Cook eggs in olive oil
You should olive oil to cook your eggs with. I was visiting with some friends of our several years ago, one of them from a Houstonian Greek family. He was making fried eggs for us, and poured a big pool of olive oil into the skillet. “What the hell?!” I said in my head, “you’re cooking that in olive oil?” I asked him. Sure, why not? he said, I always do.
For whatever reason, this was mind-blowing. I’d been cooking eggs in spray-bottle oil and butter when I wanted to treat myself - if I was going really crazy and wanted to Arkansas it I’d use left over bacon grease like my grandma.
But, since then, I’ve cooked eggs and just about everything else in olive oil.
A, free, 24 hour developer-fest ONLINE
Next week, on Thursday March 19th there’s a big online conference we’re doing. Check out the agenda: It’s chock full of developer, DevOps, Spring, & kubernetes. We’ll also spend a small amount of time explaining what all this Tanzu stuff is, of course.
It’ll be better than real work!
Original programming
Kubernetes in large organizations
I wrote up an analysis of the State of Kubernetes 2020 survey that VMware did.
Some highlights:
- 59% of large organizations use Kubernetes in production
- 53% of those users have shortened development cycles
- 40% cite lack of internal alignment as a challenge when selecting a Kubernetes distribution
- 64% run Kubernetes on-premises
Check out my analysis for a deeper dive into those findings, and, of course, be sure to get your eyeballs on the full report.
Software Defined Talk: Self quarantining with half-baked bread
This week it’s just Brandon and me - I get a little crazy in the opening monolog, then we get down to business:
Most of our time is spent discussing the joys of eating half-baked bread. We also discuss what a Tanzu is, kubernetes konspiracy theories, and Oxide the new private cloud hardware startup…wait, wut?
Twitter Threads: Working from home, cloud native at Liberty Mutual
- I jumped on the bandwagon and spooled out my tips for working from home. Just one really: don’t forget to work.
- This is a really good interview with three folks from Liberty Mutual about how they’ve improved their SRE, DevOps, and developer experiences. Of course it’s with VMware Tanzu (Pivotal) stuff! I tweeted some excerpts.
A reward
As a thanks for subscribing, I setup a discount code for my book Digital WTF: you can get a copy for free! I also put this link on the “thanks for signing up” email, so if you wanted to help out with my ego-boosting, tell your friends and enemies to subscribe if they want to get a copy of the book for free too.
Tanzu
VMware (where I work) had a big announcement on this past Tuesday. To sum it up, you can use kubernetes in VMware-land now, built into the VMware’s virtualization infrastructure. I haven’t (ever?) spent the time to understand all the components and layers of the VMware stack, so you’ll pardon me just referring to the large, enterprise stack of software as “VMware.” The point is: if you’re organization uses VMware (which is likely the case) kubernetes is available to you.
This is a big deal in the ongoing “make kubernetes boring” throught-train. Building kubernetes into VMware makes it widely available and, indeed, “boring” in that it’s ubiquitous and available - at least the VMware distro. If you’re a developer using kubernetes in a large enterprise, you should ask the ops people about this. In my experience, ops people are very interested in giving developers what they want - with some tricky word-play there: what developers want, but also what operators want. I think this is one of those time when the two wants are the same.
The next step, after kubernetes is “boring,” is to go back to focusing on developer and DevOps tools: getting your organization to focus on product development and driving the business with software, making developers more productive, ensuring that real CI/CD is in place, and so forth.
With VMware, IT operators can provision Kubernetes clusters just as easily as they provision virtual machines. Developers are able to access conformant Kubernetes clusters through the native Kubernetes API. And the CIO now has the flexibility of a next-generation platform that can support both virtual machines and containers, the mixed workloads that make up modern applications.
Tanzu Kubernetes Grid is embedded into vSphere 7 with Kubernetes as part of VMware Cloud Foundation 4 to deliver Kubernetes clusters as a service to developers.
The headline news is that vSphere now has native support for Kubernetes, so you can run containers and virtual machines on the same platform, with a simple upgrade of the system that you’ve currently standardized on and adopting VMware Cloud Foundation.
Helping out operations people:
This also addresses another key constraint of Kubernetes success: the skills gap. With minimal additional training, your vSphere administrators are now able to support Kubernetes and the modern applications run in containers.
A deep overview of the announcements. Also, from a Scott Fulton.
And, included in general coverage a summary of and take on the previous container and kubernetes portfolio at VMware/Pivotal.
The Magic Mushroom at Fredy Fryday
Review governance often
Often, governance and rules turn out to be folklore, their origins long forgotten, even non-existent. Here’s a technique to expose that, and then start building up more helpful governance.
For example, we ran a leadership program with a set of senior leaders in a large, private-sector organization. They felt frustrated about the ways the organization constrained them from innovation, from collaboration, and from having the time and space to focus more on creating what they want for the future rather than reacting to what they have now. As they discussed these limitations together, they realized they each had a different sense of what, exactly, the limitations were. Each person had created in her mind a set of the limitations that came from outside, and all of them had been acting to ensure that their own staff lived inside those boundaries. Upon collective reflection, though, they discovered that none of them had a really clear sense of what the actual limitations were in the organization. Listening to their different perspectives on this day was boundary shattering for them; they discovered that most of what they were railing against was a phantom, a rumor, or other ghostly sense of what was allowed or not. They realized that they, too, had been unconsciously creating these boundaries for their people, even as they disliked them for themselves. Collectively, they began to play with creating new boundaries—with their eyes open and on purpose—that would enable some of the things they had previously experienced as constrained.
— Simple Habits for Complex Times: by Jennifer Garvey Berger, Keith Johnston
Relative to your interests
If you’re interested in seeing these links daily, I post them as I find them on my blog. There’s also some longer commentary for many of them that I add there that I don’t include below, for example here and here.
- Developer experience: why we have a Cloud Native practice at ITQ
- Separating the writing from your emotional state - ‘My writing epiphany — which arrived decades into my writing career — was that even though there were days when the writing felt unbearably awful, and some when it felt like I was mainlining some kind of powdered genius and sweating it out through my fingertips, there was no relation between the way I felt about the words I was writing and their objective quality, assessed in the cold light of day at a safe distance from the day I wrote them. The biggest predictor of how I felt about my writing was how I felt about me. If I was stressed, underslept, insecure, sad, hungry or hungover, my writing felt terrible. If I was brimming over with joy, the writing felt brilliant.’
- Java 8 considered great - ‘Upgrading Java is, like, taboo for some reason it seems. “Java 8 Is Still the Standard”’
- Six page memo HOWTO - ‘Avoid digressions and pedantic detail. This isn’t a thesis assessment, stakeholders will trust the writer with some details if they are show they are being honest about addressing all sides of the problem.’
- Building machines for (private) clouds - ‘It might seem a little crazy to launch a server company in the middle of a historic transition between enterprise computing models.’
- The virtual commute home - ‘When my alarm goes off, though, I don’t go right upstairs to talk to my family. Instead, I have a sacred “commute” time, where I take half an hour and read a book, play a game, or have a nap to reset, so I am a pleasant human when my family sees me. I think I learned this from my dad, who would always come in the door and disappear into his room for 20-30 minutes after work. ‘
- Brand names - ‘ “We realised that having something that makes it feel like it could be a person actually kind of lets your guard down a little bit and lets you have that deeper connection,” ‘
- Cloud native infrastructure benefits - ‘First, it is a vibe in the market. Customers ask for it and with the latest version of VMware vSphere you can purchase the install base. This is perhaps a somewhat boring explanation, but there is just market demand for containers and K8s.... Second, standardization: it is the de facto standard in the market for cloud-independent, infrastructure hosting. To me, it’s excellent a standard is being created and the best thing is: it’s a stablestandard.... Third, we see increased operational efficiency for our customers with a more self-healing, desired state infrastructure. So, you need fewer people to operate it and you achieve more speed for your developers.’
- Tim Anderson’s Tanzu coverage - ‘But VMware’s biggest asset is its existing strong relationship with enterprise customers, and if it can hang onto that, it will keep them despite the move to public cloud and k8s.’
- Engaging people more in online meetings - ‘Never go longer than 5 minutes without giving the group another problem to solve.’
- Kohl’s omni-channel progress, according to Kohl’s - ‘Buy Online, Pick-up In Store (BOPIS)’
- Always start with the business case, the strategy - ‘before you get wound up to upgrade, stop, take a breath, and ask the right question first: Where is our business going, and how should we transform? The ERP decisions will flow from this and not vice versa.’
- Product managers have little corporate power - ‘There are six challenges that I see: first, product people usually don’t have any transactional power. They cannot tell the stakeholders and development team members what to do; they cannot assign tasks to them; and they are typically not in a position to offer a bonus, pay raise, or other incentives.’
- Bad tools get bad results - ‘Lack of access to robust digital tools in the workplace can frustrate employees who see productivity hindered by inefficient systems. An excess of workplace tools can be overwhelming too, and can alienate for millennial workers. When tools fail to elevate workers, output suffers.’
- Ask open ended questions, for stories - ‘“Instead, ask about people’s interests. Try to find out what excites or aggravates them — their daily pleasures or what keeps them up at night. Ask about the last movie they saw or for the story behind a piece of jewelry they’re wearing. Also good are expansive questions, such as, “If you could spend a month anywhere in the world, where would you go?””
- Talk Less. Listen More. Here’s How.