1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:26,800 Well, Cora and I are back again. And in this episode, we talked with Abby, who is part of a working group at the CNCF, and they've been working on a platform maturity model. And as I think I start off with, I really like this paper. I was asked to review it at some point. And I think it's a good, concise way of basically explaining the journey of a platform team. And it has five categories that we'll get into. 2 00:00:26,800 --> 00:00:38,700 And I think it really is. They're still working on it. As Abby says, it's kind of like an alpha version. But I think it's in a good shape to start sharing publicly. What do you think of the conversation, Cora? 3 00:00:38,700 --> 00:00:57,380 I mean, I loved it. So Abby Bangser is a principal engineer, I think it is, at Centasso. And she has just a wealth of experience in this area. And they've been having conversations with a working group where she was describing that they're down to debating about, should it be this word or that word? 4 00:00:57,380 --> 00:01:07,160 So they've really given this a lot of thought and a lot of care into it. And I believe this started at Centasso and then was donated to the CNCF. 5 00:01:07,860 --> 00:01:14,200 And now, actually, it's, again, we like to find publications to talk about on this podcast. 6 00:01:14,460 --> 00:01:21,920 So this document is actually a public Google Doc that anybody could, of course, read and comment on and contribute to. 7 00:01:23,380 --> 00:01:34,820 So if you're interested in this topic, definitely listen to this conversation. And then if you want, you can go give your feedback and contribute to this burgeoning platform maturity model. 8 00:01:35,060 --> 00:01:51,780 Yeah, I think that's a good point is if you end up listening to this and you're interested, I think they're very interested in feedback, especially as we were talking, I was writing down a few people I know who actually are run platforms and have done for a couple of years. 9 00:01:51,780 --> 00:01:57,160 And I need to send this along to them and see what they think, if they're interested in contributing to it. 10 00:01:57,200 --> 00:02:03,080 I'm sure they're busy, but, you know, also, they're nice. Maybe they want to help out with the overall thing. 11 00:02:03,220 --> 00:02:08,580 Well, yeah, I mean, let's let's let's jump into it. It's it's a it's a good interview. 12 00:02:09,040 --> 00:02:10,140 And why don't you introduce yourself? 13 00:02:10,840 --> 00:02:12,020 Yeah, sure. Thanks for having me. 14 00:02:12,380 --> 00:02:18,820 I'm Abby Bangzer. I am based in London, despite my East Coast America accent. 15 00:02:19,200 --> 00:02:30,000 And I work as a principal engineer at a company called Sintasso, working on trying to improve the lives of platform engineers by building Craddix, which is a framework to help build your platform. 16 00:02:30,960 --> 00:02:36,040 And and we caught up a little bit at KubeCon where I let's let's see how. 17 00:02:36,240 --> 00:02:41,520 Oh, I think I think. Well, our mutual friend, I suppose, Paula Kennedy, she emailed me. 18 00:02:42,180 --> 00:02:50,180 This is three, four months ago. I forget when. And y'all have been working on this platform maturity model paper, which I got the chance to look over. 19 00:02:50,280 --> 00:02:56,980 It was fun. And I thought it was just great. It's like nine pages of like a bunch of answers in a, you know, a maturity model thing. 20 00:02:57,060 --> 00:03:07,740 And and and I think, you know, I like a maturity model because it basically like I don't know, I we'll we'll we'll see how how you two would describe it. 21 00:03:07,740 --> 00:03:12,360 But I feel like it adds a certain amount of comfort and surety. Right. 22 00:03:12,380 --> 00:03:17,940 It's sort of like we're going to we're going to go out and like transform things for the better and improve the way we're working. 23 00:03:18,160 --> 00:03:27,940 And like, sure, we need to be a learning organization and discover things and have our mind wide open to the possibilities of our own awesomeness and the failure that drives our success. 24 00:03:28,120 --> 00:03:37,740 But also here's kind of what's going to happen. And it's like it's like and of course, you update the maturity model as you go along in in time and history. 25 00:03:37,740 --> 00:03:46,880 But like, it's it's nice. And I thought I you know, what I I liked about it is, well, among many things is you've kind of gotten it. 26 00:03:47,020 --> 00:03:55,980 You break it out into like I think it's five different sections or whatever you might want to call them, sort of like active clusters of activities you will be doing. 27 00:03:55,980 --> 00:04:02,960 And then like any maturity model, you, of course, want a numeric rating of some sort, which, again, is handy to know to know. 28 00:04:03,200 --> 00:04:12,800 Sometimes numbers are good. I think in our business of transformation, you're supposed to you're supposed to not like any rating system based on numbers, but they can be fine. 29 00:04:13,080 --> 00:04:19,080 I my my my my wisdom on that is bad things are bad and you should do the good things. 30 00:04:19,080 --> 00:04:30,800 Anyhow, what you know, the first after my opening monologue there, like what you know, when when y'all were working on this, like what what was in y'all's head about what a maturity model is like? 31 00:04:30,900 --> 00:04:48,060 What does it represent? Yeah, I honestly, I thought I was going to have my head absolutely bitten off when we started going for asking kind of feedback on this around people that we know around the industry and people that we respect and in platform engineering and around. 32 00:04:48,060 --> 00:04:59,340 And I was surprised how many people were positive about it because I myself am a recovering consultant and I can say that I have seen maturity models go wrong and I've also seen them be really effective. 33 00:04:59,340 --> 00:05:10,960 Right. And I think that's like when you've seen maturity models applied in a really kind of negative way and kind of a stick to beat people in a way to take away people's bonuses or something like that kind of way. 34 00:05:11,060 --> 00:05:15,900 You you tend to get a little bit cautious about just the concept because, as you said, it is familiar. 35 00:05:16,000 --> 00:05:19,160 It is something people have probably seen before, probably used before. 36 00:05:19,300 --> 00:05:36,860 So why then you might say if I if I had these fears, like why did we even talk about a maturity model and I think for us, we were looking at the work that the CNCF working group platforms working group had done with the white paper and said, this is great. 37 00:05:37,080 --> 00:05:45,680 But we're still seeing people, multiple people read the same paper and come out saying what to us sounds like different things. 38 00:05:46,220 --> 00:05:56,480 So we're seeing people read this and go, yes, I am delivering a platform like I have Terraform modules that people can copy and they can make PRs to my repo. 39 00:05:57,200 --> 00:06:08,700 That's self service. And we're like, yes, but is it self service if you have to learn another language, if you have to wait for another team to merge your PR or like give comments on your PR? 40 00:06:09,120 --> 00:06:19,920 Is that truly self service or is that just kind of inner sourcing, which is a step above kind of throw a ticket out into the black void and hope someone responds with something useful. 41 00:06:20,040 --> 00:06:28,940 Right. So I don't mean to diminish the value of those kind of workflows, but they aren't yet kind of what we were talking about when we were releasing that white paper. 42 00:06:28,940 --> 00:06:44,160 And so we wanted to we wanted to address that by having a conversation at one level more concrete that did actually acknowledge some of the things that can detract from a great platform engineering experience and solution, 43 00:06:44,160 --> 00:06:48,360 as well as the things that can support and encourage a great one. 44 00:06:48,360 --> 00:06:58,940 A lot of times you talk only about what a good one looks like and you you get kind of nervous to talk about what maybe is taboo or not maybe supporting a positive outcome. 45 00:06:59,140 --> 00:07:04,140 And a maturity model gives you that space to talk about, like level one is a platform. 46 00:07:04,500 --> 00:07:06,840 Now, is it the most effective you can be? Probably not. 47 00:07:06,940 --> 00:07:09,740 Like here are going to be the impacts of operating at this level. 48 00:07:09,920 --> 00:07:13,500 And so I think that's the power of it that we were talking about when we got started. 49 00:07:13,760 --> 00:07:21,120 It also kind of defines what a platform is right here because the platform is a it's a word that's used in so many different contexts. 50 00:07:21,120 --> 00:07:29,520 So a person who does work at the infrastructure layer to them, a platform is what, you know, automating and adding self-service to what they have a purview over. 51 00:07:29,520 --> 00:07:32,300 And so this is really a way to say we're defining. 52 00:07:32,720 --> 00:07:39,440 And I guess to that point, it seems like developer experience is like the ultimate measure of it. 53 00:07:39,480 --> 00:07:46,040 Right. Like if you could break it down to like one metric or one thing to measure everything, would you say what I guess what would you say that is? 54 00:07:47,860 --> 00:07:49,600 Developer experience is another tough one. 55 00:07:49,700 --> 00:07:54,800 You're just it's just layering more kind of ambiguous terms on top of each other. 56 00:07:54,800 --> 00:08:08,040 But I think most recently there's been that space article that's come out about developer experience being a proxy for product developer productivity because it's hard to you can't measure lines of code or hours worked as productivity. 57 00:08:08,340 --> 00:08:28,340 So I think in the way they described developer experience as something that tracks business outcomes by reducing the cognitive load and reducing the friction on delivering outputs as a developer, as a software engineer, I think, yes, then that is what a platform is trying. 58 00:08:28,720 --> 00:08:34,140 What we the version of platform that we're talking about is trying to do an internal platform is trying to do so. 59 00:08:35,320 --> 00:08:42,700 Yeah. And well, well, let's let's I'll let myself chase this this shiny object or rabbit or whatever. 60 00:08:42,700 --> 00:08:49,040 But like what what do you think of this like obsession with cognitive load as a concept? 61 00:08:49,400 --> 00:08:58,000 Like, I mean, it's not bad, but it seems like in the platform engineering space, like it's a real like it comes up a lot. 62 00:08:58,000 --> 00:09:12,180 And I guess, again, it's not a good situation to have anyone like mentally toiling over something that should be easier, that that doesn't sound like a good way to live. 63 00:09:12,460 --> 00:09:17,300 But like what makes it such a big deal in the platform space that there's a lot of focus on it? 64 00:09:18,760 --> 00:09:20,780 Yeah, it's a it's again layering. 65 00:09:20,880 --> 00:09:28,080 I appreciate you call that out because I think it's again layering those ambiguous terms because cognitive load gets said so frequently, as you said. 66 00:09:28,240 --> 00:09:52,240 Yeah. But actually, there's like three different types and the what we're actually trying to do with internal platforms is is focus ourselves on the cognitive load that is bringing business value is actually the complexity of your business domain that you're trying to tackle and deliver value behind while reducing the cognitive load that relates to just getting the job done or and and understanding your environment. 67 00:09:52,240 --> 00:10:06,760 Right. So people don't always talk about the fact that like we're not reducing all cognitive load as a platform, we're not just making the software engineers job completely rote and uninteresting, we're trying to give them the power to spend their energies and their cycles on the useful stuff. 68 00:10:08,340 --> 00:10:22,220 But I think the reason why it's so valuable and kind of the internal platform side is because I run into two different types of software engineers, there's probably more, but if I'm going to make it black and white, you get the software engineers. 69 00:10:22,240 --> 00:10:38,840 You get the engineers who are like terraform what? No, no, I don't want to help. And then you get the ones that are like, ooh, new language to learn. Sure, I'll learn terraform. They go off in there down their rabbit hole of learning terraform becoming the best infrastructure engineers you have at the company. 70 00:10:38,840 --> 00:10:50,840 And in neither case is that what your company wants them spending their time on. In the case of like, I'm just going to stop working until someone hands me a database because I don't know what terraform is. That's no good. 71 00:10:50,840 --> 00:11:06,900 And in the case of, I realize I'm trying to work on this feature that, you know, our customer ABC asked for, but actually, I want to make sure my terraform is correctly modularized and variables are easy to reuse and is also not what you want them to be working on. 72 00:11:06,900 --> 00:11:21,600 And so I think reducing even the awareness of the implementation of infrastructure is that idea of giving a bit more focus and a bit more opportunity for the software engineers to focus on their problem spaces. 73 00:11:22,000 --> 00:11:28,180 And that's what I think when people talk about reducing cognitive load on software engineers, people are really trying to hone in on. 74 00:11:28,780 --> 00:11:35,940 Yeah, for sure. I mean, kind of like you're describing to visualize it. It's your cognitive load is like a balloon. 75 00:11:36,040 --> 00:11:43,600 Like you're assured a certain amount of it and you just want to make sure the part of the balloon you care about is less full. 76 00:11:45,160 --> 00:11:55,400 Like you want to spend all your time focusing on just like the actual application in the business and not, you know, having a perfect set of variables for how you configure your networking. 77 00:11:55,980 --> 00:12:07,320 It also requires that the platform team understands better what the developer experience is, what they need, how they operate. 78 00:12:07,320 --> 00:12:18,140 So it's funny because like when there isn't a good platform solution, we find developers like the second example you described, the terraform, you know, curious person going and learning infrastructure. 79 00:12:18,340 --> 00:12:28,660 But now if we need a platform that is going to service developers well, we actually need to ask the infrastructure people or the platform people, at least, to understand development a little bit better. 80 00:12:30,020 --> 00:12:30,460 Absolutely. 81 00:12:30,460 --> 00:12:31,260 I guess that's been new. 82 00:12:32,260 --> 00:12:41,660 I don't know how the platform sort of community or demographic has experienced this because I think I see it from probably the developer side still. 83 00:12:42,600 --> 00:12:51,580 But yeah, I wonder how, you know, what that perspective is within the platform community that they've sort of been forced out of their silo to learn about development. 84 00:12:51,580 --> 00:12:55,900 But I guess on that note, also, they've adopted development practices, right? 85 00:12:55,960 --> 00:13:01,000 Like GitOps is an adoption of a development practice to service engineering. 86 00:13:01,200 --> 00:13:02,460 So I guess there's benefits. 87 00:13:02,820 --> 00:13:13,620 If you get the right people going, they might argue that it was an adoption by developers from the operations space with things like Puppet and Chef and those kind of auto reconciliation loops. 88 00:13:13,900 --> 00:13:16,240 So GitOps as a whole is a whole other thing. 89 00:13:17,020 --> 00:13:18,640 But I definitely agree. 90 00:13:18,740 --> 00:13:28,000 I think that the subtle thing that's happening right now is that people who are on platform teams tend to think of themselves as engineers. 91 00:13:28,120 --> 00:13:28,840 They are engineers. 92 00:13:29,000 --> 00:13:33,740 They are writing code, whether that be in a different language than their front-end peers. 93 00:13:33,940 --> 00:13:37,980 It's the same thing as you have front-end and back-end developer-focused people. 94 00:13:38,640 --> 00:13:46,860 And so what you've, in the past, I think, tended to have is these engineers who are building internal services who are like, I'm an engineer. 95 00:13:47,100 --> 00:13:48,300 I know what engineers want. 96 00:13:48,420 --> 00:13:55,400 And then they build what they think engineers want based on their own kind of skills and knowledge and expectations. 97 00:13:55,400 --> 00:14:09,040 And now we're seeing the rise of a phrase called platform as a product come into play, where all of a sudden, it doesn't matter if you are, you share some characteristics of your users. 98 00:14:09,460 --> 00:14:11,020 You are not your users. 99 00:14:11,580 --> 00:14:14,120 And you need to be building for your users. 100 00:14:14,420 --> 00:14:28,020 And so that's where I think where I'm hearing you, Cora, is like, it's not about the platform team understanding development as much as understanding development's tasks or development's needs or, like, what does they actually want to get done? 101 00:14:28,160 --> 00:14:30,620 I think that's the thing that people are being challenged with now. 102 00:14:30,760 --> 00:14:36,460 And you asked, you know, am I seeing that kind of coming through into the platform space? 103 00:14:36,580 --> 00:14:38,720 And absolutely in conversation. 104 00:14:39,120 --> 00:14:42,120 I think in practice, it's still growing. 105 00:14:42,580 --> 00:14:43,840 It's definitely growing. 106 00:14:44,140 --> 00:14:47,080 But I wouldn't say it's yet the default behavior. 107 00:14:47,480 --> 00:14:54,100 I think we're starting to see more and more product managers in the internal platform space, which is helping to bring some skill sets to the teams. 108 00:14:54,940 --> 00:14:58,800 And the conversations helping to prioritize that kind of work. 109 00:14:58,920 --> 00:15:05,400 But I think it's still a learning process for how to apply those product skills to internal platforms. 110 00:15:05,680 --> 00:15:06,980 Yeah, which is really great. 111 00:15:07,180 --> 00:15:10,100 I mean, this whole idea of platform as a product has so many angles. 112 00:15:11,320 --> 00:15:24,400 And I think, like, when I first was introduced to the term, I think I thought about it more in terms of, like, I guess, I saw, like, more the side of, like, how do you upgrade and how do you manage it as a whole and how you break down your work? 113 00:15:24,400 --> 00:15:26,140 How do you work amongst the product team? 114 00:15:26,380 --> 00:15:33,740 But really, the point that you're making is really key, that platform as a product means that you start by looking at the needs of your users. 115 00:15:34,540 --> 00:15:34,680 Right? 116 00:15:34,820 --> 00:15:37,640 That's, I guess, maybe that's the biggest difference, in fact. 117 00:15:38,960 --> 00:15:47,180 Yeah, I think it was popularized by Team Topologies, really, that idea that your platform should be something that is optional. 118 00:15:48,720 --> 00:15:56,700 You have the upper leg on any competitors because you should be able to be right there talking to your customers, completely bespoke to your company. 119 00:15:56,700 --> 00:16:06,580 But if they're able to go out into the market and find something that would meet their needs better than what you're offering internally, they should be free to do that within the constraints of the business requirements. 120 00:16:06,580 --> 00:16:11,000 They still are going to have to meet any compliance requirements and things like that. 121 00:16:11,120 --> 00:16:27,420 But that just shows you how the gap you might have between what you think your customers need, being the software devs, and what they actually need if they're choosing to go out into the public market, choosing to apply their own security requirements because they're like, oh, this platform isn't meeting my expectations. 122 00:16:28,000 --> 00:16:34,980 Right, right, that's, that's, it's so fascinating that to make it optional forces you to build the best thing because you need people to want to use your platform. 123 00:16:35,340 --> 00:16:37,040 That's, it's, it's really powerful. 124 00:16:37,240 --> 00:16:42,460 Yeah, does that, is that, so the maturity model that you're suggesting has several categories, right? 125 00:16:42,520 --> 00:16:47,800 You have funding, adoption, user experience, backlog, organizational structure, and cross-functional representation. 126 00:16:47,800 --> 00:16:53,220 But what you just said seems to tie in best with adoption, perhaps, is that, would you say that? 127 00:16:53,700 --> 00:17:00,160 Yeah, I think, I think, so just to call out, all these sections are sort of in their version alpha. 128 00:17:00,980 --> 00:17:07,420 And it's, it's an active work in progress with the CNCF working group right now that we're trying to get people to join in. 129 00:17:07,500 --> 00:17:16,460 So if this is something, if you're listening and you're interested by this, please come tell us why we're wrong, why we're right, what we can do to, to make it better and, and evolve this. 130 00:17:16,460 --> 00:17:18,960 But you're exactly right. 131 00:17:19,040 --> 00:17:32,600 The adoption, user experience, backlog, all sort of mixed together and all have influence over that kind of usability of the platform or choice to use the platform by, by the software developers. 132 00:17:33,000 --> 00:17:36,200 So is the user experience such that they want to use it? 133 00:17:36,260 --> 00:17:38,100 Is it tailored to their needs? 134 00:17:38,140 --> 00:17:42,720 Is it giving them high level business options that, that get them going quickly? 135 00:17:42,720 --> 00:17:46,620 That's sort of the, the top level there with paved paths. 136 00:17:47,300 --> 00:17:51,500 Are they, from adoption, are people actually getting the support? 137 00:17:51,640 --> 00:18:02,340 Is there, are you investing as a platform team in internal advocacy, internal DevRel, where you are elevating the voices of people who have had success with the platform? 138 00:18:02,760 --> 00:18:06,920 You are answering questions in public, making it easy to ask questions. 139 00:18:06,920 --> 00:18:09,980 All those kinds of things can make a big difference. 140 00:18:09,980 --> 00:18:13,440 And then obviously how you track what comes next. 141 00:18:13,460 --> 00:18:16,700 Are you just taking the next thing off the backlog that someone told you to make? 142 00:18:16,700 --> 00:18:23,860 Or are you thinking through the evolution of this product, solving the big business problems that maybe people don't know how to ask for, right? 143 00:18:23,920 --> 00:18:26,600 That faster horses versus a car kind of idea. 144 00:18:27,680 --> 00:18:33,520 Are you treating it like a product that you're trying to design intentionally and deliver? 145 00:18:35,280 --> 00:18:40,240 Yeah, and I think, you know, like the cluster of stuff and the adoption, right? 146 00:18:40,300 --> 00:18:41,500 Like you kind of went to the levels. 147 00:18:41,740 --> 00:19:01,060 Like, I think especially like the, the platform advocacy part is like, I, well, I've noticed it's one of the two things that when I've talked with infrastructure people who are becoming platform people, like that's, that's one thing that they don't really, it doesn't occur to them naturally. 148 00:19:01,920 --> 00:19:06,020 That, that you would have like advocacy and marketing and those kinds of things. 149 00:19:06,020 --> 00:19:15,440 And I think like it really, I mean, I'm trying to think of like a group I've talked with that has put a platform in place that does not have like advocacy and marketing. 150 00:19:15,720 --> 00:19:22,980 And I'm pretty sure they all do like, they all like, like, you know, they usually come up with like a brand name for what they're doing. 151 00:19:22,980 --> 00:19:27,960 And they have like, usually like a full-time person dedicated to just like doing that. 152 00:19:27,960 --> 00:19:30,720 And they do like conferences every three months and on and on and on. 153 00:19:30,720 --> 00:19:51,240 And like, you know, having worked in marketing for many years, I just think of that as marketing, but I, it's like, it's, it is like a very different skill and role for like infrastructure or even like engineer people to have to, to need to sell that or market it internally. 154 00:19:51,240 --> 00:20:00,760 And, and of course the second one, the second role being product management, which is like, even for software developers sometimes is a wacky notion to, to have product managers. 155 00:20:00,760 --> 00:20:11,320 But it's, uh, anyways, I think the advocacy thing is, is, is, is key to that because otherwise people aren't going to use it or, or even, even, even worse. 156 00:20:11,320 --> 00:20:14,400 They use it, but poorly because they're upset. 157 00:20:15,560 --> 00:20:17,560 Well, yeah, but I guess, I mean, advocacy. 158 00:20:17,880 --> 00:20:20,480 So on, on the one hand, cause advocacy is on the scale. 159 00:20:20,800 --> 00:20:22,800 It's, uh, what was it like a number five? 160 00:20:22,800 --> 00:20:28,880 It shows, it shows, it shows maturity level five, our current top, but the numbers don't mean it's just the top. 161 00:20:29,000 --> 00:20:34,720 The fourth is the, maybe I'll have to put those words around those to, uh, to help Coté. 162 00:20:34,720 --> 00:20:40,760 So we don't have numbers, you know, toddler, infant, toddler, teenager. 163 00:20:41,020 --> 00:20:43,160 Well, we could, we could, we could really appeal. 164 00:20:43,380 --> 00:20:47,840 We could, you could appeal to the, uh, the, the, the, the younger demographic and use emojis. 165 00:20:48,600 --> 00:20:50,800 Oh, I like it. 166 00:20:50,880 --> 00:20:51,280 I like it. 167 00:20:51,320 --> 00:20:53,080 See, this is why you've had marketing experience. 168 00:20:53,180 --> 00:20:53,540 I can tell. 169 00:20:55,420 --> 00:20:55,820 Yeah. 170 00:20:55,980 --> 00:20:57,340 But that's really your hook, right? 171 00:20:57,340 --> 00:21:04,700 Like, I mean, you, I guess you have to have a platform that is at some level of maturity to go out and advocate and, and, and try to get people to know. 172 00:21:04,700 --> 00:21:20,600 But on the other hand, um, yeah, that's your, that's your arm into like really understanding user experience, because if it is optional and you're going out to, to show people and hope that, that, you know, if you explain to them how it works and its benefits, they'll want to get on. 173 00:21:20,700 --> 00:21:25,600 Those are the people who can best see why you choose to use or not to use it. 174 00:21:26,380 --> 00:21:33,160 So do you think like, that's where maturity models, this is, this is one of the places where maturity models can start to rub. 175 00:21:33,160 --> 00:21:43,720 Because I don't, I don't believe you have to have a super mature product, super mature platform to have a mature adoption strategy. 176 00:21:44,340 --> 00:21:58,020 Otherwise, when you think about like, um, an early stage startup, us, like then we would basically have no talk about marketing or advocacy because we're not a fully fledged, completely ready to go to market product. 177 00:21:58,020 --> 00:22:02,200 Except we do have all of that because that's what's helping us build the right product for people. 178 00:22:02,200 --> 00:22:19,400 So yeah, yeah, to me, that level four is about, um, actively making space for an investing in and acknowledging the need for that kind of advocacy dev dev rel marketing sort of skill set. 179 00:22:19,400 --> 00:22:30,100 And it's not that there's a one size fits all to like, this is how you do marketing, this is how you do dev rel, it has to be a mature product ready to, you know, here's your documentation kind of thing. 180 00:22:30,580 --> 00:22:32,000 Yeah, yeah, no, you're right. 181 00:22:32,040 --> 00:22:39,480 Like you do have to, that is a good point that you don't want those things to necessarily be, to use a fancy word, uh, what is it, temporal or chronological? 182 00:22:39,480 --> 00:23:00,300 Like, like, like it's more, I guess it's the case, at least as, as we're going through it and like, you know, as, as y'all are modeling it, that it's more of less of like, uh, uh, uh, a line on a chart going towards awesomeness and more like a spider diagram where you've got like multiple, you know, multiple attributes that you can like fill out. 183 00:23:00,300 --> 00:23:05,120 And, you know, you can, you can wait out what you have, what you want to focus on. 184 00:23:05,120 --> 00:23:17,920 And, uh, because you're basically saying if you achieve all of these, if you're, yeah, see that, that you've really thrown a loop for it there because, because it does seem like it requires, I agree with what you're saying. 185 00:23:17,920 --> 00:23:26,100 Like, I, I always find that like, you need that advocacy almost right away, even if you don't have full maturity for exactly the reasons y'all were saying. 186 00:23:26,100 --> 00:23:31,020 And, and, and, you know, you're highlighting core that like, you need a way to get input of what's going on. 187 00:23:31,260 --> 00:23:33,460 So that is, uh, well, that's annoying. 188 00:23:33,960 --> 00:23:36,080 I think the, I know, right. 189 00:23:36,280 --> 00:23:38,800 It's the, the, the, the virtuous cycles, right. 190 00:23:38,940 --> 00:23:51,540 And one of my, one of my, um, teams that I know that did kind of UX on like develop, um, user experience on one of my past projects, past, past lives, uh, had what they called beers and tears. 191 00:23:51,540 --> 00:24:01,980 And they would like watch kind of watch back user testing, or they'd go and like, ask someone to try and ask someone to come present how they currently achieve something. 192 00:24:01,980 --> 00:24:06,980 And it would just be, they would just tear it apart as like, oh my gosh, how is this what we're making our users go through? 193 00:24:07,460 --> 00:24:09,340 Like, what could we do to make this better? 194 00:24:09,340 --> 00:24:28,340 And, and it's actually kind of the whole idea of what's painful do more of like, go find the things that are really terrible and really lean in and, and be outwardly okay with acknowledging your faults as a platform, uh, platform currently so that you can show that you're open and ready to improve. 195 00:24:28,340 --> 00:24:33,680 Because if you get there and go, our platform's perfect, of course you should be using it, here's, here it is. 196 00:24:33,920 --> 00:24:38,240 And other people are just looking at it and going, the emperor, I don't think it has any clothes. 197 00:24:38,460 --> 00:24:47,420 And then it's harder to fix things if you, but later you find them, if you do bring in advocacy when you're, when your platform is, you know, quote unquote perfect, then it's probably too late to fix some of the decisions. 198 00:24:47,420 --> 00:24:51,880 It's more painful when people say it's not perfect, uh, it's much more painful, right? 199 00:24:52,040 --> 00:24:52,580 Right, right. 200 00:24:52,780 --> 00:24:52,960 Yeah. 201 00:24:53,040 --> 00:24:56,780 So that's, and that's where like this maturity model, I think we're still growing. 202 00:24:56,940 --> 00:25:13,080 I think you mentioned a spider model, Coté, and that was something we did talk about whether or not we should have more aspects like a nested so that you can sort of show that you have a strength around the people and process side, but maybe not so much in the technology side or, you know, sorry, sort of start to get that shape of your platform. 203 00:25:13,640 --> 00:25:20,740 Um, we didn't go with that complex model to start, but those are the kinds of things we're discussing right now on, is that the way it should go? 204 00:25:20,780 --> 00:25:30,380 Is that going to be more helpful to people or is that going to become more of a box ticking exercise, which is what we want to stay away from that sort of, all right. 205 00:25:30,720 --> 00:25:31,820 So I don't know. 206 00:25:31,880 --> 00:25:34,480 Those are the pros and the cons when you're designing a model, right? 207 00:25:34,560 --> 00:25:35,120 All models are. 208 00:25:35,120 --> 00:25:35,440 Yeah. 209 00:25:35,840 --> 00:25:36,160 Yeah. 210 00:25:36,240 --> 00:25:43,620 So what, I guess, what about, um, speaking of different models, um, I guess, can you talk a little bit about the, the cloud native maturity model? 211 00:25:43,640 --> 00:25:49,760 And, uh, how, how this is different and what kind of led to a decision to create something new? 212 00:25:50,600 --> 00:25:51,020 Yeah. 213 00:25:51,160 --> 00:25:54,240 The cloud maturity model, cloud native maturity model is fantastic. 214 00:25:54,240 --> 00:26:04,980 So we're actually, one of the pieces of work right now is trying to make sure we're in, um, intentional where we split from there and where we try and align. 215 00:26:05,120 --> 00:26:09,140 So there's going to be some pulling closer and there's going to be some more explicit splits. 216 00:26:09,400 --> 00:26:13,420 One of the things that I'd say is very different between the two models. 217 00:26:13,420 --> 00:26:20,880 And as of now is staying different, but again, work in progress, uh, is that their model is a stepped model. 218 00:26:20,880 --> 00:26:30,780 So as in level one across people, process, technology governance, I think was the fourth is you are level one for all of those things. 219 00:26:30,780 --> 00:26:37,500 And that is like adopting, I think, or what's the, I have the words around here, building your cloud native experience. 220 00:26:37,680 --> 00:26:41,000 Then you go to level two is operating your cloud native experience. 221 00:26:41,000 --> 00:26:47,100 And that is across all four of those areas, uh, people, process, governance, um, technology. 222 00:26:47,700 --> 00:26:50,720 And that's not the way we've gone with this model. 223 00:26:50,800 --> 00:26:57,920 This model is more like these things can move independently and you may find yourself at level three for something and level one for something else. 224 00:26:57,920 --> 00:27:06,680 And you may find yourself unable to move further in a certain category until you kind of improve one, at least a little bit, a different category, at least a little bit. 225 00:27:06,740 --> 00:27:08,840 So they are interconnected, but loosely. 226 00:27:09,440 --> 00:27:26,340 Um, yeah, and I think that that was partly based on honestly, like, it's really, one of the places I think if you fall apart first, trying to apply maturity model is when you go, well, my people is level three, but my process is level one. 227 00:27:26,700 --> 00:27:27,540 Where am I? 228 00:27:27,700 --> 00:27:32,200 And then you start to really fall apart and we didn't want to try and tackle the most perfect. 229 00:27:32,500 --> 00:27:33,080 Everybody's here. 230 00:27:33,180 --> 00:27:35,740 We're seeing people tackle us in very different ways. 231 00:27:36,780 --> 00:27:37,180 Yeah. 232 00:27:37,260 --> 00:27:41,200 So it's interesting, like, you know, from, from what you're saying, it's interesting to think of it. 233 00:27:41,260 --> 00:27:49,000 Well, because, because the, the bad thing would be, would be like, well, this year we're going to go up to at least four on all of these, right. 234 00:27:49,000 --> 00:27:52,720 To just like have some unconsidered, like, because four is better than two. 235 00:27:53,080 --> 00:27:54,540 And so we must do better. 236 00:27:54,540 --> 00:28:05,440 Whereas, whereas, whereas really there, there's almost like, there's, uh, uh, in, in, there's, there's some value in thinking about the trade-offs you make between these five areas. 237 00:28:05,440 --> 00:28:05,760 Right. 238 00:28:05,980 --> 00:28:18,480 And, and, you know, whatever the final form may take, it's almost like by defining four levels, uh, in, in each of these, like the backlog, you can be reactive, scheduled evolutionary or platform as a product. 239 00:28:18,480 --> 00:28:18,840 Right. 240 00:28:19,120 --> 00:28:28,300 And so like, if, if you kind of define these, these like four levels you can have, you could say like, well, we're only going to be scheduled right now because we want to favor. 241 00:28:28,820 --> 00:28:32,820 I don't know, getting more platform advocacy, like that's the more important thing. 242 00:28:32,820 --> 00:28:41,700 So you can actually make trade-offs and because they act more independently, it's not like you, you have to feel bad about yourself or your organization that you're not like progressing through all of these. 243 00:28:41,700 --> 00:28:47,300 It's more just like a, uh, a recipe that you can, you can, uh, maybe not mix and match things. 244 00:28:47,300 --> 00:28:51,560 That's the wrong, weird idiom, but you can, you can sort of choose where you want to focus. 245 00:28:51,560 --> 00:28:59,100 And you might choose to be scheduled for now because you have a certain amount of backlog right now of fires that you have to put out. 246 00:28:59,260 --> 00:29:05,860 And that is not something that you want to try and shift just yet because it will cause a lot more havoc. 247 00:29:06,260 --> 00:29:10,620 And so actually being scheduled is the right decision for your company for this moment in time. 248 00:29:10,800 --> 00:29:14,140 And so therefore it frees you up to spend time on another category. 249 00:29:14,220 --> 00:29:16,020 So you can even think of it in like a positive way, right? 250 00:29:16,020 --> 00:29:19,940 Where you are choosing to be here so that you can spend the, but that gives you time to spend elsewhere. 251 00:29:19,940 --> 00:29:36,020 So, um, yeah, that's, that's definitely the intention as it stands is that like, you can trade these off and focus on them and see that if you're struggling to move between the levels, maybe you should look at some of the other categories to see your aspects to see, are they what's holding you back? 252 00:29:36,020 --> 00:29:44,920 So are you struggling to get to kind of platform as a product because you're actually at still level two of adoption where you're sort of assuming that if you build it, they will come. 253 00:29:45,680 --> 00:29:54,260 And actually that's like the antithesis of having a product that is optional and that people have to give you feedback on and that you are going to market with. 254 00:29:54,340 --> 00:29:54,520 Right. 255 00:29:54,640 --> 00:29:57,140 So, uh, those things will happen. 256 00:29:57,720 --> 00:30:00,260 So, so let's talk about the funding part. 257 00:30:00,320 --> 00:30:01,140 That's always fun. 258 00:30:01,600 --> 00:30:02,560 No pun intended. 259 00:30:02,840 --> 00:30:03,580 That's terrible. 260 00:30:04,000 --> 00:30:08,080 Uh, but the, the, the, the, the four levels there are that you have one off, right? 261 00:30:08,080 --> 00:30:13,120 Like it's a project and then you have a, like an annual budget, which means it's determined every 12 months. 262 00:30:13,120 --> 00:30:17,920 And, you know, depending on your organization, I'm sure you spend two to three months just on slides. 263 00:30:18,180 --> 00:30:18,620 A regular budget. 264 00:30:19,020 --> 00:30:19,420 Yes. 265 00:30:19,540 --> 00:30:19,780 Yeah. 266 00:30:20,140 --> 00:30:25,840 And then, and then there's the, the, the platform team budget and then the, the, the P and L, the profit and loss. 267 00:30:25,840 --> 00:30:32,940 And like, so, so first of all, like what, what are y'all's like modeling here? 268 00:30:32,940 --> 00:30:39,620 Like, like what's the aspiration of this maturity thing, like the ideal state that, that you're, you're going to. 269 00:30:40,120 --> 00:30:40,520 Yeah. 270 00:30:40,640 --> 00:30:50,780 So just to, to flesh it out a little bit, the like secondary, the subtitle of funding is how does the company value and therefore fund the platform efforts. 271 00:30:50,960 --> 00:30:58,700 And I think that what we're talking about here is the fact that everything we should be doing at a company should be about improving the output of that company. 272 00:30:58,700 --> 00:30:59,860 And it's very capitalist. 273 00:31:00,120 --> 00:31:02,120 I get that, but that is why we're hired. 274 00:31:02,120 --> 00:31:02,940 It's what we're doing. 275 00:31:02,940 --> 00:31:17,340 And that includes internal work that we are saying will improve the efficiency or effectiveness of our engineering, which in turn will improve the delivery of features and value to our, our paying users. 276 00:31:17,340 --> 00:31:17,660 Right. 277 00:31:18,100 --> 00:31:26,600 And so we should be able to articulate the work we're doing in, on internal tooling and how that impacts the bottom line. 278 00:31:26,600 --> 00:31:37,620 It might be that we're saving money by reducing the, um, uh, reducing the amount of compute we have to run on because we're able to like bin pack a bit better. 279 00:31:37,880 --> 00:31:49,240 Or it might be that we are increasing revenue by increasing the speed at which developers, we can onboard more developers, which therefore lets us onboard people to more feature work. 280 00:31:49,740 --> 00:31:59,860 So, but, but that's sort of the, the conversation there is how do we make sure that anything we're building, even if it's internally facing has a business eye to it. 281 00:32:01,100 --> 00:32:01,640 That's right. 282 00:32:01,640 --> 00:32:02,020 Right, right. 283 00:32:02,100 --> 00:32:02,820 Profit and loss. 284 00:32:03,140 --> 00:32:03,340 Yeah. 285 00:32:03,680 --> 00:32:04,080 Interesting. 286 00:32:04,140 --> 00:32:04,680 Yeah, yeah. 287 00:32:04,800 --> 00:32:10,360 No, no, that, and that, that like, that makes more sense than just how you get the budget. 288 00:32:10,880 --> 00:32:11,320 Right. 289 00:32:11,380 --> 00:32:12,220 Like you're saying. 290 00:32:12,420 --> 00:32:14,980 The ones that's been under debate, the wording of it for sure. 291 00:32:14,980 --> 00:32:25,100 It's funny, like a lot of people ask, um, how do they, how can they sell this idea to the, to stakeholders or to, to the, you know, to the business to fund? 292 00:32:25,260 --> 00:32:31,980 And this is a really great, I haven't heard this sort of, you know, uh, tie in with profit and loss, you know, of eventually getting there. 293 00:32:31,980 --> 00:32:45,660 But, uh, it's, yeah, it's the hard part and like what these, like the middle layers, the annual budget up to platform team budget are starting to, to, to expose to people is that you can't get to the point of proving the value of your work. 294 00:32:45,660 --> 00:32:48,260 If you can't measure the costs in any way. 295 00:32:48,380 --> 00:32:58,560 And so if you don't yet have a mature tagging strategy to be able to do a kind of chargeback sort of idea of how much does it cost to run this application? 296 00:32:59,180 --> 00:33:04,260 How much does it cost to run this type of infrastructure that's needed by these five different applications? 297 00:33:04,940 --> 00:33:16,500 You know, it might not be the most perfect spreadsheet of, of data there of accountancy, but being able to make it so that people don't look at the platform team and say, 298 00:33:16,500 --> 00:33:18,140 they cost us millions a year. 299 00:33:18,140 --> 00:33:25,760 Cause look at that cloud budget, look at that cloud spending and have people realize that that cloud spending is actually on all of engineering. 300 00:33:26,280 --> 00:33:38,500 And what that platform team is costing you is their salaries and not the data running the database, because that's actually the databases for another team that's running. 301 00:33:38,500 --> 00:33:46,480 You're running an internal business, like it's platform as a product and it has to, this idea of chargeback, I guess that's, that's concretely, that's how you get to profit. 302 00:33:46,500 --> 00:33:47,500 Profit and loss. 303 00:33:47,500 --> 00:33:47,500 Exactly. 304 00:33:47,500 --> 00:33:49,500 So that makes, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. 305 00:33:49,500 --> 00:33:50,500 I have seen that. 306 00:33:50,500 --> 00:33:51,500 Right. 307 00:33:51,500 --> 00:33:54,500 And then you can report on these, on who's buying. 308 00:33:54,500 --> 00:33:55,500 Yes. 309 00:33:55,500 --> 00:33:56,500 Right. 310 00:33:56,500 --> 00:33:57,500 Exactly. 311 00:33:57,500 --> 00:34:08,500 And then, cause then you can also see who's, who's buying exactly who's using it is, are people choosing your internal platform or are you funding something internally where people are actually running off and using a cloud provided thing or a SAS provided thing instead? 312 00:34:08,500 --> 00:34:09,500 Right. 313 00:34:09,500 --> 00:34:10,500 And what are they saving by using you? 314 00:34:10,500 --> 00:34:11,500 Yeah. 315 00:34:11,500 --> 00:34:12,500 Right. 316 00:34:12,500 --> 00:34:13,500 Fascinating. 317 00:34:13,500 --> 00:34:14,500 Yeah. 318 00:34:14,500 --> 00:34:15,500 Yeah. 319 00:34:15,500 --> 00:34:19,500 But that, I mean, that is, that is a very common question for people to say, like, how do I sell this within my business? 320 00:34:19,500 --> 00:34:23,500 And it's interesting that the platform maturity model can help with that. 321 00:34:23,500 --> 00:34:24,500 Yeah. 322 00:34:24,500 --> 00:34:34,500 And, you know, I mean, another thing you, you, you get with models like this is, uh, and we were talking about this a little bit at the beginning is, uh, yeah. 323 00:34:34,500 --> 00:34:38,500 Like we're talking about here, like oftentimes people just don't know how to think about something. 324 00:34:38,500 --> 00:34:39,500 Right. 325 00:34:39,500 --> 00:34:46,500 Like, like we were saying, like, no one really knows how to think about how would I, what is the value of a platform? 326 00:34:46,500 --> 00:34:52,500 Like, do I think about it as like the way I pay for paper clips or is it something else? 327 00:34:52,500 --> 00:34:59,500 Like I, I always wonder in like other industries, like in manufacturing, do they have these same debates about like factories? 328 00:34:59,500 --> 00:35:06,500 And, and like, you know, if, if you're, you know, I don't think anyone would be like in manufacturing, I don't know if we need a factory. 329 00:35:06,500 --> 00:35:11,500 Like it, it just, it's sort of like the ROI of a factory is like existence. 330 00:35:11,500 --> 00:35:17,500 And, and like it, so it seems like, sure, you want to make sure you're not like overpaying for something. 331 00:35:17,500 --> 00:35:25,500 And you want to make sure that when you're like running the factory, you're maximizing usage productivity, I guess you could say. 332 00:35:25,500 --> 00:35:37,500 But like, at some point, I mean, it would be absurd, you know, analogously to like platforms to go into a manufacturer and like, you know, someone's trying to prove that they need to pay for a factory. 333 00:35:37,500 --> 00:35:42,500 And for people to be like, yeah, I'm not sure if we need that or not. 334 00:35:42,500 --> 00:35:50,500 Like, and, and so it's like, I'm kind of, I've been hoping recently, well, I have many hopes, but this is just a minor one in my life. 335 00:35:50,500 --> 00:36:02,260 And this grand sum of things, but like, you know, maybe as, as like more managers and executives, and especially finance people at company, like, you know, we're like born with computers. 336 00:36:02,740 --> 00:36:20,020 Like, like, for them, it won't be such a big deal to be like, yeah, we, we need computers, like we need the platform, and we need to do development, and sure, don't pay too much for it and make, you know, think of it more as a factory and not that we have to like, prove that we should pay, you know, spend money on it. 337 00:36:20,020 --> 00:36:26,900 And instead, you like, prove the fitness of the platform, that it actually works well, and it delivers on what you're promising. 338 00:36:27,680 --> 00:36:40,540 Well, that, I mean, that, I keep thinking about this build versus buy question, because I feel like, you know, with everything, right, there's, there's a point at which you have to build, there is no option to buy the thing that you need. 339 00:36:40,540 --> 00:36:47,600 And platform teams have been in the business of building platforms for, you know, a couple of decades, at least not, if not more. 340 00:36:49,340 --> 00:36:56,280 And so, I don't know, does, like, is that a question that comes up for you guys as you do the, as you define the platform maturity model? 341 00:36:56,340 --> 00:37:04,440 Because I know you're focused on outcomes, not tool recommendations, but is there an opinion or a perspective on build versus buy? 342 00:37:05,880 --> 00:37:09,040 So, not, not as a part of this piece of work. 343 00:37:09,040 --> 00:37:28,500 I think build versus buy definitely comes up often in the conversations within the working group and around how to encourage and engage with the CNCF projects for how those can support people with as open source projects, but also often having commercial models around them, and non-CNCF projects as well. 344 00:37:28,660 --> 00:37:31,020 So, yes, it comes up all the time. 345 00:37:31,020 --> 00:37:43,460 It's not something this model, what I'm hoping from this model is that you could look at this, take this model and say, would buying this part of our platform help us achieve or not achieve success, right? 346 00:37:43,820 --> 00:37:54,200 And I say in that way, buying this part of our platform, because I think the thing we're sort of learning is that, as an industry, I think, is that there is not a platform. 347 00:37:54,600 --> 00:37:55,880 There's not the platform. 348 00:37:57,240 --> 00:38:05,600 There are tools which get pieced together to achieve the delivery workflows that are needed by the company, right? 349 00:38:05,820 --> 00:38:10,500 And those workflows might be starting up a new project team or a new application. 350 00:38:11,020 --> 00:38:13,140 They might be delivering value to production. 351 00:38:13,540 --> 00:38:19,180 They might be testing something, user acceptance testing of something. 352 00:38:19,320 --> 00:38:22,800 These are sort of things that people need to achieve internally. 353 00:38:23,440 --> 00:38:28,620 And there might be tools that help you do that in different ways, depending on the technology you're using. 354 00:38:28,620 --> 00:38:39,000 And your platform needs to provide all of those so that you can have all those experiences kind of approved by what you need from the business to achieve the business. 355 00:38:40,120 --> 00:38:51,220 And so I think, tell me if I'm wrong, but part of what you're saying there is, like, because you have these five groupings of things, like this kind of, and it defines as we're talking about the platform maturity. 356 00:38:51,540 --> 00:39:01,740 Like, again, you can look at a buy versus build thing to see, like, well, if we build versus we buy, how does that help us or harm us in improving in one of these categories, right? 357 00:39:01,800 --> 00:39:11,720 Like, it potentially would let you get more detailed in figuring out which of those two you want to do, rather than just, like, I don't know. 358 00:39:11,760 --> 00:39:17,580 It seems like a lot of build versus buy discussions are more global in scope, right? 359 00:39:17,620 --> 00:39:26,420 It's just like, like, we want to consider the whole gigantic thing just as a whole, instead of like, well, what are all the different trade-offs we would have between this? 360 00:39:26,620 --> 00:39:29,380 Because it's really, I don't know. 361 00:39:29,600 --> 00:39:32,360 It doesn't seem like there's that much nuance to that debate. 362 00:39:32,360 --> 00:39:40,820 I think if you want one platform in order, and you want to build versus buy one platform, the only thing I can think of is the cloud providers. 363 00:39:41,220 --> 00:39:55,000 I don't know any other tool on the market, no matter how expensive or how cheap, that solves literally every interaction that a software engineer needs to have with your internal tooling as a single tool, right? 364 00:39:55,000 --> 00:39:57,340 Like, we just don't have that. 365 00:39:57,440 --> 00:40:03,660 We have CI pipe, like, we have CI tooling, and we have app delivery tooling, or, like, app, like, hosting tooling. 366 00:40:03,940 --> 00:40:11,240 And we have, you know, security management tooling and incident management tooling and debugging tooling. 367 00:40:11,440 --> 00:40:12,440 And we have all these different tooling. 368 00:40:12,600 --> 00:40:16,220 And each piece, each one of those is a part of what you need from your platform. 369 00:40:16,360 --> 00:40:17,380 So I agree. 370 00:40:17,480 --> 00:40:21,960 I see a lot of people talking about, oh, build, buy, like, two kind of binary options. 371 00:40:21,960 --> 00:40:26,200 And I just don't quite understand how that works in practice. 372 00:40:26,200 --> 00:40:29,980 Yeah, I mean, I guess, I mean, VMware is, VMware is, is in that business. 373 00:40:29,980 --> 00:40:33,980 And that's, I think that's what, that's what we're trying to achieve. 374 00:40:34,220 --> 00:40:37,680 So, so maybe that's one example of a company that's trying to do that. 375 00:40:37,940 --> 00:40:42,500 Even within you, although this, you have a suite of tools that do it for your customers, right? 376 00:40:42,500 --> 00:40:47,280 So you're not, there's not, like, one VMware tool that is, like, to rule them all. 377 00:40:47,440 --> 00:40:49,940 It's like, there's, you piece together a whole lot of them. 378 00:40:50,100 --> 00:40:53,660 It's the components that, that different customers will piece different components together. 379 00:40:53,740 --> 00:40:57,700 And that's what builds their version of the VMware platform for themselves. 380 00:40:57,700 --> 00:41:03,360 And that's, like, that's a nice packaged environment because then they know those components work well together. 381 00:41:03,360 --> 00:41:10,660 And that's going to be one of your best kind of chances at piecing all of these pieces together and having them be a coherent whole, which is really nice. 382 00:41:10,660 --> 00:41:27,320 Yeah, but I do, but I guess that's the build versus buy, like, that, like that, wherever, wherever a company is in that scale of being able to offer customers an integrated version of that, that it's only going to get better, right? 383 00:41:27,360 --> 00:41:30,100 And so that build versus buy question just shifts. 384 00:41:30,100 --> 00:41:32,580 Every day it shifts, in my view, a little bit more. 385 00:41:32,960 --> 00:41:43,940 I mean, maybe not for, I mean, these bigger companies like VMware who are aspiring to that and who, you know, who are somewhere on the path of offering that, they're, you know, they're not for small companies. 386 00:41:44,000 --> 00:41:45,580 These are for larger enterprises. 387 00:41:45,580 --> 00:41:52,120 So that build versus buy also depends on who the buyer is, right, and what your budget is and what scale you're operating on. 388 00:41:52,220 --> 00:41:54,940 So it's still a different question at every stage. 389 00:41:54,940 --> 00:42:07,900 And if you do, which is another great question, because if you start off a smaller company and you're maybe not, you know, able to afford these larger solutions, then at some point that shift is going to happen for you too. 390 00:42:08,080 --> 00:42:10,100 And you've already invested some work. 391 00:42:10,560 --> 00:42:14,940 So it's a tricky question about, like, maybe when you make that shift. 392 00:42:15,380 --> 00:42:20,660 Have you ever tried to apply Wardley mapping when you start thinking about these things? 393 00:42:20,800 --> 00:42:22,940 Have you come across Wardley mapping before? 394 00:42:23,020 --> 00:42:23,820 No, what is that? 395 00:42:24,260 --> 00:42:35,580 So this gentleman, Simon Wardley, it's named after him, but it's grown many legs since then, though he's still, like, strongly the driver of the community. 396 00:42:35,580 --> 00:42:41,180 And it's basically an idea of looking at the evolution of a market. 397 00:42:41,960 --> 00:42:48,780 So, you know, 20 years ago, people were really heavily invested in worrying about on-premise compute. 398 00:42:48,920 --> 00:42:52,940 So they were thinking about things like power supplies and CPUs and things like that. 399 00:42:53,020 --> 00:43:01,840 Today, to think about a power supply when you're spinning up, like, a cloud instance would be not on most people's to-do lists. 400 00:43:02,240 --> 00:43:05,900 And so that evolution into commodity is, like, what has happened. 401 00:43:05,900 --> 00:43:09,540 It went from something that was a differentiator to something that is a commodity. 402 00:43:10,140 --> 00:43:26,200 And Wardley mapping tries to take what is within your domain, within, like, what you need to use, what you rely on as a company, and map it on, is it, like, is it something that is new and a differentiator for you? 403 00:43:26,260 --> 00:43:29,500 Or is it something that is a commodity to the market? 404 00:43:29,780 --> 00:43:32,240 And how close to your users is it? 405 00:43:32,240 --> 00:43:49,620 So there will be people today, so high-frequency traders, who are still wildly interested in things like power supplies and on-premise compute, because that is a differentiator for their market, whereas it's not for lots of other markets where an extra millisecond or two isn't going to make a difference. 406 00:43:49,860 --> 00:43:51,740 And you can, you can, it's okay. 407 00:43:52,620 --> 00:43:56,820 And that, so the map is contextualized to your environment. 408 00:43:56,820 --> 00:44:01,200 So what is it that is differentiator for you versus a commodity for you? 409 00:44:01,460 --> 00:44:05,900 And it tries to have you, tries to challenge you on, should you be building this? 410 00:44:05,960 --> 00:44:08,060 Is this actually a differentiator for you? 411 00:44:08,220 --> 00:44:17,260 Or is this something that you require to be successful, but is not going to be the thing that makes you beat out your competitors or be top of market? 412 00:44:17,980 --> 00:44:20,040 So, yeah, it's an interesting way of modeling things. 413 00:44:20,040 --> 00:44:26,680 Yeah, it's sort of like in our lore, Cora, there's the James Watters value line, right? 414 00:44:26,980 --> 00:44:36,980 And if you were to add like a time trajectory of like as something gets commodified, some nice, I don't know, complexification of it. 415 00:44:37,160 --> 00:44:39,820 But yeah, good old fun stuff. 416 00:44:40,440 --> 00:44:43,000 Also, serverless is going to be big next year. 417 00:44:43,380 --> 00:44:43,800 That's all. 418 00:44:45,220 --> 00:44:47,400 So you have seen worldly mapping before. 419 00:44:47,760 --> 00:44:48,860 Of course, yes. 420 00:44:49,300 --> 00:44:51,200 Yeah, it would be nice. 421 00:44:52,120 --> 00:45:07,560 Yeah, you know, as you two are discussing the build versus buy thing, it was occurring to me that like, it's almost like a non money changing hands way of saying it might be like integrated versus build. 422 00:45:07,780 --> 00:45:18,520 Like if you have, if you have like a platform that's all integrated and like, well, I hesitate to say easier, but is like more intentionally put together. 423 00:45:19,260 --> 00:45:29,660 Then like, it's like, yeah, rather than you actually have to like, piece together with bash scripts and other judas over here. 424 00:45:29,900 --> 00:45:36,060 Yeah, yeah, it's like, you know, I mean, I'm always leery of metaphors when it comes to programming and operation stuff. 425 00:45:36,120 --> 00:45:42,960 But it's like, you know, if you went to someone's house, and you're like, those windows don't really seem to fit those window frames are like those doors. 426 00:45:43,080 --> 00:45:51,800 It's like, they've just kind of like, they've like found, yeah, they've like found some parts and like gotten sod some things around and it fits together. 427 00:45:51,800 --> 00:45:55,500 And it's a house versus like, oh, this door closes, right? 428 00:45:55,520 --> 00:45:57,700 Like everything actually is integrated together. 429 00:45:57,700 --> 00:46:01,100 And like the, you know, the bathroom is just a bathroom. 430 00:46:01,660 --> 00:46:07,080 And I'll, you know, think things are fit together more, which you can only do with standards, right? 431 00:46:07,080 --> 00:46:12,600 I mean, it only works if you can go to Home Depot and say, I mean, this kind of hinge, and it will fit all doors. 432 00:46:13,100 --> 00:46:13,500 Yeah. 433 00:46:13,760 --> 00:46:15,040 That's the only way we can. 434 00:46:15,700 --> 00:46:22,440 I mean, I look up American recipes and are like, what, how many, what ounce, which type of ounce? 435 00:46:23,120 --> 00:46:24,240 And it's just a mess. 436 00:46:25,280 --> 00:46:25,680 Exactly. 437 00:46:25,940 --> 00:46:26,200 Yeah. 438 00:46:26,240 --> 00:46:29,360 And then you convert between like milliliters and tablespoons. 439 00:46:29,360 --> 00:46:31,800 And you're like, one of these systems is insane. 440 00:46:31,800 --> 00:46:37,860 Like, what, what is, what does it mean that a tablespoon is like 14.2 something? 441 00:46:38,120 --> 00:46:40,480 Good to know there's something harder than building a platform. 442 00:46:41,100 --> 00:46:45,020 And then, and then, and then you realize that the recipes, exactly. 443 00:46:45,520 --> 00:46:48,420 And then the recipes are just like slightly off. 444 00:46:48,420 --> 00:46:53,340 Cause like mysteriously, the cooking, cooking temperature for the same thing is a round number, 445 00:46:53,340 --> 00:46:55,540 which, which I don't, I don't think that works. 446 00:46:55,540 --> 00:46:56,420 That's so true. 447 00:46:56,520 --> 00:46:57,200 That's so funny. 448 00:46:59,020 --> 00:47:00,860 Especially baking, which is so precise. 449 00:47:01,540 --> 00:47:04,960 Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. 450 00:47:05,340 --> 00:47:06,700 Well, uh, let's see. 451 00:47:06,780 --> 00:47:09,920 I, I mean, I think we, obviously we haven't read the maturity model. 452 00:47:09,920 --> 00:47:12,400 It's, it's, as it stands, I think it's about, what is it? 453 00:47:12,420 --> 00:47:14,440 Uh, eight, eight or nine pages or so. 454 00:47:14,500 --> 00:47:18,080 It's actually, it's, it's actually briefer than I remember it being, which is great. 455 00:47:18,180 --> 00:47:18,900 It's only at four. 456 00:47:19,080 --> 00:47:19,720 Come on, Coté. 457 00:47:20,160 --> 00:47:21,820 Well, when I scroll here. 458 00:47:21,860 --> 00:47:25,100 Oh, there's like the intro part about how to participate. 459 00:47:25,400 --> 00:47:26,260 Yes, yes, yes. 460 00:47:26,580 --> 00:47:28,000 See, so even better. 461 00:47:29,980 --> 00:47:30,520 That's true. 462 00:47:30,580 --> 00:47:32,800 It does have the contributor part, but it is, uh, yeah. 463 00:47:32,880 --> 00:47:37,620 And, and so like, I mean, if people interested in contributing, like, uh, like, like what's, 464 00:47:37,700 --> 00:47:40,000 what's the whole process for that? 465 00:47:40,000 --> 00:47:43,000 Or like the whole culture around contributing to something like this? 466 00:47:43,540 --> 00:47:43,760 Yeah. 467 00:47:43,840 --> 00:47:51,000 So this, this started as a bit of a brainchild with some colleagues, uh, at Centasso and quickly, 468 00:47:51,000 --> 00:47:54,960 we realized that if this was going to have any value, we'd have to make sure it was not 469 00:47:54,960 --> 00:47:57,140 a company owned thing. 470 00:47:57,140 --> 00:48:00,840 Cause this is much bigger than any one company, regardless of our level of experience in the 471 00:48:00,840 --> 00:48:01,080 industry. 472 00:48:01,080 --> 00:48:05,940 So we sort of threw some ideas together, got a bit of a draft together, and then immediately 473 00:48:05,940 --> 00:48:10,180 threw it out to a bunch of people who are, are all very nicely thanked at the bottom of 474 00:48:10,180 --> 00:48:12,520 the model, uh, for having done reviews for us. 475 00:48:13,280 --> 00:48:17,500 And as I said, when we first passed it out, I think none of us had very high expectations. 476 00:48:17,500 --> 00:48:20,500 I think we all thought people are going to look at the word maturity model and they're 477 00:48:20,500 --> 00:48:24,420 just going to say, nah, or they're going to look at it and say, you know, it's too far off. 478 00:48:24,500 --> 00:48:27,180 And what we found was actually people were really excited about it. 479 00:48:27,280 --> 00:48:31,760 And we got ourselves into the nitty gritty debates quite quickly, which usually means you're 480 00:48:31,760 --> 00:48:33,160 onto something useful, right? 481 00:48:33,160 --> 00:48:37,200 When you're, when you're looking at those one word differences and you're not talking 482 00:48:37,200 --> 00:48:38,720 about the overarching thing. 483 00:48:38,940 --> 00:48:39,840 So, yeah. 484 00:48:39,920 --> 00:48:45,960 So once we went through that first review, we then donated it to the, the CNCF, uh, platforms 485 00:48:45,960 --> 00:48:48,060 working group, which I am a member of. 486 00:48:48,060 --> 00:48:52,740 Um, and so I'm helping just steward and make sure that people understand the initial context 487 00:48:52,740 --> 00:48:55,580 and have accessibility to, to make edits. 488 00:48:55,580 --> 00:49:00,560 So to contribute today, um, I'll make sure you have the link Coté for any show notes and 489 00:49:00,560 --> 00:49:05,400 whatnot, uh, to be able to just right here in the Google doc, it's, it can be anonymous. 490 00:49:05,560 --> 00:49:09,780 I'd love for you to be signed in so that we can have a great back and forth, but any feedback 491 00:49:09,780 --> 00:49:10,800 is great feedback. 492 00:49:11,120 --> 00:49:13,600 You, everybody, it's globally suggestible. 493 00:49:13,600 --> 00:49:19,300 So people can make edits and we'll, we'll look to, uh, incorporate them as we can, especially 494 00:49:19,300 --> 00:49:22,500 if you share what your intention of the edit was, that'd be great. 495 00:49:22,500 --> 00:49:26,040 Cause that gives us why, um, we should, we should include it. 496 00:49:26,520 --> 00:49:29,300 And you can also comment and respond to other comments. 497 00:49:29,300 --> 00:49:33,800 Uh, and that's going to be open for a couple of months, uh, really until things start to 498 00:49:33,800 --> 00:49:41,980 slow down on the interest, but we're targeting hopefully a more formal GitHub issue type review 499 00:49:41,980 --> 00:49:49,740 cycle in maybe September time, uh, in order to hopefully, if we feel like it's ready, uh, 500 00:49:49,740 --> 00:49:55,380 have it be ready for KubeCon North America and Chicago, but there's not actually a hard deadline 501 00:49:55,380 --> 00:49:56,380 on this. 502 00:49:56,380 --> 00:49:59,880 So if we're finding that there's still big questions to be answered come September, we'll 503 00:49:59,880 --> 00:49:59,880 keep going. 504 00:49:59,880 --> 00:50:05,140 We'll keep having, keep workshopping it until we're comfortable with it as, as a document. 505 00:50:05,140 --> 00:50:10,880 So, um, and then if you want to get more involved, the working group meets, uh, every month and 506 00:50:10,880 --> 00:50:16,880 an hour call and you can join the CNCF Slack and find the working group and join those calls. 507 00:50:16,880 --> 00:50:21,380 So there's lots of other really interesting work going on in the platform space with that 508 00:50:21,380 --> 00:50:21,380 group. 509 00:50:21,380 --> 00:50:22,380 Yeah. 510 00:50:22,380 --> 00:50:23,380 Yeah. 511 00:50:23,380 --> 00:50:24,380 Yeah. 512 00:50:24,380 --> 00:50:26,380 I, I like the other, uh, just the platform reference architecture. 513 00:50:26,380 --> 00:50:29,380 I always use that very nice. 514 00:50:29,380 --> 00:50:32,380 Uh, so great job on that stuff. 515 00:50:32,380 --> 00:50:33,380 Working group. 516 00:50:33,380 --> 00:50:34,380 Yeah. 517 00:50:34,380 --> 00:50:35,380 Huge, huge props to the working group. 518 00:50:35,380 --> 00:50:38,380 Josh, the driving force of a lot of those things from red hat. 519 00:50:38,380 --> 00:50:41,380 And he's been, he's been great and, uh, and doing a lot of work there. 520 00:50:41,380 --> 00:50:45,380 So definitely it's, it's been a whole team effort through that working group, but I really 521 00:50:45,380 --> 00:50:46,380 enjoyed being a part of it. 522 00:50:46,380 --> 00:50:51,380 It's the conversations have been the most interesting bit as it is with all models. 523 00:50:51,380 --> 00:50:55,680 Uh, I, I hope people who read it will get value, but I know that the people who are helping 524 00:50:55,680 --> 00:51:00,380 create it are getting the most value because talking through what to do, where the trade-offs 525 00:51:00,380 --> 00:51:01,380 are, how to word it. 526 00:51:01,380 --> 00:51:02,380 Those are the really interesting bits. 527 00:51:02,380 --> 00:51:03,380 So for sure. 528 00:51:03,380 --> 00:51:04,380 No. 529 00:51:04,380 --> 00:51:08,380 And, and like you were saying, like, you know, if you're, if you're working with someone on 530 00:51:08,380 --> 00:51:12,380 a document or a concept, like you can tell they're very engaged and care if they're debating, 531 00:51:12,380 --> 00:51:18,380 if you should say investing versus funding, like, like, you know, exactly. 532 00:51:18,380 --> 00:51:19,380 Yeah. 533 00:51:19,380 --> 00:51:22,380 And also like, it probably is like, it would be, it would be really weird to incorporate 534 00:51:22,380 --> 00:51:27,380 feedback from someone and be like, well, as you may recall, wet yak said that this was 535 00:51:27,380 --> 00:51:32,380 a, uh, an idea we should incorporate because Google docs is always putting in these absurd 536 00:51:32,380 --> 00:51:39,380 names, uh, which, uh, anyhow, uh, well, great absurdly made up. 537 00:51:39,380 --> 00:51:42,380 Uh, well, how about yourself? 538 00:51:42,380 --> 00:51:46,380 If people wanted to, uh, catch up with things you were doing or, uh, you know, in a non-creepy 539 00:51:46,380 --> 00:51:49,380 way, see what you're up to online, where would you refer them? 540 00:51:49,380 --> 00:51:52,380 Uh, I don't know where to these days. 541 00:51:52,380 --> 00:51:56,380 Uh, uh, so I think we are all spread out quite widely at these, at this point. 542 00:51:56,380 --> 00:52:00,380 So my, the one thing I will say is my last name is very unique. 543 00:52:00,380 --> 00:52:05,380 So if you look for an Abby Bangzer and it's in the software world and not the art world, 544 00:52:05,380 --> 00:52:06,380 you found me. 545 00:52:06,380 --> 00:52:09,380 Uh, so I'm on Twitter as a underscore Bangzer. 546 00:52:09,380 --> 00:52:16,380 I'm on, I've made my way over to blue sky with the same handle, uh, Mastodon, uh, and LinkedIn 547 00:52:16,380 --> 00:52:18,380 with, with my, my full name. 548 00:52:18,380 --> 00:52:19,380 So I'm sort of all over the place. 549 00:52:19,380 --> 00:52:21,380 I try and do cross posting. 550 00:52:21,380 --> 00:52:23,380 So if you have a favorite platform, I'll hopefully see you there. 551 00:52:23,380 --> 00:52:28,380 So, yeah, there, there's, there's what we need a working group on, uh, is the, uh, too, 552 00:52:28,380 --> 00:52:30,380 too, too many social silos. 553 00:52:30,380 --> 00:52:35,380 And, uh, we need, we need some, uh, uh, some consoling and advice about what to do. 554 00:52:35,380 --> 00:52:38,380 We're on level two on that one. 555 00:52:38,380 --> 00:52:39,380 Yeah. 556 00:52:39,380 --> 00:52:43,380 I think it's an XKCD around that something, make another standard. 557 00:52:43,380 --> 00:52:44,380 Yeah. 558 00:52:44,380 --> 00:52:45,380 Uh, it'll help out. 559 00:52:45,380 --> 00:52:46,380 Well, well, great. 560 00:52:46,380 --> 00:52:47,380 It was, it was great talking about this with you. 561 00:52:47,380 --> 00:52:52,380 I think, I think I, I, I've got some more, uh, my understanding of it beyond, uh, looking 562 00:52:52,380 --> 00:52:57,380 at it and it's, it'll, it'll be, it'll be fun to, to, to have it evolve and, and see how 563 00:52:57,380 --> 00:52:58,380 that pans out. 564 00:52:58,380 --> 00:53:04,380 Well, as always, uh, if you've listened this far, I'm not sure how you subscribe to this podcast, 565 00:53:04,380 --> 00:53:08,380 but if you're not, if you're not subscribed already, you can go to tanzu talk.com and, 566 00:53:08,380 --> 00:53:10,380 uh, find out easily how to subscribe. 567 00:53:10,380 --> 00:53:12,380 You could tell all your friends, tell your enemies too. 568 00:53:12,380 --> 00:53:14,380 If that will increase our downloads, that's fine. 569 00:53:14,380 --> 00:53:15,380 And your neutrals. 570 00:53:15,380 --> 00:53:23,380 Uh, and, uh, also we, we stream these kind of, I don't know, would you say Cora at a random 571 00:53:23,380 --> 00:53:25,380 unexpected time whenever it is. 572 00:53:25,380 --> 00:53:29,380 So, so we're totally breaking that rule of streaming where you're supposed to be regular 573 00:53:29,380 --> 00:53:31,380 and predicting, but whatever. 574 00:53:31,380 --> 00:53:35,380 Uh, but if you go to our YouTube channel, it's just VMware Tanzu, you could look up the video 575 00:53:35,380 --> 00:53:36,380 as well. 576 00:53:36,380 --> 00:53:40,380 And I guess if you, you know, if you've written our, our hook here is we, we like to find something 577 00:53:40,380 --> 00:53:44,380 that somebody is publishing and talk about that and have a conversation around that. 578 00:53:44,380 --> 00:53:48,380 So if you are, uh, you know, if you have a blog or if you've written something that you 579 00:53:48,380 --> 00:53:53,380 would think is an interesting topic and want to come on and chat with us, let us know. 580 00:53:53,380 --> 00:53:54,380 Absolutely. 581 00:53:54,380 --> 00:53:54,380 All right. 582 00:53:54,380 --> 00:53:55,380 Well, we'll see everyone next time. 583 00:53:55,380 --> 00:53:56,380 Bye-bye. 584 00:53:56,380 --> 00:53:57,380 Thank you so much, Abby. 585 00:53:57,380 --> 00:53:58,380 Thanks y'all.