Michael Cote
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Articles by Michael Cote
Platform Engineering ROI: What it costs to build your own platform
Platform Engineering ROI: What it costs to build your own platform sponsor-vmware-tanzu,sponsored-post-contributed, Ubaid E. Alyafizi for Unsplash+ What it actually costs to build your own internal developer platform over five years, and why most “we’ll just build it” pitches are pricing the cheap version.
Your Enterprise AI Strategy Must Start With Java, Not Python
Your Enterprise AI Strategy Must Start With Java, Not Python sponsor-vmware,sponsored-post-contributed, Featured image from Pixabay. It’s prediction season. Nowadays that means reading a lot of fanfic about how AI will replace your entire org chart by Q3 and, even more, why you’ll fail because you haven’t completely upended your organization. No AI ROI? That’s your fault for not changing the soul of your enterprise culture.
Driving Platform Adoption: Community Is Your Value
This is the third part of a series. Read also: Driving Platform Adoption: The Missed Opportunity of Marketing Driving Platform Adoption: Is Swag The Secret to Getting Developers to Use Your Platform? New paradigms and technologies succeed partly through the strength of community. We’ve seen this repeatedly, first in the web development world, open source, DevOps and now platform engineering. Communities are valuable to the success of your platform and your business.
Is Swag The Secret to Getting Developers to Use Your Platform?
This is the second in a series. Read also: Driving Platform Adoption: The Missed Opportunity of Marketing Driving Platform Adoption: Community Is Your Value “Do you have a T-shirt yet?” our colleague DaShaun Carter asks platform teams. That seemingly frivolous question actually cuts to the heart of platform marketing: brand identity.
Driving Platform Adoption: The Missed Opportunity of Marketing
This is the first in a three-part series. Read also: Driving Platform Adoption: Is Swag The Secret to Getting Developers to Use Your Platform? Driving Platform Adoption: Community Is Your Value After spending the last decade studying enterprise platform initiatives, we keep encountering the same story: technically excellent platforms struggling with low developer adoption. Platform engineering teams are befuddled.
Playing D&D With AI: The Agentic AI Developer's Achilles Heel
To make good agentic AI apps, developers need to get good at what they’re terrible at: documentation. That’s because Agentic AI apps use a lot of tools, and to understand when and why to use those tools, the AIs need good documentation. I’ve been coding Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers to help me play solo Dungeons & Dragons with Claude, as I covered in my previous article on this topic. Playing D&D with just the AI robots is fun and delightful.
If AI Can Play Dungeons & Dragons, It Can Run Your ERP
I’ve been playing a lot of Dungeons & Dragons again for the first time in 30 years. Not with humans, but with AIs, and I’ve mostly used ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. Surprisingly, playing D&D with the AIs turned out to be the perfect way to understand what agentic AI actually is and how it might work in real-world enterprise software. Enterprise systems are complex. So is D&D.
Evolving From Pre-AI to Agentic AI Apps: A 4-Step Model
Evolving From Pre-AI to Agentic AI Apps: A 4-Step Model sponsor-vmware,sponsored-post-contributed, Featured image by Ilya Lukichev on Shutterstock. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we’re in an “AI or die!” era right now. Every organization seems desperate to figure out how AI fits into their business strategy.
Enterprise Grade Platform Engineering at Charles Schwab
This blog is based on "Navigating Market Storms by Leveraging VMware Tanzu and VMware Cloud Foundation at Scale," a panel with Schwab at Explore 2024. Charles Schwab manages 35.6 million brokerage accounts and executes 5.49 million trades on an average trading day. The company manages $9.41 trillion in client assets. As you'd expect, they're a highly regulated company spanning several businesses including banking and personal investing.
Community is Mission Critical for Platform Engineering
"Platform Engineering in the Wild with Tanzu Platform for Cloud Foundry," Jürgen Sußner (DATEV eG) and Nick Kuhn (Tanzu), August 2024. This is what makes platform engineering new and interesting: "If I consider them [developers] as customers, I have to ask them, what should I do better? How can I do better?
Is "Cloud Native Security" Worth Paying For?
Written by Michael Coté and Rita Manachi A version of this article appears in The New Stack. Securing cloud native environments can be overwhelming, especially if you're building your own stack from the hot-pot bar of the CNCF landscape. You'll fit each of those projects together, making sure you find and follow all the security to do's. Then you customize them to behave however you need - after all, that's why you built a custom stack, right?
Custom Cloud Native Stacks: Worth the Tradeoffs?
Securing cloud native environments can be overwhelming in any situation. But that’s especially true if you’re building your own stack from the big buffet line of the CNCF’s Cloud Native Landscape. First, you need to fit all your chosen projects together, making sure you find and follow all the security to-do’s. Next you have to customize them to behave however you need — after all, that’s why you built a custom stack, right?
Cloud Native Platforms Continue to Payoff, But There Can Be Too Much of a Good Thing
For the past five years, we’ve been asking people how they use cloud native platforms in our State of Kubernetes surveys, now renamed the State of Cloud Native Platforms. This allows us to get a sense of how well these platforms deliver on their promises. The promise of platforms is to improve how your organization builds and runs its own software: getting faster releases, higher quality with more security, and freeing up developers' time to focus on the actual apps instead of the infrastructure.
Two methods for designing better, more developer friendly platforms : @VMblog
By Michael Coté, developer advocate VMware Tanzu I'm still not entirely convinced that we've landed on a definition of "platform engineer." A few years ago, I felt like I turned a corner and all but ran into a big smoothie made of SRE, kubernetes, centralized developer tool groups, and Internal Developer Portals (IDP). We're still tuning the ingredients as we drink the smoothie. Thankfully, for us crotchety DevOps people, DevOps is still a must-have for the smoothie.
How to Survive and Thrive in a Big Company: Tactics and Practices to Manage Your Time and Relationships
Publisher(s): O'Reilly Media, Inc. ISBN: 0790145433008 Read it now on the O’Reilly learning platform with a 10-day free trial. O’Reilly members get unlimited access to books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers. Advancing in a large organization requires more than just being good at your job. Many of these skills and practices are not obvious and seldom taught.
Navigating the Challenges: Planning for Rising Electric Vehicle Adoption
A lot of factors are part of a well-planned community development: where the schools will be located, how many homes will be built, the exact number of Starbucks required to give residents their caffeine fix and more. But many cities and states are having to now take into account a new factor: the rate of electric vehicle (EV) adoption. Electric utilities are in the midst of planning for long-term effects of rising EV usage and how the increased load will affect the grid.
Planning for Future EV Charging Demand Requires Sophisticated Forecasting by Utilities
Posted to 1898 & Co. in the Grid Professionals Group image credit: Adam Young on the Burns & McDonnell campus Project Manager | Management Consulting, 1898 & Co. After graduating with an electrical engineering degree from Kansas State University, Joshua gravitated toward the utility industry, eventually working with utilities to bring power on-site for...
The Art of Platform Marketing: You’ve Gotta Sell It
“How do we get developers to actually use our platform?” This is a question I’m often asked. A good first step is to make sure you take a product management approach and build an app platform that developers actually want to use, making sure that the golden path to production is not only useful but, well, fun. However, there is a second step that is often overlooked and misunderstood by platform teams: good, old-fashioned marketing.
Tools Make the Difference for Kubernetes Success
The way to solve Kubernetes complexity is with tools. Ironically, this also creates a lot of complexity because there are many options for each type of tool and, thus, an unfathomable number of combinations. Each stack of tools first requires unique integrations, and then there's ongoing work to keep all those tools integrated and working together. It's no wonder, then, that we've seen a strong willingness for organizations to spend money on Kubernetes tools.
Tanzu What’s New - May 12 2023 Edition | VMware
“Do not pray for an easy life, pray for the strength to endure a difficult one” - Bruce Lee Check out Tanzu Product releases for this week and release notes for more details.
Kubernetes Benefits for Developers and Business in Large Enterprises
If you’re interested in Kubernetes, chances are extremely high the reason is because you want to support developers, by using Kubernetes to run the applications they write for your organization. There are other use cases, such as data analysis and running enterprise applications, but most Kubernetes workloads are there to help run an organization’s custom-written applications. So how is Kubernetes helping to reach that goal? Is it actually benefiting developers and the organizations that use it?
Multi-Cloud, Still an Actual Thing after All These Years
The 2023 edition of VMware’s annual State of Kubernetes report is now out, and it’s got a lot of great information about how organizations are using Kubernetes today, as well as the benefits and challenges that go along with that. In this blog post, I’m focusing on one area: multi-cloud. The concept of going multi-cloud is less contentious than it used to be, now that more and more non-tech enterprises are using lots of public clouds.
Survey Shows Companies Moving away from DIY Kubernetes
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We’re putting the finishing touches on the State of Kubernetes 2023 survey. This is the fifth time we’ve done this survey, and I’m always eager to see the changes over the years. Among other findings, this year I’m seeing an emerging best practice: a decrease in DIY Kubernetes. People building Kubernetes on their own went from 28% in 2020 to 16% in 2023, according to the survey. That was already low three years ago, but it’s more or less dropped by half in the years since.
By Michael Cote, Michael Coté, Richard MacManus Verified, David Eastman, Chris Preimesberger Verified
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The New Stack
Verified
News & Analysis of Tools for DevOps Professionals
DevOps automation simplifies software implementation, which is a priority for IT teams. To reduce developer input and create an efficient development process, organizations are turning to automation tools to reduce manual operations. To be effective, DevOps automation tools require coding skills. Since the first hammer was forged during the dawn of the Bronze Age nearly 5,000 years ago, the creation of simple tools has always driven technology.
Platform Engineers: Developers Are Your Customers
If you’re an organization building a platform engineering team, that team’s new customers are application developers. This may seem obvious, but it’s a huge shift from the usual way infrastructure builders think about their job. The shift from delivering a service to managing a platform as a product is significant.
Platform Engineering Improves Developer Experience, Tech Layoffs Solve Enterprise Talent Gaps
Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2023. Read them in this 15th annual VMblog.com series exclusive. By Michael Cote - Developer Advocate, VMware Tanzu With the continued rise in Kubernetes adoption and a looming recession on the horizon, organizations in 2023 will need to shift their thinking regarding how best to weather the storm.
Monolithic Transformation: Using DevOps, Agile, and Cloud Platforms to Execute a Digital Transformation Strategy
If your company is looking to create new business models through digital transformation, this practical ebook will help get you started. High-powered tech companies and traditional enterprises have dramatically improved business processes through cloud-native technologies and product-centric software techniques, enabling them to react to market changes much faster. Michael Coté from Pivotal explores the strategies and tactics you need to transform your in-house software creation capabilities.
The Road to Total War - Anglo-German Rivalry, 1880-1914
This thesis is an analysis of the growing Anglo-German rivalry over the years between 1880 and 1914, leading up to the First World War. It discusses several aspects of the competition, from economic and strategic, to cultural and social, to political and diplomatic. The main argument is that the peacetime antagonism between Britain and Germany was as total as the war which it helped to bring about. The rivalry was ubiquitous, being reflected in all facets of society and geopolitical relations.
Don’t Let Developer Toil Affect the Business Value of Your Apps
It is no surprise that the world today is driven by apps. Organizations all over the world are basing their business goals on their capacity to integrate new apps quickly, and they need to constantly reimagine how they interact with and communicate with their consumers and employees to fulfill changing expectations. To do this effectively, businesses need to operate at a high level of speed and agility. But in many cases, this isn’t happening.
The 7Rs of Modernisation – a roadmap to app transformation - JAXenter
Turning modernisation into an exciting task © Shutterstock / GEMINI PRO STUDIO Modernisation requires a healthy dose of elbow grease – not quite as simple as tapping ‘update’ in the app store. We’ve found that there are seven different ways of modernising any given app. Here they are, ordered from least to most effort, risk, and value: Retain, Retire, Rehost, Replatform, Refactor, Rewrite, and Replace.
Kubernetes Crosses the Chasm, and Other Lessons from the 2021 CNCF Survey
Key Takeaways The latest CNCF survey claims that 5.6 million developers are using Kubernetes in some way or form. Based on the 23% of developers worldwide that are using it, Kubernetes has crossed the chasm into the mainstream "early majority" category. With 39% of respondents implementing "serverless" of some kind or another, this is clearly the year of serverless ... as it’s been for the past 5+ years.
A Better Kubernetes Experience for Developers is Key in 2022
As more and more organizations run Kubernetes in production, they’re finding that application developers are having to focus too much on Kubernetes and not enough on their actual applications. This year, I predict that we’ll see a major shift to remove this friction to speed up application release cycles and still get all the benefits of Kubernetes.
People Run Everything, Everywhere: Highlights from the O'Reilly Cloud Adoption 2021 Report
Hey there, it's your survey analysis pal: me! O'Reilly recently published its 2021 cloud survey, and it’s got some great insights into cloud usage, migration, and strategy. Here are three things I thought I'd look at more deeply: Across industries, organizations are using multiple clouds in a very real way. Organizations seem too ambitious about the number of applications they'll be able to move to the cloud in the next year. Security is an interesting, now often discussed type of cloud lock-in.
DevOps Is Fed by a Tools Culture Loop
Michael Coté Michael is a staff technologist at VMware and co-host of the 'Software Defined Talk' podcast. The concept of DevOps is about 10 years old at this point. Throughout that span, new tools and practices have pushed the field through each phase of evolution. Automation tools like Puppet and Chef started the whole thing, followed by cloud infrastructure, new and reinvented monitoring and log tools, Git and build pipelines, containers and Kubernetes.
Beyond DevOps metrics – technical, business, and culture metrics for the software defined business by Michael Coté
In this talk, you’ll hear about three types of metrics that organizations are using to get better at building and running software. You know, those organizations that are doing the “digital transformation” thing so that they can run their business with software that isn’t ancient and lame. Be like a tech company! We all know development and operations metrics like lead time, error budgets, and mean time to repair. But we don’t focus on business metrics enough.
The Truth About Kubernetes: the Benefits & Challenges
Organizations are continuing their Kubernetes buildouts and increasing production use, according to our 2021 State of Kubernetes survey. The challenges around skills and security still exist, but reaping the benefits of better resource utilization and speeding up the software release cycle have become a critical priority, as more organizations rely on software as the primary way of interacting with customers.
Three ‘success’ metrics for software development
December 2, 2020 Michael Coté Being agile and working towards a collective goal will enable companies to achieve, and measure, true success. How do you measure success? What metrics should you look at? This article looks at three qualitative ways in which companies can look to define their success metrics. The race towards digital transformation has picked up pace during the pandemic.
SpringOne 2020 Talk Picks
DevSecOps for US Federal agencies (FIPs, STIGs, auditors, AOs, and all that) When Federal people ask to secure a DevOps app creation and delivery process, what do they mean? Chris Willis joins Coté in this episode to answer that question with a #vmwaretanzu customer example. Read More A Checklist for API Security with Wim Remes Even seasoned developers will benefit from this API security checklist that covers documentation, authentication, and design implementation patterns.
Software Defined Talk: Joyent, LinkedIn, and Habitat
2016-06-22 06:32:04 Software Defined Talk: Joyent, LinkedIn, and Habitat With two surprise acquisitions this week we have a lot of synergies to discuss on this week’s Software Defined Talk podcast. We cover Samsung picking up Joyent, and Microsoft buying LinkedIn. We then discuss a recent article trying to explain what’s going on with private equity buying tech companies. Then, we discuss the big news from Chef we’ve been waiting for: the announcement of Habitat.
Cloud Orchestration in the House - Software Defined Talk #016
2014-11-18 16:21:36 Cloud Orchestration in the House - Software Defined Talk #016 As AWS re:Invent spit out more news than we could track, we also go over the happenings at CA World, identity management, the OpenStack Summit, and, as always, our recommendations for the week. Joining on the show this week: Brandon Whichard, Matt Ray, and Coté.
Software Defined Talk 48: The Strategy Burden
2015-11-09 13:52:44 Software Defined Talk 48: The Strategy Burden No one really knows what the deal with “private cloud” is. There seems to be a coffin, but as we discuss on this fresh episode of the Software Defined Talk podcast, it’s unclear how far we are from the final nail. We also discuss HP splitting, HP shutting down their private cloud, a slew of small acquisitions, and Matt Ray’s take on the recent OpenStack Summit in Tokyo.
Software Defined Talk: Too Old for the Buffet
2016-08-08 08:36:07 Software Defined Talk: Too Old for the Buffet With Matt securely setup in Australia, we get the low-down on the down under. We also discuss rumors of HPE and Rackspace going private and catch up on Verizon buying Yahoo. Listen above, subscribe to the feed (or iTunes), or download the MP3 directly. With Brandon Whichard, Matt Ray, and Coté. Show notes HPE on the block?
Bootleg Recordings of VMworld 2015 Panels - Software Defined Talk #43
2015-09-12 07:24:41 Bootleg Recordings of VMworld 2015 Panels — Software Defined Talk #43 We figure out our Walmart greeter job for our never-retirement. After a discussion of a new type of expert witness we cover Chef’s funding, VMworld and Photon, and what’s left to do in SSO and identity management. http://traffic.libsyn.com/cote/SoftwareDefinedTalk043.mp3 Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes, RSS Feed. Show Notes If you like video, see this episode’s video recording. The meme expert.
Vegas Blinders, re:Invent, Curious George, and Dell/EMC - Software Defined Talk #46
2015-10-11 14:39:58 Vegas Blinders, re:Invent, Curious George, and Dell/EMC — Software Defined Talk #46 Vegas Blinders, re:Invent, Curious George, and Dell/EMC — Software Defined Talk #46 Calling in from Las Vegas, Matt gives us the rundown of this year’s re:Invent. Looks like Amazon is maintaining the course to go after everyone.
Picasso Didn’t Have Markdown, or “Matt Ray’s DevOps World” - Software Defined Talk #44
2015-09-23 17:24:55 Picasso Didn't Have Markdown, or "Matt Ray's DevOps World" — Software Defined Talk #44 What went wrong with Evernote? We winsomely open up discussing that and the inevitable markdown commentary. We also discuss the incomprehensible (to Coté) nature of security, HP shedding 30,000 jobs, and beef. http://traffic.libsyn.com/cote/SoftwareDefinedTalk044.mp3 Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes, RSS feed. Show Notes If you like video, see this episode’s video recording.
Burn the Boats Because We’re Inventing Self-Driving Cars - Software Defined Talk #025
2015-03-07 08:00:09 Burn the Boats Because We're Inventing Self-Driving Cars — Software Defined Talk #025 Burn the Boats Because We’re Inventing Self-Driving Cars — Software Defined Talk #025
Eating elephants one bite at a time, large scale application modernization with Rohit Kelapure
Securing Cloud Applications, the book, with Adib Saikali Security for developers has always been…complex. When you re-design for and move your application to the cloud, there’s a new set of security concerns to work with. Adib Saikali’s working on a...
Why Large Organizations Trust Kubernetes
Large enterprises clearly trust Kubernetes, according to our most recent State of Kubernetes survey, and are using it for applications in production. And while there are barriers to adoption, they're worth it for the productivity and resilience benefits that using Kubernetes yields.
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