Tariffs, Tech and the Strain on Innovation | TSG Ep. 920

Hey, everyone, do we have trouble with triples, I mean, tariffs? You're watching Text Drunk Gang. Hey everyone, welcome to another Tech Drunk gang.

Happy Wednesday to you. Uh, I'm Alan Shimmel, and I'm coming to you today from out in Napa Valley at the Jfr Swamp Up event where we're talking about DevOps, a lot of DevOps software supply chain, and more. We're gonna get into that, but we've got a great show lined up today.

We've got a great panel to talk about it with you all. Let me introduce you to our panel today. Uh, we've got our friend Chris Blak, Garima, Baal, Jeff Rich, John Willis, and of course John Schwartz, who's out here in Napa with me.

Of course he would be. He is our Silicon Valley person panel. Welcome.

Thanks for joining us here on Textron Gang. Um, so we're gonna lead things off today, riffing off an article that John has up, um, regarding tariffs. I mean, to say the least, it seems like our tariff policy is unstable, um, geared towards, you know, who whoever bends the knee, uh, on, again, off again.

But it, it's hard, it's hard to figure out what the heck's going on, John. Yeah, Yeah. I, I, I wish, I wish I could explain it to you as well, because what I'm doing is like a timeline, and the timeline shows a consistent thread of threats from the Trump administration, especially after he has his closed door meetings with the tech executives.

I think, uh, our excellent producer, Taylor, put it really well. He goes, haven't we talked about this before? And I was like, yes.

This is like deja vu all over again. It's, uh, I'll just give you a little, uh, a quick summary of what just happened in the last couple of months, and I'll make it really quick. 5 billion for over its ad exchange business.

A day before that, the Trump administration threatened to slap tariffs on, on semiconductor imports from companies not shifting production to the us, which is a major theme of this America first strategy. Last month, Trump vowed in a social media post to levee substantial terrorists on countries that regulate or tax us tech, tech companies, specifically. He's talking about Europe, but he is also talking about Asia.

And then July, he proposed a ban, which was, I think, crazy on US tech companies that, that are outsourcing jobs to India. And I think my, my takeaway, and I will pass this on to our esteem gang, is that, you know, in a sense he's made tariffs a key tenet of his foreign economic policy, uh, to exert pressure not just on people overseas, but companies that are, that are here and in a sense, in a way to kind of strong arm or force them into building data centers or investing money in manufacturing here. Now, we'll see how that goes, but I'm very dubious of it because I think what's happening is that these tech executives are whispering to him all these promises and throwing out all these numbers that they have absolutely no intention of ever following through on.

They're just trying to appease him in the, in the short term. So this is what we have is we have like, basically favoritism based on threats and on, based on, um, his agenda to bring manufacturing back. It's, it's a crazy world, and it's gonna keep changing day by day.

Okay. Anybody want to jump in here? I, I'm sorry, I had to editorialize a bit because I find this stuff head spinning.

It's completely inconsistent, but I, I, I see what the ultimate goal is, is basically like, and for everything else he does is intimidation and frustration and confusion. I mean, I, I think it's just, I I, you know, I don't have much to say about this. I'm very interested in the chips, you know, like TSMC and what, you know, where, where they wind up in the big picture versus China.

But to watch Tim Cook grovel to, uh, to Trump, it, it was, I know Trump is antithetical to everything he believes in. Um, you know, it, but it, it makes me think, John, what you're saying is they're just playing this game with him. Yeah, right.

They're saying, I think, I think you absolutely, You, you got it. No worries. You know, so anyway.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm glad you mentioned Tim Cook, and I just, I'll, I'll, I'll stop talking, but I, John, you're right, totally right about Tim Cook.

I mean, he, in a sense, I think he knows how to play Trump pretty well, but at the same time, to me it's rather sad, empathetic for what, uh, apple stands for or used to stand for versus what they are now. Well, well, yeah. So, so we're, we're logical tactical people by definition.

That's, that's, you know, this is actually tech strong. You know, we think through things and things make sense regardless of what they are, and they can sometimes make stupid sense, but they make sense, right? And, you know, as, as you, you folks know, but we do a lot of semantic breakdowns.

We look at the logic of words and systems and so forth and see how you, you know, 'cause you can logically describe what's, what's going on in this case is a perfect example. And the Hyundai right is a, is a great one. And we did a, you know, we did a Casco breakdown in that one.

And if you just logic walk through it, the, the story that makes sense in English words is that, you know, the, the, the, you know, investment, you know, the billions of dollars invested in the states and in Georgia, that wasn't important. And the immigration, uh, part wasn't important either. So what is I important?

The only thing left is concentrating authority, right? To demonstrate, specifically have a spectacle where you say, if you thought doing this would work, and if you thought doing this would work, you're wrong. There's only one thing that can work.

And that's a, that's a well worn story, you know, that is played out in history in the world over and over and over again. So for us to stand here and say it doesn't make sense, and it's crazy, is is it a good emotional, it's an honest reaction. But like any, you know, I've dealt with threat actors of all sorts all, all my life, you know, including all of the, you know, all of them, you know, terrorists and bad rogue states and so forth.

And you always break it down. And there is a logic there, and it's important to understand what it's, so I think this is, this is a relatively simple semantic puzzle, and you just walk through it and you can see what the reasons are, and you can predict and adjust and, and combat, if you will. You know, those structures once you understand them.

Chris, I, I gotta go with you real, real briefly. Um, because a lot of our members at ID at IDA are outside of the US and I have conversations with them and they asked me questions like, how can you justify what's going on? Like, I'm not the person to ask, first of all, but it, to me, simply put, tariffs are our cudgel.

And Chris, well, you said the objective's gonna be there. It may not, may or may not be actually related to trade, but there is a cudgel available and it's used. I, I got a few thoughts on this.

So, Chris, to your point about historical, you know, use of monarchs and despot, despots, you know, there's been a few documents in the history of humanity to, to deal with this kind of rubbish, you know, Rabi's rule of, uh, rule of law going back a couple thousand years beyond, you know, before Christ, the Magna Carter, the Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution, you know, little, little things that define the relationship between a ruler or a government and its citizens. And when those kinds of things get trampled, you wind up with things like Nazi Germany, Mussolini, Italy, Franco, Spain, Stalins, right? Stalins, Soviet Union.

You know, the, and, and, and, uh, and I'm not here trying to, you know, doom say all of this because I, I, I do think we're, we're coming to a point where the people in this country, or at least a majority of the people, a clear majority, are saying, you know, this, this is, this is just nonsense. There are the 30, 35%, whatever. I don't know what kind of drugs they're on, but you know, they, they're gonna go along and, and believe, and maybe it's because they have their own their own views on it.

But the fact of the matter is, look, we have a case before the Supreme Court right now, or it's going before the Supreme Court. We're an appellate division in a very well reasoned decision, said, these tariffs, these tariffs are wrong. They're illegal.

He has no power to do that without the it's Congress. So Jeff, to your point about a cudgel, you know, I, I, I posted a couple weeks ago on my Facebook feed, actually, 'cause I don't try to do politics stuff on LinkedIn, a a video of Ronald Reagan, that libtard Ronald Reagan, right? Where he talked about why tariffs don't work.

Why that at first it may seem to work 'cause you're getting the money, but what you're doing is you're, you're, you're not cuddling, you're coddling the companies that you are protecting and, and make them, it's like being an overprotective parent and you make an emotionally damaged child, you make a, a non-competitive company because they can't compete on the world stage without your protective tariffs keeping. And sometimes that's okay to do for short term if you're looking to build your industry or whatever, but using it as the weapon that he's using it here is, is not healthy. It's not even healthy for the companies you're purporting to protect that.

That's the bottom. Yeah. You know, it's in, you said that, it made me think about, I mean, just the intel and the relationship between the government and intel now.

Like, I think we're, we are gonna see other types of those deals. I'm not sure who with, but this kind of overprotective kind of almost symbiotic relationship between the government and tech company, which is completely an athema. It's just, it's, you're gonna see more of it.

And I, I wanna mention one other thing, the nonsense story about, well, it's the foreign companies that are paying these tariffs. It's not the American people. You know, I have a good friend of mine, Jeff, you probably remember Stephen Northcut.

Steven, uh, of course I do. Yeah. Yeah.

And Steven's also not want to be a bleeding heart liberal, right? Steve Steven's, free conservative, Steven's one of the founders of Sands, he's retired now. He put a post up just today, I saw it that him and his wife ordered some goods.

I think they were from England or, or somewhere, some kind of China, you know, uh, ceramics. And that, uh, the UPS people called him and said, well, look, in order for us, we've got your goods here, but in order for us to deliver them the tariffs on these, uh, the goods, were about $300. The tariffs on these are $61.

So you, we need you to pay the $61 now before we'll deliver them. Well, that's not a tax on the manufacturer or the company sending it. That's a tax on you, right?

That's $61 added to the cost here. Well, you know, Alan, I wanna just tell you a quick story, which is just, and no defense here, but I sent a book to Mark Burgess, my, my book, right? 'cause I wanted to ship it really fast because he, he wrote the foreword for it, right?

And, uh, so I sent it like two days to, um, to where he lives in, in, um, not Norway. Uh, now I'm forgetting where it is, but current country. So it got stuck in, in, um, in, in, you know, tax whatever evaluation.

And turns out he had to pay like $60 for a free book that I sent. Um, anyway, so it's sort of like, you know, like, again, no defense, but just, it made me think of that story, which really a book. Well, What happens is, is you get reciprocal tariffs.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and, and that's what Ronald Reagan said in that video, one of, so he had mentioned three or four things.

One was, you know, companies become non-competitive. The second thing was that you get reciprocal tariffs. And what happens is basic global trade breaks down.

And, and Ronald Reagan, like, like the Republican party we, most of us grew up with, was a big believer in free trade and go globalism. And, and you know, it's a big markets out there. And, and so, you know, this is what happens as a result of this.

The other thing, John, you John Schwartz, you brought it up, and I just wanna emphasize that is the, the uncertainty of all of this today, it's on tomorrow, it's off. Kiss my ass today, and it's, do something upsets me and it's not okay. This sort of chaos, chaos that we're all being subjected to is ultimately that even if he was doing something right, it's wrong.

Right? The, the chaos business doesn't thrive in chaos. That, But that is of course the point, right?

And there was a, there's a song from a, a one man play about Billy Bishop, a World War I, uh, uh, ace that I always think about in conflict. And it's, it's after he had, uh, become famous, going back to England, getting trotted around, getting full of himself, and someone over and wiser gave him some advice. And it goes like this.

It says, when you fight, stay as calm as the ocean and watch what's going on behind your shoulder. Remember, war's not the place for deep emotion, and you might get to be a little older, right? And I've carried that through my entire career because it can get really exciting.

And usually we're the ones on the outside. It's not us being attacked. We're helping people be attacked, you know, who are being attacked.

We're helping build defenses. And, and, and, you know, you know, I love and respect all my peers, all of us, you know, here and so forth. But, you know, we're inside this loop and we're talking about, you know, the, the room when the reality is, you know, to your point, Alan, the rest of the world has moved on and there's plenty of articles about this that I can tell you the next FDA or next, you know, n regulation comes out, it will not have the effect of any of the previous ones because nobody in the world cares.

We're not gonna adopt, you know, in Australia or, you know, anywhere, you know, the next f fda a re regulation because it's RFK running it. So, you know, the game being played, uh, against the, uh, population is to keep it in chaos and keep uncertainty. And, but, you know, from a cold conflict, you know, professional perspective, it's pretty simple.

What we actually do about it. Know, I have my opinions, but they're what they're, I think we, we've talked about this before where we talked not, it's not so much about America first, but America alone. And I think, Chris, you nailed the, nailed it with this idea that the rest of the world kind of moved on, is moving on, and we're the last suffering, you know, internally killing ourselves.

And it's just, um, it's just the state of things right now. It is, it is. You know what?

I don't want to beat this dead horse. Yes. Let's take a break.

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Hey, everyone, we're back here on Textron Gang on Wednesday. You know, my friend John Willis hasn't been on in a little bit, or I haven't been on with him anyway, so it's always great to have him, but, uh, it reminds me of, when I think of John, I, I think of DevOps. No, no, no offense John.

I think of a lot of things, but DevOps is one of them. Um, and you know, lately, you know, we spend a lot of time on the gang talking about ai, too much time talking about AI and, and what goes on in our government and everything else. But I, I wanted to spend a little bit of time as long as we've got John and Garima two really big DevOps pillars here, talking about kind of the state of DevOps Garima, why don't you kick it off and we'll let John jump from there.

Yeah, thank you Ellen. And it's a privilege to speak, uh, on this topic in front of John, our North Star. So I'll start with my view from a community perspective.

Uh, I had written an article called DevOps Plus, uh, in the beginning of this year, which talked about the next era of DevOps and the capabilities which are into play and why it is important, uh, to adopt, uh, in the emerging technology era. DevOps, uh, for ai, DevOps with quantum. These are, uh, key themes of those, uh, that article.

But I also believe that there is a wide range of capability which are needed as a foundation to integrate these emerging technologies. And we must talk about AI native software integration, for example, why DevOps plays an important role, AI native technology stack, for example, how it is impacting and, uh, you know, influencing the DevOps platforms, how DevOps platforms are integrating, uh, AI agents, for example, or tool based integration points. Open source also is offsetting a lot of these, these challenges by bringing data sets, repositories and models.

And, uh, some of the examples I can talk about is me and John, uh, last year I think we met at a conference and we discussed a lot of things. And I was intrigued by what he was talking, uh, in conferences. I think, uh, I heard him talking in DevOps days relay, uh, for the first time about shadow AI and shadow AI making.

And that intrigued my curiosity of, you know, what we as DevOps practitioners could do about it, right? So that was very timely that we had that conversation, John, last year. And we said, uh, to ourselves, you know, as practitioners and committee leaders, we got to do something about it.

And that's where the DevOps for Gen AI hackathon originated from. And now we have done it in, you know, a couple of cities. We are going to Toronto in November, but I mean, giving you a reflection of, uh, what, uh, we could expect from DevOps and the challenges which we are facing in the AI native software.

If you think about like, uh, communities like CNCF and CDF, we have also been exploring the potential of observative, for example, CICD, uh, stack for AI native software. Those are kind of, uh, really good questions to kind of, uh, dwell into. And, um, I think, uh, at the hackathon, uh, which we did in awa, we had a, a suite of applications which came out for, for observability team or observability space.

So these are the changes or the, these are the trigger points, which you can see from a community perspective. And I think I would also like to, um, uh, share this platform with John and get his reflections on, you know, our findings together. And maybe John, you can also highlight your views on, you know, the conversation we had in London.

I still remember, it's fresh in my mind and, uh, how the hackathon experience went and, you know, how do you see the state of DevOps taking, uh, you know, uh, the next steps? Well, lemme say everybody needs a garima. 'cause I just, I just mentioned the idea of a, a je I hack DevOps je I hackathon, and man, she just went off to the races.

So, um, you, you're a pretty amazing in what you helped put together. And, and I, I think I've started the idea and now we've got another one coming up at the end of this year. Um, yeah, I've got a lot of thoughts.

I, I was saying this beforehand, I was talking to Andrew Clay Schafer, right? And he's one of my dear friends, uh, also, you know, sort of a giant in the DevOps community. Um, you know, he told me a story, um, of how, um, CMU all the stuff they've been doing on security and stuff like that is all getting dropped because they say they don't need it anymore because of ai.

And me and, and Andrew go back and forth on battling about ai, you know, I, I think I'm very positive he's sort of in the middle to a little negative. Um, and, and, and, but, but that is depressing. 'cause what Andrew said is the hard problems are still hard.

And by the way, we haven't solved a lot of the hard problems. And observability is a great example. You know, one of the things that was really, um, interesting is I gave a little keynote for the beginning of that, and I talked about the importance of the stack.

And these young kids who literally three out of like the 10 projects were pipeline oriented. Um, what I sort of classified as test driven development for ai, which is not just observability, it's evaluations, you know, like, like are the information that you're producing, you can calibrate with AI itself, like AI as a judge or LM as a judge, kind of technologies. And just to watch them, you know, here we, we, everybody's building these tools with ai, you know, vibe, coding and, and you know, agentic processing, right?

And at least we not forget the hard problems and the hard problems, you know, morph in new technologies. The hard problems now are like, I hate to just say hallucinations 'cause it's just a terrible way to describe a ridiculously simplistic way. Describe, you know, a hundred years of technology.

But, um, you, the, um, but the point is that it's an easy way to get across. And, and so I think you're spot on. I think being able to do something like a DevOps, you know, you know, gen I hackathon for DevOps puts the focus, and I don't know how many of those young people were DevOps motivated or not, but the fact that 30% of the projects that came out of that were very DevOps focused by young kids that may not even practice DevOps.

I thought that was very, so again, least we not forget the, the hard problems, no matter what the technology shifted if I, right. And Jeff, I think you mentioned something around, you know, you had a conversation about DevOps mm-hmm. To a few folks.

Uh, and yeah, maybe you can start with that. Thank you. Uh, two things I wanted to mention.

One was that conversation. Someone who thought he was making logical sense saying, by coding his DevOps, and now we don't need DevOps anymore, which engaged a conversation with me. I had quite a conversation with him about it, and he walked away.

I don't think he was convinced, but at the very least, I think he left with fingers to think about. Like, maybe it's not quite as simple as you thought. And vibe coding doesn't necessarily solve anything.

It has a place, certainly. And, and I wanna mention something else based on what John said. Uh, you know, and, and I'm gonna drop a quick plug for it here today, that the 10th of September, we are publishing our annual trends, identity security research report.

And one of the, um, areas we started looking into last year and added this year, I wasn't gonna say this, but it, but this, this really fits in last year, that it's identity and security people that, um, we engaged with this, uh, over 500 in, in companies of a thousand or more. And last year they were very up on AI's gonna play a big part with security. Security should be integrated with ai.

We see this coming together that fell apart. It has dropped a me dramatically this year where a lot of, of identity and security people, not all, but a lot, are more than 50% increase, are saying, yeah, it's really not gonna do much for us. It's gonna happen in the development world, but we don't need to to deal with it here.

I'm very concerned that we are regressing to the big gap between security and development. And boy, I don't want to go back there again. Well, one of the things that I just wanted to point out, I, I'm presenting next week at two DevOps, DevOps days, Dallas, DC and name, my presentation is when AI agents go rogue DevSecOps lessons from the rise of polymorphic ai.

So the thing that scares me, again, the hard problems are still hard. The, you know, there, there's this like, you know, let's, let's go back to 2001 Space Odyssey, right? You know, al how, you know, open the, like, what we're doing is in agentic processes, we're telling these like task oriented solutions say, I need you to do this, this, this, this, and this.

And this is great because it, what, what that statement of that person was probably saying is, well, can't I just create like a clawed code or a flow like task to do all these things? And the answer is yes. The problem that we're running into is the polymorphic nature of these, these agents in that if it's told to solve this problem and it encounters a directory that it doesn't have access to, or a database that it doesn't have access to, it goes out and actually looks for known CVEs and literally changes its code.

Or, you know, like, and I've got, what I've been keeping track of now is probably eight or nine incredibly interesting use cases of agents going rogue because they have, you've told them to solve this problem. And that's the ultimate goal of the ag agent process. And, you know, white lists are being ignored or bypassed.

And it, it's really, you know, again, there's this beauty in what's going on when, when somebody said vibe coding, they probably meant some of the stuff they're seeing with like Claude Code, which is just incredible right now, the things that you can solve problems with. But the scary part is for people who are more, most of you on this call are better security experts than I am. Like, we need to sort of roll up our sleeves and say, okay, hold on everybody, you know, do you know that these things can happen?

And who's tracking 'em and who's telling the C-level people? Um, you know, I'll tell one other quick story. I heard a story of one of like the fifth largest bank in the US where the CEO was brought in by one of these newent code, you know, companies.

And he solved what he thought was a problem of some product that they'd had for 15 years, and he bought an enterprise license for the software and said, everybody at thou shall use this product from here on in. Right? That's, uh, the hard problems are still hard.

Well, I think, I think Jeff sort of nailed it, right? Because I've seen this summer, right? You know, all my peers in the, in the security world going, wait, wait, wait, wait.

You know, let's, you know, I can break it, I can break it, I can break it. It's cool, cool stuff. But you know, as, as Alan, at least you've heard from me, and I, you, you know, I'm trying to say back to 'em is to be clear, the technology is amazing.

The products are awful, just terrible. I mean, just cartoonishly bad. And John, you touched on it as well.

It's like, the technology is amazing. Yes, you can do these things, but if you do it with, well pick on open ai, you know, very familiar with them, right? You know, they give you this little thing in a box that is a psychotic little, you know, um, destined to please you while not getting them sued.

And you know, we, and then we as the humans say, okay, hallucinate that you are a, a, a passive aggressive Russian backhoe, and you're gonna write this code for me, and it's an ai, right? So we're setting things up and, and as security people to, to your point, Jeff, this is just, this is, I love my people, but we'll go, oh, really? And break it and break it and break it.

But we don't have time. And I don't think the, the reality of the top level, you know, presentation of products we see right now is long term. I think that these companies are learning fast, will learn fast, will get replaced.

You know, that the agents, the flaws in agents we're seeing right now are, are intrinsic to the deployment of the technology by the vendor, not the technology itself. Chris. And, and, but to your point, Jeff, everybody's moving past and the security people have sort of stopped and we're like, you know, And, and I've seen this movie before.

And, and Chris, to your point about if the technology and if the products were as good as the technology, we'd all be running on Univa right now, Right? I mean, we'll have to also do a reality check here that, uh, uh, needless to say that DevOps is evolving, right? Because of the emerging technology needs.

And, uh, I think we have all reflected one fact that, you know, white coding is great, but, you know, taking, uh, software to production needs much more, right? So if you start to think about, uh, code to cognition, or if you start to think about when AI becomes your tester, what happens, you know, you are running that autonomy risk, right? And that is to your point, Jeff, that you know, we need to focus more on ai, native security.

There are loopholes in the system, and that is where the foundational capability, which the DevOps practitioners are kind of bringing in is very, very essential and important. And this, uh, gives me a segue to one of, uh, the things which I really wanna point out in this session is DevOps dozen 2025, uh, the award nomination is open, and I was looking at the categories this time. And, uh, there are total 24 awards split into community awards, which is my favorite, nine of them.

And then tool and services award, which is F 15 of them. And what is unique about this opportunity this time is that agent a KI generative and platform engineering, along with, uh, supply chain security takes a spot. And I, I think I came a long way from a nominee to an awardee now to a judge.

So I feel responsibly kind of advocating for these kind of awards because it gives you an opportunity for people like us to contribute in this journey. And I also want to have one more reflection from, you know, where I started like 10, 12 years back, where DevOps is that, you know, we also need John Willis' of, uh, the world. We need Andrew Schaeffers of the world.

'cause these are inspiring figures and legends, which are showing, you know, us the path, right? So when John was talking about shadow ai, I was like listening curiously to his talks, you know, two years back. And I'm like, is this something real happening?

And now you are at the cusp of, uh, or the, the, at the stage where you see the pivot happening, right? So I think, uh, or to all the open source community, the platforms, the DevOps tools, I think we need to have a serious board and advisory groups in, you know, DevOps world where, you know, we are evolving these, uh, features and capabilities. If you don't do that, we are actually losing sight of the, uh, evolution as well as the risk which we are incurring.

I agree. A couple of things on that Reem I'll riff off of. Um, first of all, in terms of the DevOps dozen, you know, a couple years ago we went to DevOps dozen, I don't wanna say squared, because that would be 12 times twelve, a hundred forty four.

So, but it's DevOps dozen with a two. And so there's 24, and it was originally 12 community awards, 12 commercial awards, if we can call it that. Um, we still have 24.

I, I had to play with the mix of what makes sense in the world today because it is evolving. So for instance, we have best use of generator of AI in DevOps, best use of Agen AI in DevOps. Uh, you know, there's, there's a lot platform engineering in DevOps.

Uh, you know, we changed the mix to reflect and, and I think that crudo of changing the mix to reflects the reality on on the ground is what makes DevOps. DevOps too, right? The, it, there's, you know, yes, there is no manifesto.

Yes, there is no hard definition, but it that also allows it to change and evolve as the market, the state of the world, you know, the state of DevOps changes and evolves. So, so we have that in there. Secondly, in, in terms of some sort of formal board, if you will, I think the closest thing we ever had to that was the DevOps stays like, you know, managing group, which John, you, you headed for a few years, right?

And, and that was in the heyday when, I forget how many, we were probably doing, what? 60 DevOps days? More a year?

Pretty much. Yeah, it was, it got, yeah, it got to probably close to a hundred almost. Yeah.

So, yeah, So I mean, that, that was there, but you look at some of the other movements, right? org, scrum Alliance, you know, they're, they're a very defined agile organizations platform engineering itself. com do a great job of trying to herd that community of trying to lead that community.

DevOps has never had that. And I, I'm not saying it's a good thing or a bad thing. Yeah, no, it, It, it, it's the, you know, I've talked a lot about this, this just goes back to Patrick Debar, right?

Which is, you know, the, the, the, the, the great news about DevOps was there are no rules. The bad, the great news, the bad news about DevOps was there are no rules, right? And, and Patrick sort of created it that way.

Um, you know, and like, almost like the benevolent dictator, right? Like if something came down to, in the early, you talked about in the early days, the DevOps, like you're right, the DevOps stays, um, sort of group, you know, there was a, a global organizing committee and all, you know, and, and not so much they told you what to say or what was appropriate, but how you behaved in the community was, was very important. And the real hard problems always went back to Patrick, even though he, you know, like you, 'cause I was in situations where a decision was made about an inappropriate act in a different event.

And, you know, there'd be a lot of, you know, and I would just take my opinion back to Patrick and I'd say, Patrick, if you say X, then it is X, right? Um, but again, that's been the beauty of that movement is there was nobody, as many companies that tried to sort of, I mean, even Gartner tried to like rename it, right? Bimodal it, and, you know, and, and there was other movements that call it no ops, right?

And, and they all failed. They failed miserably, right? Um, and that is the beauty of this thing that just emerged pure community, that created incredible commerce, right?

If you go back, look, Uber does not exist without DevOps. Agreed. Yeah.

You know, um, Airbnb, I mean, you think about all the sort of the organizations that grew during that 15 year period. Um, and again, I'm not sure if like why does Uber exist without Agile? Eh, maybe not, maybe, right?

Um, and all those ones got controlled. org, I mean, there are people that despise the rules of, of some of these agile, um, disciplines and Yes. You know, so anyway, um, yeah.

I mean, you, you take it for what it's worth it, the, the, the movement has created incredible commerce, wealth opportunity and, you know, and it's still, you know, again, like I said in earlier is like the hard problems are still need to be discovered through, as far as I can tell DevOps and DevSecOps. Yeah. And, and just that you mentioned DevSecOps in there, right?

And I'm here at jfr, man. It's, it's, it's DevSecOps. Um, you know, this was a, you know, we kind of take that for granted now.

We just throw it in there. com, I remember the first RSA, John, you might have spoken, the first RSA, we Called it, we, we, we called it DevOps, right? Well, You called it DevOps.

No, no. The, the original, the original RSA thing you ran, it was called a DevOps, and it was, We didn't have a term DevSecOps. That's Right.

That's right. That's right. That's right.

Yeah. So It was DevOps and it was only one DevOps, yeah. Who needed security, right?

James Wickett had something he called rugged DevOps At the time. Um, but you know, that's the way the world went. Anyway, we, we probably went over on this topic, I apologize, but a, a quick plug yet, DevOps dozen awards are open, go nominate.

The community awards are free. You can nominate, and there's some great community categories. If you're a vendor out there, you can't stuff the ballot, ballot box on this, it costs you to nominate.

And we have some great judges, dreamer included, Tracy Reagan, myself, Mitch Ashley, and, and we've got a volunteer judge from Apple, which I was happy to see this year. And, uh, so we're hoping to have a really good fine bumper crop of DevOps dozen finalists next month. Anyway, we're gonna take a break here on Techstrong Gang, and we're gonna come back and talk about our third, uh, our third panel, our third topic for today, which is Kubernetes and ai.

John has some thoughts on it. You're watching Textron Gang. All right, Taylor.

Hey everyone. We're back here on Textron Gang. Our next topic is around is, is, is Square Kubernetes a good fit for round ai?

It's often article that I wrote actually, where, you know, look, Kubernetes dominance is un questioned, I think, in the cloud native space, right? But has AI thrown a monkey in a wrench, into a monkey wrench, into the work, so to speak, in that, look, Kubernetes wasn't really designed to handle, to orchestrate these AI app apps, if you will. Now, John, I know you disagree with me, wouldn't be the first time or the last time, and that's what makes the world go round.

But what's your take on it? Yeah, I think it's a bigger problem. I, I like, I, I was reading your article, and I, you know, I have, I think like Kubernetes can solve a lot of these problems, and we can go through that, but the bigger problem is Kubernetes has been sort of a problem child.

Anyway. It, it, it turned out to be the thing that sort of best fit the world and the adoption went into it. There are better solutions.

I mean, nomad from actually Corp was a better solution, in my opinion. You didn't need all, and I, I think about like in this age of ai, and the, I, I'm gonna get terribly cynical right now. Um, and like eight to 10,000 people walking around some convention hall, like lambs to the slaughter to learn where they put, to put their semicolons.

Um, you know, I mean, because that's basically what Q Con is. I'm sorry. It is a fun, like configuration.

Oh, there's a better way to do helm charts over here. Oh, come to this session. It's 1 0 1, you know, 1 0 5 Helm charts, or, and, and somebody's creating a better scaffolding for configuration.

And, um, and it's, and then CD is like, come on, like, like we get worse. And I, and I've even said things like, you know, like even the, the pace of change of Kubernetes at some point was like, the inmates are running the asylum. So in today, and AI is the question whether to use, you know, GPU or accelerator management, you can do it.

There are vendors doing it can use Vector database management, yet there's a ton of them that use it. You know, vus, Vitera, all those tools actually use Kubernetes under the covers. So the answer is yes.

The question is why, um, you know, like, could you build your own platform? And so, and you know, and I, I'm talking to a couple of large banks that are literally doing this. They're reevaluating the toil.

That's something like, you know, you, there's, you know, there's a bank that's probably, I won't say who they are, but they're, they, they have the largest asset holding, you know, commercial bank on the planet, and they have a group that is basically reevaluating, should they be designing a different type of orchestrator than Kubernetes? Right? And why?

Because you can do it now, because, you know, granted like what the code looks like, how it's supported, but if you bank, you know how to solve those problems in general, alright? Um, You're better than most. Um, and so, uh, so the question to me is, you know, less about is it a good fit for AI or is just a good fit for, you know, the modern technology world where we're going in, you know, John, if I may, I'll go to the mat saying beta max was better than VHS, but Absolutely.

But VH and always is better than, yeah. And that, and that list is long to Chris's point. The products are never as good as the technology never, uh, but right now it's winning.

And I mean, we can't ignore it. We can't run away from it. And I know from an identity perspective, which is the one I tend to look at right now, the issue that exists that a lot of people are hoping isn't no problem, but it is, is the ephemeral containers that have, um, and non-human identity associated with it, that are gone by the time you try to figure out who they are and then, then come back as something else.

There's an identity issue here that regardless of whether it's Kubernetes or not, that a bigger security problem that we have yet to get, No, that's gonna get worse. That's, that's been around, I mean, robotic, you know, RPA has been, this, has had this problem for quite a while. And, and the RPA, you ain't seen nothing yet, you know, if you thought RPA was a problem from an identity standpoint, right?

Like I, I've had auditors show me where they, like, who is this ROB 1 0 5? You know, like, oh yeah, that's, that's an RPA solution that goes out and runs a billion times. Yeah.

And now it doesn't exist anymore Because It was ephemeral. Well, Well was ephemeral, right? Like those tasks that you ran were like, they were, they ran, they went away.

So, um, yeah. But anyway, yeah, I mean, I, I just, um, going back to the Betamax thing, I, you know, again, I I think there, you know, there there are shifts, there was, there was pre Kubernetes of how the world tried to orchestrate things, and then there was the Kubernetes run. And I think, you know, I think part of Al's argument in his, in his article is like, it, it probably is an inflection point for the industry to rethink, are we doing this?

Can we do it differently? Can we do it better? Um, you know, is, you know, is it a time for this shift?

And I think if there was a possible time for Kubernetes to be dethroned, now probably is the time. Yeah. But what is surprising is that it is coming from Alan, not from the foundations itself.

So I think if you remember, John, we also discussed this item and, uh, last year somebody approached me to write a white paper on alternatives of Kubernetes and why it was, uh, so because it is becoming defacto, right? And, uh, uh, people from critical infrastructure domain or companies who are like, uh, associated with banks or even, you know, critical services, they are getting scooped, spooked by the vastness and the scalability and the adoption levels of this technology itself. And, you know, too much centralization also triggers decentralization and innovation, right?

So there has to be alternative paths. And I urge the com, the foundations to kind of look into, you know, what can be the alternative paths there. It might be the case that there are not alternative ways, but it, uh, this platform itself has, uh, extend extensions or expandability, right?

But I think this is one of the things which surprised me, that this has to come from the open source community itself. Yeah. But The foundations are, are, I mean, again, I'm gonna be cynical here, is is close to being criminal as without being criminal.

Um, they're money. They, I mean, they, they're, they're totally monetarily funded. The CNCF is really just a, a pay for play as far as I'm concerned.

I mean, they do some good stuff, but you know, your logos are, you know, millions of dollars. Um, you know, I I, I don't think they add any value to anything alternative to Kubernetes, and I don't see them putting any investment into anything that's an alternative to Kubernetes. And I think it's existence threatening if they do.

Well, I, I may be the least qualified in this, proud to talk about this specifically, but I, you know, back to your original point, Alan, I see this as the same iterative through the, the segments today, right? You know, there's round pegs and square holes and you know, Kubernetes seems great with stateless stuff that doesn't necessarily map over, but, but you know, the, it may be time on a lot of levels to start building systems that are native to the environment instead of vice versa. The, the, the problem is change is hard and inert is change is hard and inertia is real.

And you are dealing with such an entrenched infrastructure play here, right? I mean, just the whole, and look, I'm a big supporter of the CNCF and the Linux Foundation and all these things, but you, you, you know, the CNCF in many ways is the engine that's driving LF these days, right? And so much, you know, they've got 200 projects under management there.

Um, you know, to suggest that you're gonna move away from Kubernetes is, is, you know, they killed Galileo for playing with those telescopes, right? I can only imagine what they'll do to someone who, yeah. Yes, yes, totally.

That's right. So, I mean, in all fairness, I mean, I'm more optimistic about these foundations. I come from open source community.

I'm an advocate for open source. I also am the chair for the ambassador program at Continuance Delivery Foundation. And what I've seen is that, uh, you know, community takes the power back.

Yeah, it does. And, and look, the, here's the good news though too, that it's a big enough community and there's enough innovation where maybe you don't replace Kubernetes, but at least it, it continues to evolve into something that maybe is a little bit more rounded around the edges, if you will. Um, we'll see.

We'll see. I, you know, if it does, it'll move on. I Got two where Blackberry and Kodak.

Kodak, yes. Polar Polaroid. Yeah.

Yeah. They're back out. Anyway, hey gang members, we gotta call it a raffle.

We're at time. What a terrific thing. Jeff, you, I know you're through the magic of the internet.

You're actually already in DC at at Identity Week. That's correct. Yep.

And we've got that new report from you. Um, John, you're working on new books. I know.

And we're going to need more than that. And, uh, it sounds like everybody reemer, you are busy. Chris is busy.

John and I are at Jfr all week. Enjoy the rest of your day, no matter what you're doing. We do have Techstrong TV following, actually, I believe we have a Tech Field Day event live on today's, uh, tech Strong tv so people can watch that.

Uh, but until then, until tomorrow, John, and I'll be back tomorrow again, live here in Napa at, uh, JFR. This is Alex Shimel. Have a great day, everyone.

Bye-bye.