Cloud-native .Net, all the Great KS’s, and Travel

Episode 91 · 41:32 · SRT · archive.org · all Tanzu Talk

Hello listeners. Something went crazy haywire with my network during this recording. I tried to go through and edit what I could in and out and fix some things up, but there's still unfortunately plenty of things left over. So hopefully that doesn't impede your enjoyment. And with that, enjoy the episode. Well, here we are again. It's been a long time. I had some live from the showroom for recordings. You know, did you, you know, it's okay if you didn't, but did you happen to listen to the last episode with Josh Long? I need to, I feel bad listening to episodes that I'm not on. So I have to get past that and just listen to those. Well, just for the completionist out there, I had to go through a lot of thinking. So Josh and I, I think we talked about Singaporean and Malaysian food for like 15 minutes. And I was thinking, you know, this isn't, you know, on the face of it, uh, related to computers and maybe I should chop that up and put it at the end. But, uh, as usual with my fine editing skills, I did not do that. So I don't know if, if, uh, if some listener had to, uh, if, if it's suffering to hear about melee and Singaporean food, then maybe you should really examine your life and what your interests are. But on the other hand, I apologize about that. And, you know, also while I'm here apologizing, I listened to it and, uh, you know, I can come off as a little bit of a conversational bully, but I was, I was just trying to draw out from Josh a few facts about chicken rice and Malaysian food. So I didn't mean to sound like I was doing that. He's, he's a sweetie, you know, no, no, uh, no bullying needed for him. So how about yourself? What do you, what have you been up to? Yeah, I know. We haven't talked a little while. So, uh, you know, we're just talking to ourselves, forget the podcast. Uh, yeah, between a lot of business travel lately is in London, you're traveling more than me, but every other week for the last couple months been on the road, but good customer things, good conferences, you know, it's, uh, all productive stuff. Oh, that's exciting. So I, I noticed, I don't know if we've talked about it here, but you,

you have some new talk you've been giving called abstractions, which I'm pretty sure is not about Q-tip, uh, the, the nineties rapper, but what's, what's, uh, what's the arc of that talk? What goes on with it? That's funny. Uh, I think it's the question. Well, the question I'm trying to answer is how do you decide what runs where? Cause I mean, I think it's easy enough for someone to say, we've got some news items on Kubernetes, but you know, everything's not going to go there. Everything's not going to go in functions. Everything's not going to go in applications or VMs or hardware. So what are the honest conversations about what things are optimized today for given abstractions? How do you even make decisions about, do I need to move from A to B? Can it be happy here? Does it need to go somewhere else? So the talk I've been doing for some customers and some other settings is just kind of what are those abstractions? What are the things that those are good at? And therefore kind of what workloads maybe would you put on still bare metal today versus jamming into a container versus sticking into a function? And it seems like that goes over well. Cause a lot of people are still trying to figure that out. There is no one massive flow chart, although maybe you and I would have fun building that, but there's no massive, like choose your own adventure for deploying it at this point. It's unfortunately to some extent based on what do you have? Like I can't say, Hey, put this in functions. If you have no functions today platform. So sometimes it's also based on what are your existing investments, what are your existing skills, what kind of things are you aiming for? But there is a, you know, it's harder than it was before. You can't just jam everything in a VM and call it a day. And that's exciting, but also means for a lot of companies, there's a lot of confusion and it's almost departmental. It's almost this group likes this. So they put things here. This group likes that, which really kills your operational efficiency really kind of kills the rotation ability for teams to bounce between different teams. Cause every team has a different tool chain. Every team's deploying differently. Like I love the diversity, but at the same time, it seems like maybe some ground rules are helpful. That does sound good. I was just talking to someone about, uh, how you select where to put workloads

between all the clouds and stuff yesterday. So, uh, I should go check that out. You know, that also makes me think, I don't know if you have any role in doing things like this, but we should, uh, we should set up some sort of like, uh, recording people giving their talks so people can see them. Cause I, I, you know, it would be nice to see a recording of you giving that talk and all these other people have talks and you, you're sort of like, uh, as a presenter, you're dependent on the conferences you go to, to like film that and publish it. But you know, we could just like log into some zoom thing and, uh, try to be on our best sort of presentation behavior and present something that, that would, that would be exciting. That's probably something I could just do on my own instead of making someone else do it. It'd be good. Yeah. And then we can have, we can have a little series. There you go. You know, add some code save value. Uh-huh. Exactly. Finally do something around here. That's right. Well, uh, so there's been, I mean, there's been a lot of news, uh, since last we talked, but I think, I think there's a good little selection of it. Like as always, as always, as we talk about on my other talk, software defined talk, there's always a bunch of Kubernetes stuff going on. And it seems like, uh, I think, I think all the, uh, all the public KSs, so to speak, the Kubernetes service or container services are, uh, those of like generally all GA'd, right? Like Amazon has it and Azure has it. I assume Google's had it for a long time, of course, but it seems like, uh, there's full GA of everything. If you want to go all public cloud with that. That's right. Yeah. And then it's only in the last week or so, depending on when you listen to this, but, uh, and your service for Cooper or EKS recently, then Microsoft the next day shipped the AKS, the Azure Kubernetes service. And they're very different. It's not the same thing, but as you mentioned, Google's had there since 2014. So they've clearly been, uh, been the grandfather of hosted Kubernetes at this point and probably still the most mature and the most feature rich, but Azure has got a good story here. They're actually managing the whole thing. It's easy to build out the full environment, scale environments, integrates with different

Azure services. So it's a pretty good looking offering. Of course, like any, there's things that are kind of specific to each cloud to make it easier to manage and deploy them, but they're still deploying vanilla Kubernetes, which is great. Amazon's is a little different. It's, it deploys a control plane for you. You know, the things that run Kubernetes, like the API server and the database, but then you as a user would build out all the worker nodes that actually run your containers. And then you would manage those. You would patch those. You would upgrade those. So there's a different level of responsibility on each of these services, services, different kinds of provisioning experiences. Of course, different integrations as Amazon integrates with Amazon things and Microsoft integrates with Microsoft things, Google with Google things. And that may be fine if that's where you're putting them all, but it's interesting to watch each, each one of these has good offerings. We still see obviously a lot of customers asking for things that stripe across all of them, which is why pivotal container service PKS seems to be doing well. Yeah. I mean, there is that. Yeah. You're right. It's interesting. I'll have to go look up there. There must be some, some sort of analyst or blogger or whatever they call them nowadays. Who's done some side-by-side comparison, but it'd be fun to see the choices that each, I don't know what you would call distribution. It's, it's, it's weird to think of a distribution as like a public cloud running service, but it'd be fun to sort of like entertain myself by decoding what their, their strategy is and their, their intentions based on what, what they're implementing. So then there was another, uh, another fun post that was basically like, like an overview of, uh, how to deal with all the updates in Kubernetes, which, you know, I think, I think to give a summary of it, it's a summary you would expect that we learned from the OpenStack world and every other like base layer of infrastructure is like, as long as you keep up with the updates, everything will be fine, which, which I, I think, I think, uh, yeah, there will always be people who, uh, uh, uh, you know, want to, want to incur the sort of like technical infrastructure debt of not updating and patching things, which, which is a poor choice in the longterm. But

in general, that's probably what is a good idea is just to keep things updated. Uh, but it has a, it has an interesting, uh, there's sort of like proof that the overall community spends a lot of time on exactly that, uh, that issue. And then the other part that's interesting to it is the, uh, the sort of changing nature of what, um, uh, you know, what traditionally you would call like long-term support, or I forget all the funny acronyms people use, but there's, there's a slightly different way of thinking about that, that at the moment, at every, if everything in a project like Kubernetes is updating very frequently, the idea of having like a 10 year support not only sounds a little weird, but it also might not really apply anymore. If, uh, things are vibrant enough to be, to be updating frequently. I, I never really spent that much time like decoding who's written this and therefore what their biases are, but there's been several lengthy posts on Kubernetes recently from all sorts of, uh, little, little vendors, or I don't know if they're little, but all sorts of parties, but there's, there's, there's a whole bevy of them at the moment. Yeah. On your, uh, your first piece of updates, I think what we've been seeing more and more, and you might see this too, is Kubernetes isn't like SharePoint. I don't have one customer. And so what we're seeing with a lot of these companies is they've got, you know, one or two, and then they're planning on expanding to dozens, even a couple of people going to hundreds because it's departmental, it's different regions, it's different debt, test fraud. So it's one thing to patch one thing. And that might even be complicated as you patch monthly, as you patch quarterly on, you know, minor upgrades, but what happens when you have four or five updates a quarter across 50 things strategy, that's not her works. You're going to kill your team. So as you think about, okay, if my future is a federated set of clusters, what is a proper upgrade strategy when I can't just count on, let's just do this annually, all hands on deck. This might be a continual update process across dozens or hundreds of things that seems like it requires rethinking it. And that's good. It's a good conversation to have, but people are, I think, getting a little surprised by the work involved in that. So, uh, yeah. So another thing, like, since you're always the, uh, the .NET people, I think we have

three Richard related .NET things to go over this episode. And the first one is, uh, we had one of our build packs got updated for, for .NET course. What's the story with that? Yeah. I mean, it's pretty cool that, uh, .NET 2.1 came out the end of May. So new development tools, new things in the framework and library, better performance, better build performance. And one of the nice things is that if you're trying to figure out like, Hey, I want to use the latest and greatest, but I hate when my platform seems to trail by six or 12 months, we do pretty good with build packs. So build packs are, again, these things that take your code, kind of build the slug or build the thing that turns into a container at runtime on the, on the server. And so it builds, you know, pulls in the app server, builds up the, you know, uses the remote or the file system that pivotal provides or the build pack provides really, and kind of just builds your, you know, puts together what's needed to run your application. So arguably, I don't even think arguably, cause I check this all the time. If you want to run the latest version of node JS, that's typically in a build pack versus even in the public cloud. If you're running the latest versions of Java, Spring, Ruby, go node, all these things, build packs are great. We just updated the .NET one. So if you're building .NET 2.1 apps, the build pack now will recognize those and build it accordingly. So the nice thing is you, you always feel like you have not just the current version, it always includes the last few as well, but it's nice where you don't feel hamstrung by your platform when you want to use the latest and greatest. So if you're a .NET developer, you're in great shape today. And, and, you know, to broaden it a little bit, like what, uh, how would you characterize like the, the, the cloud native .NET world at the moment? There's always a lot of like, as we all sorts of, all sorts of platform infrastructure stuff. And we're always familiar with like, uh, what's going on in the Java world, but, uh, what are they doing over there? Are they, are they still doing a lot of .NET or are they all like Mike, you know, uh, modern day Microsoft polyglot or, uh, what's, what's their lives look like if you're a firing up visual studio all the time or whatever it is that those kids over there

are using? Yeah. I mean, now you're using classic visual studio still on windows. I have visual studio for Mac on my desktop, same with visual studio code, the free cross-platform editor. So development tools have, have gotten better. You're seeing with .NET core, this option to run .NET apps on Linux or windows. And for a lot of folks running on Linux gives them those benefits of more mature, mature DevOps tooling, better automation than what's traditionally been there in a windows environment. So .NET does finally have choice of where they run stuff, which is nice. They've got choice of new languages and framework pieces like .NET core using things like steel toe for microservices. You've got finally good first party support in all the clouds, which was not the case just a few years ago. So not just the Azure cloud, which you would expect does a good job with .NET, but that Amazon, you know, works hard to get .NET developers. Google works really hard to get .NET developers. So I like seeing that they're trying to provide software development kits, SDKs. They're providing first party support in some of their paths like services or even in their function platforms. So you're seeing better places to run things, better ways to build things, kind of better tooling for the desktop. So I'm not seeing myself as any sort of wholesale abandonment of .NET. I think .NET Core has helped. I think that over the last few years, Microsoft was almost training .NET developers to also learn things like JavaScript and purposely hedge their bets just in case, you know, maybe they weren't going to do as much with .NET, but they've doubled down on that. And in the meantime, all these devs have hopefully picked up some other front-end skills that are helpful as they're building, you know, better modern apps. So it's a good ecosystem. It seems to be growing. I feel like you're teeing me up for stuff since I do have a meetup in Austin in a couple of weeks to talk about the .NET renaissance. I'm doing it for a customer as well in a kind of a keynote session, but then doing a meetup that evening. I'm writing a book on the topic. So I'm starting to dig in on this a little more and hopefully helping these .NET devs

modernize their existing stuff. Yeah. You know, as, as, as ever, you're like the .NET guy. Yeah. It's just, it's just, it's in the water supply up there. It is. That's unless you've got like a Brita water filter, like you just end up doing .NET all the time. They put something in there. Another thing I'm always, that's right. Another thing I like, I'm always interested to get a sense of is like, so what, and, and, and it might just be like, like the answer is everything, which is fine. But do you think there's any like particularly interesting characterization of the types of application and workloads that .NET people do? Yeah. I mean, it's, you know, traditionally it's all of it. It's, it's batch jobs, it's running services, it's web apps. It's obviously front end forms application sitting on a developer's desktop or a user's desktop, or even sold as software that people open up. But you look at some of the biggest sites on the internet, like Stack Overflow, right? It's a classic .NET application that runs at some of the biggest scale on the internet. So you've got everything from APIs and web services. I think traditionally, it's been a lot of web apps, especially the last 10 years, web apps, APIs, backend components, you know, those sort of pieces. And then, you know, more and more, there's more obviously JavaScript and things on the front end to, to power that, that the front end doesn't matter as much as the, as it did before for some of those other languages. So I see a lot more, a lot of backend components, a lot of APIs, but then still plenty of things just cranking out in the data center jobs that move data between services or restart things or process things from an FTP share, things we don't like to talk about, but things that still probably power a lot of business. Yeah, that was, that was always my, my impression of a substantial amount of .NET applications is there. I don't know how to characterize it, but they're just like internal corporate apps that, that people would make. And as you point out with like stack overflow and other stuff, and I forget, I mean, does, does eBay still .NET stuff? Maybe they changed over from that, but there's plenty of big, like large sites to do it, but it does seem like because of the ease

of use of getting, you know, um, creating an application and deploying it and managing it all, all being into the windows stack that it was, uh, it was a good choice if you just needed to make a, uh, small, but valuable internal application for things, which I guess, I guess it's still the case, but then. Yeah. But you make a good point there though. I mean, we should remember that the reason that it's probably not the favorite tool of startups and a lot of these folks is because there was always this tax of a having to run on windows. And that was a licensed component. Visual studio was never free. So if you were just kind of get started, that's why .NET has typically been associated with enterprise because those are ones that had agreements to use the tooling. They were running windows at scale. They're running on the desktop. That's arguably a reason that most popular DevOps tooling like chef and Ansible and, you know, Terraform and these things came really late to windows is because the initial people were solving problems on Linux because that was the quote unquote free and open source stack. So hopefully .NET core and some of these other things are making .NET developers feel like, Hey, I could just pick this up and run completely free on Linux and use my SQL and use things that aren't tied to windows, but that just wasn't the case for the last couple of years. So, so then also, uh, and, and, and yeah, we'll get back to the, uh, it'll be, hopefully I'll be able to make it to the thing in Austin. That'll be fun. But then also, uh, uh, racks the new service for, for doing co-location, which I guess like, uh, I think, I think for many years now they've sort of moved to the, I don't know if anyone calls it like enterprise cloud anymore, but to sort of high touch cloud services. So having, having more, uh, you know, a co-location service makes a lot of sense for them. Yeah. And I spoke to an industry analyst a few weeks ago and kind of asked what are they seeing in co-location? Like, why is this actually rising? You would think that co-location would suffer in the cloud era. And the one thing the analyst told me is actually it's, it's spiking in the cloud era, because for a lot of companies who are shutting down their data centers, they move whatever they can to public cloud. The rest goes to a co-location provider. So that might not be long lived.

That might be something that only is good business for another 10 years. But in the meantime, this represents something that I don't own anymore. And so if I'm a rack space, as you say, is good for high touch, you know, quality service. Pivotal has a good partnership with them. But a lot of companies trust them for managed services, managed hosting. It's also great to say, hey, take my other random stuff that's filling up my data center. Can you just run that for me? So I think that's a pretty smart, savvy move on their part. We'll see how much it takes up. They quote my old friends at 451 to your point of saying that there's a, oh, a compound annual growth rate. That's crazy of 12% through 2020, which I always have to remember that this is 2018. So 2020 is not as far out as that it used to be as far out as it used to be in like 1996, which I think temporally, my mind's like locked on that year. Very confusing. But yeah, that is only like, what, two and a half years. But still, it is that it is sort of counterintuitive that you would see people moving there. But it gets to what we're talking about earlier where, and I guess I encountered this a lot, a lot of, a lot of, you know, CIO types and the level right below. Oh, they're trying to figure out as boring as this phrasing of it sounds workload placement and like where they would put things and how to manage that. And it's almost like as you're going over the rack space stuff, I was thinking it's like, maybe not terribly, but interesting, interestingly, like analogous to like all the outsourcing talk that people had, I guess, a couple of decades ago now. So hopefully, it should turn out a lot better than that. Of course, it is. It is interesting to think about the way the way that cost controls and the way that you can optimize your costs based on the simple act of where you run your software is, versus, I don't know, not. So as, you know, as we like to do in the middle of news. So there's only, I think we only have like two events to speak to. I was trying to think of if there's anything, I've been traveling a lot, but I don't think I have anything in the near future. So as you mentioned,

you're going to be here in Austin on July 10th at the Cloud Native Meetup, talking about an expanded version of a little bit of what we just did, I guess, about how things are going on in, in with .NET and the Cloud Native space at a meetup. I will put a link to it there in the show notes, but that's, that's not too, not too far from now. But what's, what's, what's further of a little preview to cap it off that you would give people? Yeah, I'll do some demos and some, some discussion. But again, I think the main focus is, what do we mean by, you know, even Cloud Native in the .NET sense? What are some, some new anti patterns? Sometimes we go through times where something seemed like a great practice 10, 15 years ago, and now you're, you're scolded for doing it. So kind of what are the newest anti patterns? If you're a .NET dev, what are those places where you do have choices to run? How do you map some of the old to the new though? Because you're not going to go find a cloud service to run your Windows forms applications. That's not the technology that maps over there or certain services. So how do you kind of map what you have? What are the new places to run? What are some of the tooling things that you should be aware of? And kind of how do you get started with what you have? Because as we just talked about, if we assume that .NET is typically associated with enterprises, that means that virtually none of them are starting from scratch. They're all starting with dozens, hundreds, thousands of applications. What do you do with that? Like that, you just can't start over. So what are some strategies and things to think about there? That should be a fun talk. I'm looking forward to putting it together. Yeah, yeah. And the, the people who run it always have good food and beverages. That's key. That'll be nice. Yeah. You know, speak, I mean, another thing, we'll put it in the should bucket. We should have some sort of like little internal summit and come up with some extensive white paper about workload placement across everything. It seems like, like, you know, what, what with us opening up with all these, these Kubernetes things, and then our, you know, existing platform as a service, like, like we have with the pivotal application service, and then, and then everything else. There's, let me see if this is true. This is probably more or less true that there's more, let's call them

platforms, more types of infrastructure and platforms to choose to run your stuff on. I wouldn't say than ever before, but then, then we've had in recent memory, like it's not really, I think for a long time, it was basically like, I'm going to run this on Linux, or Windows supported by VMware underneath. And that's kind of it. Or, or I'm going to run it in like EC2 or something like that. But, but, but I don't admit, I don't know when, when it started happening, maybe in the last, it would probably be most viable in the past three or four years, you could use five if you wanted to be roundy. Does five count as a round number? Or is it only even numbers that are round? I'll give you round. Okay, that's good. I like putting a lot of thought on that. That was good. But, uh, you know, I, I, it would, it would be, uh, I don't know if very many like overviews that help figure out like, you know, just, uh, sorting through that, like, ultimately I think what you would want when you would get this from some of the, uh, what do they call them? The Gartner technology people. Uh, like it's, it'd be fun to have some sort of like spreadsheet that, that you could start with just kind of like characterizing your, uh, your workloads and their attributes and then trying to match them to, uh, to, uh, what infrastructure to run on. And I, I think, uh, was it Matt Stein? He had a series recently kind of related to that. It was called, should that be a microservice? Uh, and, but it'd be a similar thing of walking through, because man, the, the choices are, uh, there's too many of them, too many of them to be an exercise. So I'm sure lots of people could, uh, use help with that. Yeah, no doubt. I think that was Nate. So then he's on microservices. Oh yeah, that's right. I think to your, to what we talked about earlier, it's not even just this sort of sterile, Hey, is your app this big in this language on this OS? There's also kind of what's your current investments in technology? What, what does your team make up? Do you have outsourced development? All those things will factor it in, but I don't think you have to, uh, hedge your bets.

I think we have more ways to run apps now than literally ever. I, the last time I counted, there were nine ways I could run a Java app in Azure. Like that's, you know, that's kind of crazy, but that's just reality. So that's, that's, I guess there's that I was, I wasn't even thinking within each cloud, you have different options. So no, you're right. It probably is more, more than ever. It's not just, it's not just across your various, I was thinking maybe in like the late eighties or nineties, you would have all of the Unix's plus the mini computers and the main frames, early windows, and then like probably other random weird stuff, uh, that you could run it on. But even that is probably a more limited set than like, you know, nine ways to run it on Azure. If you add that up across everything, plus you have all the old stuff, maybe there's no more Univac running, but, uh, you still have, uh, existing older platforms to run things on. Yeah. Well then also, uh, the other event as always to remind people, speaking of choosing where to run the workloads, we have our annual, uh, conference SpringOne platform, uh, coming up September 24th to 27th. It's in the, uh, Washington, Washington DC area, technically in Maryland, which is great because it means you can get crab, uh, to eat. Crabs are great to eat. Always tasty. I actually was in Singapore recently and I got a giant, uh, Alaskan snow crab. I'll have to find a picture of it. Well, I have one. I should remember to link a picture in here. And, uh, one of our, one of our, our, uh, our salespeople, uh, this guy, Dennis over, over there who covers, uh, South Asia, he took me out to, uh, the place you're supposed to get chili crab. And it was amazing. And I was telling my wife this story last week, like they bring, they bring the crab out for you. And, uh, of course I picked the crab up to take a picture with, but I didn't realize it was still alive. It's like a fancy steak place where they present your steak. But I thought the crab had just been cooked and chilled. And so I picked it up, but it was actually a live crab that I had. So, uh, luckily it didn't grab my nose or anything,

but, but it is, if you, if you ever, I think they call it jumbo seafood. If you're, if you're in Singapore, you should go get the chili crab. It's, it's delicious. Anyhow, they don't have gigantic crabs in Maryland, but they are good crabs. And, uh, if you can just bring one platform there, we'll have all sorts of sessions from, uh, technical ones to more how, how, what are the, the, the tips and tricks of transforming your organization? And then of course, some great keynotes and things like that. And, uh, if you use the code S1P200 underscore Coté, you can get $200 off. And hopefully if I get enough people to sign up, I'll get like a nice pin or an extra water bottle or something. It'll be like, uh, it'll be like those old days when you sell popcorn for the boy Scouts and you get like a compass or something like that. Yeah. You'll get very nice, but we recently announced the socks. Definitely. You know, vendors love putting socks out nowadays. Got to get more socks. But, uh, we recently announced like, uh, several, a round of speakers, uh, if I recall, and they look pretty good. So you can go kind of peruse, we'll be speaking there and get a sense of it, but you should come check that out. Should be awesome. And, uh, you alluded to this earlier, but I like the tweet that you had, you know, you're like, ah, it's the, uh, it's the recharging lazy days of summer. So I decided I should sign up to write a book and also record two courses on something. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. You're a pretty productive person. That sounds easy. That's almost like a vacation for you, right? I know. I mean, I was, uh, this morning thinking that I was almost in a cold sweat. Like why did I sign up for so many things over the summer? This seems like bad decision-making, but yeah, for the most part, stuff I enjoy doing. So yeah, I signed a contract to write a book with O'Reilly on modernizing.net apps. So I thought that'd be fun. It won't be a gargantuan 700 page war and peace sort of thing. It's more of a 7,500 pager that, uh, gives people some good plans forward, but that'll be fun. I think I'll have that delivered before SpringOne. Uh, also, yeah, I think I'm doing a couple of plural site courses, one on cloud native architecture, one updating one of my DevOps

courses there and all the new things happening in DevOps. So that should be fun. And then yeah, I've got the, uh, conference, a couple of conferences coming up, speaking at the agile conference on what product ownership really means. And then the end of August, speaking at plural sites conference about what the Voyager space mission can teach you about distributed systems. So that should be a, whoa. Now I assume, I assume that's the actual Voyager space mission and not captain Janeway ship. Yes. The actual, is this the Vigo that's out there? That's right. Is that, is that the one with the, with the golden disc on it? It is with the golden record. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's a, there's a, there's a lot of parallels. When I was reading about it, there's a good movie on it on Netflix that I was just absorbing a lot about the mission. And a lot of it, as always, when I read things, it makes me think of how it reacts to my, you know, relates to my real life. And so there were a number of things that I thought, gosh, that's a good lesson, even from the seventies on how we would build a modern distributed system today. And this would be a fun talk. And sure enough, someone was silly enough to take it. Yeah. That, that, that, that would have been interesting. Maybe this is probably actually documented since it was like a, a government project, but there must've been a lot of thinking going into like, what, what's this gold album going to have on it? Like, it's, it's a, it's a weird sort of thinking to think like this type of, of, of animal you've never, or living thing you've never encountered before will know what to do with this gold record. But what the best part of that, maybe, maybe that's a interoperability point. Yeah. I mean, they literally had six weeks to put it together, which I thought was awesome. So that was like a last minute thing. And then you had to include an actual record player because how, what else are you going to, you know, I'm not going to find some civilization that has a record player sitting around. So it's a, yeah, fascinating. It can survive, you know, millions of years based on, you know, the lack of things in the vacuum of space. So that's pretty wild stuff. Well, there you go. Six weeks. That's the typical enterprise software project cycle.

So I'm sure it went swimmingly. Yeah. So what do you, so, well, well, so I, I, I guess I've been traveling a lot, like, like I've mentioned in other, in other podcasts I do where I'm going to go, I'm planning on moving to a, and, and moving to Amsterdam for a, for two years to like help out with, with pivotal stuff over there in Europe, or I should say a MIA. There's also a whole, that sort of hemisphere. And, and, and to answer the question that funny snarky people often have, yes, my family is moving there too. So I've been doing a lot of work around that. Like I, I just came back from Amsterdam with my wife to check schools and housing and things like that. And first of all, so it's a great place. It's, it's like, I don't think it gets above like 70 degrees there. They use some other funny system to rate the temperature that I'll have to get used to, but it's kind of amazing coming from Austin. You go out there in June and like, you need a jacket or light jacket. It's crazy. But yeah. And then, and then also like, you know, if, if, if a listener's room, the last two episodes, I was in like Singapore and Bangkok. And I got the chance to give a few talks there. I finally gave my Kubernetes for the confused talk and there's a recording out there, but as with the first time, I don't know how you are, but as with the first time that I give a talk, you should probably not watch it. It's probably not good, but it was, uh, it was, it was fun to finally give that talk. And, and it is always difficult. Like when you speak, uh, internationally, like, especially, uh, in, in, uh, you know, a country that maybe doesn't have a lot, a lot of English speakers, although Singapore definitely does. It's hard to like gauge the reaction to stuff, but people seem to like them. And so it was fun to, uh, go over those, those, uh, those two things. And, uh, also, you know, speaking of traveling, like I read this book recently and I know there's, there's a, there's a good subset of people who travel a lot. There's this guy, I never know how

to say his name at Alan DeBotton. I always want to say DeBott, DeBottom, which I think is incorrect. He has a good book about traveling that I read last week while I was traveling. And, uh, it's, it's, I think it's also, if you're like a business travel who, uh, travels a lot, it's good to read because, you know, when you do a lot of business travel, you can sort of get it worn down and, uh, even start forgetting where you are and it just starts to become monotonous, but just, uh, even a read of that book, it'll give you a fun, some tools to have more fun, uh, out, out and about and to take advantage of traveling so much. Like he, uh, he kind of, he has several chapters where he goes through, uh, he talks about like a Ruskin, if you're up on your Victorian criticism. Uh, and he also has, uh, he talks about Van Gogh a lot, but it'll find like some famous character, uh, I guess a real life person and talk about how they're traveling, like gives you a toolbox of things to do when you're traveling to enjoy yourself more. So it's a fun little manual. It's not going to tell you how to modernize your .NET application, but it'll at least, uh, enliven your brain a little bit. And then, uh, I think, I think the other, the other thing that I noticed is, uh, Instapaper does not work in the EU because you know, of, of GDPR or whatever. So, uh, make sure to queue all your stuff up beforehand because you won't be able to do it over there. It's just tragic. Interesting. Yeah. I, you know, I think, I think when you travel, I mean, you're, you're traveling a lot, right? Like how are you, uh, have you, have you, do you do like I do? We're like this morning, it's been like 20 minutes and you realize that yet again, you've been spending too much time on the wire cutter, trying to optimize your travel gear and remind yourself that this always goes nowhere. You don't need to buy a new bag. Yeah. No, I know. How are you packing light on, uh, these recent trips of yours? Are you a heavy packer? Do you check luggage or do you go like carry on only? Well, I don't check luggage. Well, that's, that's, sometimes I check luggage on the way

back just so that I don't have to deal with it. But, uh, yeah, I, you know, I go back and forth. I've traveled, like traveled, done business travel for like, uh, 12 years now. And, uh, you know, at first when you're doing business travel, you're like, you do a lot of research and you're like, I'm going to buy the one backpack. I'm going to get the, uh, whatever the Tortuga backpack and I can just put all my stuff in there. And I'm like backpack person. And that, that's cool. That has its charm to it. But then you're kind of like, this backpack is heavy. Uh, and, uh, it also doesn't last like five days and you got to like roll your clothes up and do all, you got to be like a, like a seal of business travel. It's a little too much, you know, there's no, what was the name of the guy in James Bond queue who had all the exploding pins. Like you got to try to be that guy. And then, and then, and then as, as I'm, I'm currently in this part of the cycle, you know, you vacillate between these two things where I have my, uh, giant, I don't know, however many liter backpack that I've had for a while. But then I also just have like, uh, just, you know, some carry on bag and it's so much nicer to have a carry on bag. You just like put your clothes in there and you can throw a bunch of crap in there. And, uh, and then if you buy stuff or you acquire things, you just put it there. It's just nicer to have like a little rolling bag and, uh, then you don't really carry all your weight on your, your back. That's true. Did you have a chance to use my air vent strategy at all on any of the flights? You're, uh, Oh no. You know, I, I'd forgotten about that, but yeah, I haven't, I haven't really had any, uh, I haven't had need to use that. Let me think. Maybe I will. When I go to, uh, I'm going to Amsterdam and Germany next week. Maybe, maybe I'll have use for that then. Cause I'm having to travel and it's, it's big. We'll see how this goes. I'm having travel on some non one world carriers might have some undesirable seat. Maybe just a person. So maybe I'll have to think back to that. Yeah. Can't wait. Yeah. Yeah. But you know,

business travel exciting. It is. And, and, uh, you know, I was also thinking like, like on this topic, here's, here's a few little tips I would give people. Again, it's not going to teach you how to modernize your applications, but I've noticed, especially traveling a lot recently, there's a few things. One, uh, uh, I wouldn't limit it to any nationality, but people complain a lot when they travel, which is just, you know, you're sort of wasting your time. You shouldn't, you shouldn't spend too much time complaining, especially when there's like long lines. Cause it's just like, there's nothing to be done about it. You're just going to have to deal with long lines. So it's good to just relax and enjoy yourself. Otherwise you're just kind of, uh, nuking your own opportunities. And then, and then here's another, another tip that I like to do when I'm traveling. It sounds really boring, but, uh, I've had some other people experiment with it, which is like, if you get a chance, you should go to the local grocery stores. And, and again, this sounds a little crazy, but a grocery store is a good way to like one, get some food and other things. So that's nice. If you've got a different type of eating, you can have at a grocery store. It's also, if you're like me and you sometimes don't want to talk with people like waitstaff or wait around, I just go to the grocery store and you don't have to talk with people. You can get some, uh, some food. And in Europe, they always have a wonderful selection of cured ham that we don't have here in the U S so if you like ham, you can eat that, but it's also good. You can do a sort of like a grocery store tourism. Like it's fun to see the differences of, uh, things that people have at stores and kind of reverse engineer in your head, what that means. And, and, uh, you can kind of get a sense of other stuff going on by how people run their grocery stores. So, so there, there, there's that something to do. And then, and then contrary to, uh, not wanting to talk to people, uh, I've been experimenting a lot with like, maybe what you should do when you're traveling abroad is just assume that everything will be okay. And just talk to people and just like charge ahead into things. Right. So like it may be a little awkward and weird to take like cabs or walk around or do whatever thing, you know, remove yourself from the safety of

your ensconced hotel and car and airport and things like that. But so far it pays off. You should just go out and explore and adventure things. And if people don't speak your language, they're generally pretty good at hand signals and, uh, usually they'll want to help you out. And then, and then the only other thing I've realized is that, uh, you should always have some pocket change because apparently the U S is the only place where you can use a restroom for free along with, uh, that's probably highly correlated to the fact that we have endless free drink refills. I think if you have a culture that has free drink refills, you need free bathrooms, but, uh, I don't think people consume very many liquids as much as we do, I should say in, in the rest of the world. So bring some pocket change. These are all, that's a, I think, I think that's it. Yeah, that's a good summary. We'll have, maybe we'll have some ongoing travel check-in things, but, uh, I, I think, I think we have some good catching up. I think, I think we're scheduled for an episode next week, a week after that. Well, maybe not next week since I'm traveling, I guess we're still in the same trap, but we'll, uh, we'll be back sometime soon. And, uh, you have any last minute things you want to wangle into here? No, we've got some good guests coming up and I've got some few folks, but lined up, but if you all have ideas of folks, you'd like to hear us, uh, get tortured by the two of us on an interview, please, please send recommendations to either of us. We love making sure we're talking. We can, we can add it to the self-torturing that we do. That's right. So yeah. Who, who do you want to see victims of this podcast? Please let us know. And, and on that note, I'm always, uh, checking out what's on our, uh, our sister, brother, our sibling podcast, Pivotal Insights. And they, they've been having a tremendous amount of, uh, of, uh, guests on there, but I would call sort of like customer interviews, people who are in organizations actually doing things. And there, there's a great amount of interviews they have there and every now and then they have a Pivotal person talking as well, but, uh, it's definitely worth checking out Pivotal Insights. They have all sorts of, uh, interesting stuff over there. I'm not sure how many steering travel insights that they have.

Yeah. I don't know, but they're, they're kicking our tail on regularity work there. So as always, that's right. I don't know if we'll ever be able to catch up. We'll just be the, uh, we'll be, we'll be like the late show after the, uh, the night show, just there for people who are straggling around, just trying to get around. Well, as always, this has been Pivotal Conversations. If you want to find all of the, uh, fine old episodes or, or, or this one as well. Although if you're listening, you've already found it, but you can go to soundcloud.com slash pivotal conversations. And there's the entire, uh, back catalog of episodes. You can go through there. There's lots of interviews we've had with people, customers, Richard and I just entertaining ourselves and hopefully you talking there. And about every Thursday, we post a full show notes, which we'll have a fair amount of links this week over at pivotal.io slash podcast. And with that, we'll see everyone next time. Bye-bye.

Tanzu Talk · 🍕 Get more pizza.