
Coté's multi-cloud usage take. Including a great chart from IDC on where workloads are living. More: we need to start thinking of "multi-cloud" as just meaning "all the computers and stuff we run." Putting the word "cloud" in there makes it seem like magic cloud stuff, when all we are/should be talking about is the entire, heterogeneous IT estate.
Something like 60% of people say it makes developer more productive, even more say there are operational benefits (64%). The developer productive part is confusing given the middling "shorten developer release cycle" figures over the years. But, whatever!
10% drop in developers owning and managing Kubernetes.
Related, from McKinsey engineers: "As a rule of thumb, if developers spend more than, say, 10 to 20 percent of their coding time on container configuration, failover, security, or other infrastructure issues, it makes more sense to tackle these issues via CSP services instead, so that valuable time and skills can be reserved for functionality that serves the business."
An idea for how many apps are running in Kubernetes, finally! While writing blog posts for the survey, I found this: Gartner estimates that "by 2027, 25% of all enterprise applications will run in containers, an increase from fewer than 10% in 2021." We're somewhere in between there in 2021, likely closer to 10% than 25%.
KubeCon EU 2023
What's Ed's take - Edward Grigson actually did some work (unlike social loafers, like Coté)! E.g.: "FinOps for Platform Engineering – I spoke to their CEO at KubeconEU and got a demo. Looks good – very flexible and easy to use." Found three new vendors: Palantir Apollo, Mia.Platform, Port / Cortex.
Jon Collins @ GigaOm: lines still being drawn around the components, WebAssembly. Best of breed vs. integrated platform. Robot: "The cloud-native world is maturing, and a multi-platform architecture will help build better manageability and governance in the future." And, Robot summarizing his platform engineering take: "Platforms are important, but the author argues for the need for multi-platform engineering (MPE) to understand and manage multiple clouds, stacks, and toolchains.The MPE group should be focused on empowering and enabling its users, acting as a product group for the entire organization."
Daniel Bryant on dev stuff, full blog post.
VMware schwag review: people love metal water bottles, not so much bottle openers. There are a lot of gambling service people in EU crowds.
Software Defined Talk at/on KubeCon. Though I was one of the three people (t)here, I don't really remember what we talked about except the Dirk bread claw. So it goes with me and podcasts.
Ben was not at KubeCon EU (sadface) but his YouTube picks are:Evolution of WASM: Past, Present, and Future - Bailey Hayes, Cosmonic
The State of Backstage in 2023 - Ben Lambert & Patrik Oldsberg, Spotify
Choose Your Own Adventure: The Treacherous Trek to Development - Whitney Lee & Viktor Farcic
How to Blow up a Kubernetes Cluster - Felix Hoffmann, iteratec
Platform Engineering Strategy stuff: Platform Maturity Model paper, draft here.

How to change mainframe apps into microservices, modernizing mainframe applications with Fouad Hamdi

In this episode, Coté is joined by Fouad Hamdi, to discuss a project he worked on to modernize of a 30-year-old mainframe app. Fouad provides a comprehensive breakdown of how he and his team at VMware Tanzu Labs approached this task, migrating a system relied on by over 3 million users from a mainframe infrastructure to a microservices architecture.
Read the original blog post they discuss here.
Details
Fouad and Coté delve into the initial goals for mainframe modernization, the constraints, and past attempts at modernization that shaped the path they took. Fouad shares how they managed to migrate safely and at a rapid pace, all while maintaining the existing system's functionality.
Listen as Fouad walks us through how the team  leveraged the power of event storming workshops and Domain Driven Design (DDD) to understand the business domain and identify key areas for modernization. They discuss the challenges of working with older technologies like COBOL, and the strategies they used to bring business knowledge to a new generation of developers.
They also explore how the team navigated complex issues such as coexistence between the old and new systems, and how they incrementally built the new system to avoid any disruption of service. Fouad shares invaluable insights into the importance of context in these modernization efforts, and the lessons they learned along the way.
Whether you're a software engineer, an architect, or a business leader looking to modernize your own systems, this episode is filled with practical advice and lessons learned from modernizing a mainframe application. Tune in to learn from Fouad's experience and to understand how you can apply these lessons to your own mainframe modernization journey.
More
Read the original blog post.
Fouad’s Blog.
Fouad in LinkedIn.

Creating the business case for platform engineering, Kerry Schaffer

A lot goes into getting a platform up and running. Before you even get to that point, though, you’ll need to put together a business case and the plans for your platform. In this episode, Coté talks with Kerry Schaffer about that business case, but also about the role of developer happiness and platform marketing. We also discuss getting more women into IT and Kerry’s work with the Women’s Security Alliance.
 
Find Kerry in LinkedIn and Twitter.

What’s in the Tanzu Application Service 4.0? With Nick Kuhn

With Backstage, more Windows support, support for MySQL 8.0, and numerous other improvements, the new release of the Tanzu Application Service is packed. In this episode, Nick Kuhn walks us through the highlights of the Tanzu Application Service 4.0.
Nick goes over the 4.0 release in detail in a blog post.
Everything you’d want to know about the Tanzu Application Service.
Find Nick in Twitter and LinkedIn.

The 3 Types of Kubernetes, and, Better Developer Productivity Improves Everything

We should start distinguishing between on-premises kubernetes and public cloud kubernetes. Also, it looks like improving developer productivity improves everything.
That’s what Ben and Coté conclude after look over a recent analyst report ranking kubernetes distros/services and a survey on developer experience efforts in organizations.
The two reports:
Justin’s report at GigaOm, also here.
Forrester Consulting’s survey on platform engineering.
Here's the video of the recording if prefer that kind of thing.

orly? ops people actually talking with developers. Also: Spring talk.

In the DevOps, cloud, platform world we're told that operations people starting working closely with developers. This week @thecote been asked "does that really happen?" several times. We discuss the orly on that. Also, Ben and Coté talk about the Spring Framework community.
Here is the video recording this episode if you prefer that kind of thing.

DevSecOps in Practice with VMware Tanzu - A Discussion with the Authors

What is VMware Tanzu? I get asked this question a lot and, you know, I try to explain it. If you want a really good explanation, you should check out a new book on the topic, DevSecOps in Practice with VMware Tanzu. It’s expansive and in-depth, not only on the parts of Tanzu, but also the theory, ideas, and ways of working that Tanzu embodies.
Cora Iberkleid joins me (Coté) to interview the authors of the book, Parth Pandit and Rob Hardt.
Here’s the book from Packt, in O’Reilly Safari, and in Amazon. 
Here’s a longer description of the book from the publisher:
As Kubernetes (or K8s) becomes more prolific, managing large clusters at scale in a multi-cloud environment becomes more challenging – especially from a developer productivity and operational efficiency point of view. DevSecOps in Practice with VMware Tanzu addresses these challenges by automating the delivery of containerized workloads and controlling multi-cloud Kubernetes operations using Tanzu tools.
This comprehensive guide begins with an overview of the VMWare Tanzu platform and discusses its tools for building useful and secure applications using the App Accelerator, Build Service, Catalog service, and API portal. Next, you’ll delve into running those applications efficiently at scale with Tanzu Kubernetes Grid and Tanzu Application Platform. As you advance, you’ll find out how to manage these applications, and control, observe, and connect them using Tanzu Mission Control, Tanzu Observability, and Tanzu Service Mesh. Finally, you’ll explore the architecture, capabilities, features, installation, configuration, implementation, and benefits of these services with the help of examples.
By the end of this VMware book, you’ll have gained a thorough understanding of the VMWare Tanzu platform and be able to efficiently articulate and solve real-world business problems.
What you will learn
Build apps to run as containers using predefined templates
Generate secure container images from application source code
Build secure open source backend services container images
Deploy and manage a Kubernetes-based private container registry
Manage a multi-cloud deployable Kubernetes platform
Define a secure path to production for Kubernetes-based applications
Streamline multi-cloud Kubernetes operations and observability
Connect containerized apps securely using service mesh
Who this book is for
This book is for cloud platform engineers and DevOps engineers who want to learn about the operations of tools under the VMware Tanzu umbrella. The book also serves as a useful reference for application developers and solutions architects as well as IT leaders who want to understand how business and security outcomes can be achieved using the tools covered in this book. Prior knowledge of containers and Kubernetes will help you get the most out of this book.

Cloud Repatriation and Low CI/CD Usage

There's been a lot of talk about controlling cloud costs by bringing workloads back to the datacenter, you know, private cloud. The three of us discuss what's going on here. Also, surveys consistently show that only about half of developers are doing continuous integration (CI), and fewer are doing continuous delivery (CD). Can that be real? Ben doesn't think so. We also discuss how secure software supply chain thinking might change the tight coupling between CI/CD, making that slash back into a wall between the two: CI|CD. Also, Ben reveals his cartography background.
 
If subscribe to our show, you'll definitely be interested in the golden path series of talks this year. Check them out, for free, at SpringOne.io. Also, the CFP for SpringOne 2023 is open now, apply!
As ever, with your three friends: @egrigson, @benbravo73, & @cote.
Here's the original video with some bonus content on listening while jogging.
Links discussed:
Technology Chiefs Seek Help Wrangling Cloud Costs.
O'Reilly cloud adoption survey, 2021.
State of Continuous Delivery Report: The Evolution of Software Delivery Performance, Feb 2022.
Ben's kid's YouTube Channel: Wibbles Wobbly Life!

You were told to install kubernetes, now what? A talk with Robert Kloosterhuis of ITQ

You've been asked to build a cloud native cloud platform. The developers need some containers, probably some orchestration. So, what do you now? In this episode, Coté talks with ITQ's Robert Kloosterhuis about just this topic. Drawing on Robert's background as a virtualization admin and now, the Tanzu portfolio of stuff, they go through the type of thinking and work ITQ does with customers. Also, some tips on getting around Amsterdam for the people coming in for KubeCon EU.
Check out the live recording in video form, if you prefer that kind of thing.
Link & Notes
Robert in Twitter, in Mastodon, and his blog.
ITQ's Managed Modern Apps Services.
Kubernetes Community Days Amsterdam 2023.
VMUG NL.
KubeCon EU.
Cloud Native Rejekts.