Exploring Google’s Acquisition & Cybersecurity Challenges | TSG Ep. 865

Hey everyone. Remember that? $32 billion Google acquisition.

Wiz, not so fast. You're watching Techron Gang. Hey everyone.

Happy Monday. Monday again. Yeah, can't it?

Just stay Sunday forever. But happy Monday everyone. Welcome to Tech Stern Gang.

It's Alan Shimel here. Um, we've got some interesting stuff to go on. As I teased in the opening, I, who would've thought that this DOJ antitrust unit would actually look into a deal, but maybe they're looking into the Google Wiz deal.

Uh, reverse cloud coming outta Microsoft Platform. This is gonna be a big platform engineering week. We'll be a platform con this week, though.

Some of us will be at the open source summit. Denver, we've got a lot to go over and we got a great gang here to go over it with you. Let me introduce you to our gang real quickly.

Some, some of them are regulars, some of always regulars, but fairly new. Speaking of regulars, let's go to our woman in New Mexico. Not in Albuquerque, but in New Mexico.

Uh, although she'll be in Denver this week for the open source summit. She's the play hub, CEO and open source ambassador extraordinaire. Tracy Reagan.

Hey Chase. How are you? Hey, Alan.

Yeah, I am, uh, hanging out at Open Source Summit and you know, we've got talks later today, so come on by. And tomorrow we're doing a, we're doing a, a, a focus group on CID cybersecurity in the main ballroom at the Bluebird Ballroom. Grab a lunch and come in and tell us what you think.

Wow, cool stuff. I'd love to hear maybe when you get back, chase and get back on the show. We can get a report on that though.

We'll be there live. Maybe Mike can talk to you about it after. And we can, we will have a full blown text storm TV coverage on it.

Very cool. Alright. From the mountains of New Mexico to the mountains of Colorado, it's all mountains to me.

He's Futurum, uh, advisor on, on, I forget the exact wording now. Mitch. New wording is system engineering Lifecycle.

Love it. System. Engineering lifecycle.

SELC, Mitch Ashley. Hey Mitch. Show.

How are you man? Good to be here. I'm very connected to Tracy 'cause those can mountains and just connected right up the right up the continent.

So, here's the question. Are you throwing off a mound yet or are you still not throwing? No, no.

I'm, I'm, I'm still, you know, sinking into the ice tank every day to, and warming it up again. See, seeing how the shoulder's feeling. We'll see, you know, the shoulder will tell me when it's ready.

Alright. All right. Those damn Yankees.

Um, next up, let me introduce you to Dr. Stacy Thayer, one of our newest gang members. Hey Stacy, how are you?

Hi, Alan. I'm good. How are you?

Good. Hey, Stacy. You know what?

I don't know if we've ever told people what you're up to these days Doing a couple of different things. Uh, so my work as a cyber psychologist, I'm acting director of the cyber psychology program at Norfolk State University, where I also teach forensic cyber psychology. And then I'm also working at Cobalt, uh, helping them out in their marketing team and working there in their senior event leads position.

Very cool. I love it. Cyber psychology, man.

Speaking of cyber, he's, he's all dressed and ready to rock today. Textron Gang member Futur and, uh, tech, not Future Tech Field Day Delegate. Our friend Jack Poller.

Hey, Jack. Hey, it's, uh, great to be on the show and, uh, great to meet Stacy. Uh, that's, uh, a, a, a very, uh, intriguing and interesting title.

I'd love to learn more. I've always said we need some psychological help. Don't you agree, Jack?

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Um, all right, jumping from Jack.

He's got a big smile on his face 'cause the Yankees won a game. Finally, he's the chief content officer, Mike Ard. Hey Mike, how are you?

Yeah, and apparently I'm in Denver playing in a elaborate game of where's Tracy? Yeah. Okay.

Very cool. Very cool guys. Alright, so it seems the DOJ might be looking into this, uh, Google Wiz acquisition.

I thought we're in a laissez-faire form of government. Let's make it great. What's going on, Mike?

Well, apparently that only applies to certain companies. It may be, but it seems like there is some elective decision making going on here. Um, the DOJ is reportedly investigating the proposed acquisition of Wiz by Google.

But Jack, I gotta ask you, you know, what's your take on this whole thing? And is this a good use of taxpayer dollars? Uh, that's a loaded question.

I'll start with. Um, it's not surprising that they're looking into this for two reasons. One is, uh, the current administration has, uh, a penchant for being very wary of what big tech is doing.

They're, you know, very concerned about, you know, past censorship and other reasons. So that's one. And the other is, um, the new Assistant Attorney general, uh, Gail Slater, who covers antitrust, is a long-term antitrust person at the DOJ.

So this is, and and she's basically said that she's planning on continuing the path of the last four years of what the Biden administration was doing, so that they wanna investigate big m and a deals. And 32 billion is a big m and a deal, um, is not surprising. 2 billion breakup fee if this doesn't go through.

So they always thought that there's a possibility it doesn't go through. 2 billion is not chicken fees. I would imagine Google was hoping not to have to pay that money.

Uh, absolutely. And I think, um, you know, traditionally, uh, and I'm not sure how it's gonna work here, but traditionally, when the DOJ has looked into antitrust stuff, they've focused on sort of how much of the market does any one company control? You know, the, the classic case that people study in business school is the m and a activities among, um, office Depot, office Max and, uh, staples, where there were three companies that basically controlled the entire office supply market here.

When you look at, um, cloud security, it's not three companies, it's eight or nine majors and another 20 minor companies that are all involved in this. Uh, you have Palo Alto, Fortinet, uh, Orca, Microsoft, uh, you know, there's a lot of companies, uh, that play in this space. And cloud security covers a very big broad definition, whether it's CNA, cloud native application protection or CSPM cloud server, uh, cloud, uh, security posture management, or CWP cloud work, uh, work, uh, and cloud platform protection.

There's, there's all sorts of variations of bundles of different services that these companies provide. So if Google takes it over, is that gonna corner the market? The anti-competitive?

I really don't think so. No, no. Mitch, let me ask you, is this a distinct and separate market, this thing called cloud native application protection platform?

Or can you make a legitimate argument that says that it's just an, an extension of cloud security and Google's a cloud service provider, so therefore they need this? And it's not a separate market, It's kind of the intersection of application security and Kubernetes container security is really what you're talking about, and it's the security world's, I dunno, entrance or, or getting into trying to get into that application layer without getting too deep into the app, but really still the infrastructure that apps run on. So, you know, whe whether that's its own product category, you could argue whether that's that strong enough of an area, or is it just really kind of fall into AppSec or cloud security?

A little bit of both. So I think it's a, you know, potato, potato thing. Well, you know, speaking to people on Wall Street, they don't seem too concerned.

When they were asked, they just said, taco, Well, you know, this has been a works in a while, right? We saw this, uh, maybe a year ago, 20, early 20, 24, there was a e effort to combine these two companies. Whiz declined.

I think it was around 20 billion at the time. So, well, you know, they made some money off of it right? Waiting and, and I can't, um, imagine that Google, uh, with all of their resources hasn't done some pretty strong research and preparation for, uh, this objection from the DOJ.

So I suspect it's probably gonna go through, it just may take a little time and some money thrown at some lawyers and, uh, Or, or thrown or the money thrown someplace else. Maybe some cryptocurrency, a certain cryptocurrency, or maybe some gold phones. Man, that's the idea.

You know What the, maybe they'll buy some gold phones. That'll be all. It'll be all okay.

And that, you know, that's not, not, I don't think that that's too out of the question. Um, but to your point, to your question, Alan, I really believe that these kinds of tools are essential for these cloud uh, providers. Absolutely.

And, and you know, the other thing is Google is not the dominant cloud provider, right? They're 9,800 pound gorilla. This isn't about search.

And, and so, you know, they're, they're not the 800 pound gorilla in cloud and cloud security is almost a, a offshoot of, of the bigger cloud market or a subset of the bigger cloud market. So I, I don't, honestly, I, you know, I I think, Jack, you might be onto something with the lady or person who's running the, uh, the, the, the antitrust over at DOJ, but as soon as someone in that administration says that she's carrying on the policies of the Biden administration, they'll probably take a 180 anyway. Yeah.

But I, and the, the other, the other part of it is, you know, that Google's doesn't have a strong track record of after acquisitions continuing to support the other cloud Cs, the other clouds, right? So Microsoft has done a very good job in trying to build tools that support Microsoft and Amazon and, uh, Google. Google not so much.

So it's not clear if Google acquires Wiz will whiz still be able to maintain that level of independence and be able to provide the same level of security on a Nongo environment. But, but there are other, there are other Synaps out there. There are, there are, but, but it also, it also means from an antitrust perspective, is if, does that mean that Google is actually going to be able to continue to compete against Microsoft or Palo Alto or Orca in providing, you know, A reverse antitrust, right?

By doing this has, does the CNET market open up with more opportunity for others? You know, especially when you have AWS you know, exponentially bigger than Google that CNA and, and take the wiz out of that AWS marketplace, you know, what does that open up? And that seems more competitive to me.

I think this is just as much about competing against Cisco as it is the other cloud providers from a security market perspective, right? 'cause Wiz brought that independent now to Jack's point, whether, whether Google can, can it can survive that through the, the Borg acquisition into Google. But, um, you know, that it's, it's more than just the cloud providers.

Yes. Obviously it's is is those folks. But I think Cisco ought to, ought to be concerned.

Maybe they aren't concerned 'cause they don't think it'll survive the, the multi-vendor, multi environment. But we'll see. Stacy, what does a deal like this do to the mindset of the buyers out there?

Do they just kind of freeze everything and wait to see how this soap opera plays out? Or do they ignore it until something dramatic happens? I think they, a lot of them wait and see what does this mean?

And I think, you know, there are companies that get acquired to, to Jack's point, nothing happens with them. Nothing changes. You don't really even know.

And then there's acquisitions that happen where w then becomes more Google than it was Wiz. And then anybody who signed on and said, well wait, I signed on with Wiz, this is not the wiz that I signed on with May move on. So I think it depends, does this just fall into Google's checklist?

Did they check a box, okay, we have this technology, we did this, this acquisition, and they let them continue to make their own success and do things their way, or does it become the Google way of things? And are they getting what they signed up for within this change? I think this is an essential purchase for a Google.

I know we've talked, um, on this, on our gang shows in the past about where does Google go when everybody's using philanthropic and o open chat GPT, uh, in place of Google searches. I am surprised by how little I use Google searching anymore. I mean, I, I, I never go to Google to look for anything.

I am either talking to Anthropic or my chat PT window and I never ask Google for anything. Uh, so maybe this is a pretty essential part of Google's strategy to shift, uh, and build their, their, their cloud platform. Uh, and in terms of revenue, I can't imagine them restricting, you know, companies buy revenue, right?

So they're buying, uh, W's revenue. They're only gonna build on that revenue because they need that revenue to replace in the future. What we used to rely on for typing in our single question in the Google window, because I think fewer and fewer people are doing it Well, it's interesting that you mentioned they're buying revenue because it's an all cash deal.

So they're giving up a whole lot of cash to buy future revenue as, as opposed to keeping up a whole lot of stock. Well, it's one, one can make the argument that Google stocks more valuable than present day cash, right? It also lets the, um, the current owners walk away very quickly instead of waiting to, yeah, it, it does.

Well, they're not locked up like that though. They could still be locked up with incentives, but, but it also points to that, quite frankly, during the COVID years and immediately prior to that, these big tech companies built up, Fort Knox is full of dry powder, dry cash, right? Apple, Google, Microsoft Meta.

They're all sitting on huge reserves of cash, huge reserves of cash with really kind of nowhere to go with it at some level, right? Um, so I, you know, though Google is, you know, 32 billion is a lot of money in anyone's book. They've got it.

And then more Referencing a show from last week, maybe there'll be Google stable coins and you get those instead of money for Could be, could be that might, that might get the DOJ to go for it. I mean, I don't, I don't see the argument. I don't, I, when I look at it, like you said, Alan, they're not the primary player in the, the space AWS is, these are tools that customers need.

So it's only making the customer's experience better. And I don't believe that they're gonna cut off their, um, customers who are not in the Google environment and they're in the other cloud environments, whatever that might be. Uh, because I don't think they wanna lose the revenue.

They need the revenue. Yeah. I, I think it'll go through.

Alright, let's take a break. Let's come back and do a little reverse cloud. You're watching text Junk.

Okay. Hey folks, we're back and shifting a, a cloud gear slightly, but we're talking about Microsoft is now making available 365 local, it's basically the cloud version of their platform is now available on premise. This sounds like the world has been turned upside down, and it is because it is.

We just spent years moving everything to the cloud, but now our friends in Europe are concerned about control and we're building out sovereignty clouds. And of course now Microsoft is responding to that need. Um, it's interesting, I guess, you know, at some point Microsoft probably could have done this at any point, but they're doing it now because Europeans are mandating it.

But Stacy, is our mindset changing about what the definition of security is here from our friends in Europe, because, well, these sovereign clouds seem to be driving all kinds of decisions that I probably would've said not likely to happen a year ago. Yeah, well, I, I think Europeans and they just have a very different way of thinking about their data than we have historically in, in the us and that's creating a lot of, of tension. So you bet things like the GDPR over there, I mean, the Europeans have really set the, the course for data protection, whereas in the US we're much more fragmented and we give companies access to the data.

So they're saying, we don't want our data in us hands, we wanna bring it on-prem, we wanna bring it into, it makes sure that all our data stays in Europe. Then that does become a different way of thinking because it's essentially kind of drawing a little bit of a line in the sand. I mean, is it saying we don't trust you, we don't, we don't, we wanna keep our data here.

This is why. And Microsoft is now raising to, to meet that request and bringing out our standards. So we say, okay, if we're not gonna hold the same standards as our European friends, then we have to essentially bring those standards to them and take them out of the us.

And it's a different way of thinking than, than we've thought in the us. And without it, we can't su we can't support Cray, if you're in the u eu, you have to have, uh, this, this technology because they have to support the Cyber Resiliency Act, and we're not moving That direction. I was at InfoSec Europe, you know, just a couple weeks ago and everyone was asking, okay, so you're, you know, you, you're, you're GDPR certified, right?

You, you're, you're able to play in our space. I mean, we kept getting that question over and over and over again. So it's clearly at the forefront of their minds.

Mitch, we were just at AWS last week and I was talking to them about this particular issue and they were pointing out that, you know, their preferred answer is a virtual private cloud. But even that, they said, you know, the issue is these SaaS vendors, and it won't just be Microsoft, they're all gonna wind up doing the same thing. And essentially it's a managed hosting service now that they provide, and it doesn't scale out.

So with changing the way that they allocate compute resources and networking and just about everything that went with it. So I think this is a more fundamental IT change than we think. It's just not simply a matter of slap a bunch of software and putting it in a different data center.

Well, it's a combina combination of things. To your point, Mike, um, there's a bit of nationalism in this too. I remember being at when, and Alan was, was there also, and you, you were hearing the discussions about what software we're gonna, what stack are we gonna build on in Europe that doesn't rely on North American US vendors.

Can we be vendor independent from the US or less dependent upon them? That's why, I guess Microsoft's taking a page out of the, out of the, the finger in the d**e from the Dutch, because Denmark, Germany, um, I think it's Switzerland, if I remember right, have announced that they're tossing out windows and and office in, in favor of Linux and Libra office. So they need to stem the tide of people saying, we can't be dependent upon North American companies.

If it's running in your data center, it's your data, it's protected. And Microsoft added some additional data protection to make sure that data doesn't leak out. Okay.

I mean, as about as much as Microsoft can do to try to keep them as customers. So I, I think there's a bit of survival to this too. It's not, they're, they aren't rushing for the doors quite yet, but they seem to be, there's a bit, a few folks are walking outta the movie, unhappy with how it's gone so far.

I think there's an economic component to it too. You know, cloud data centers are a business that's, um, really driven by economies of scale, right? And the bigger you are, the, the, the better economics you get out of it.

If it truly is driven on the EU side by nationalism, then the scale, the economies of scale don't accrue. If you have to have a data center in every country in the eu and that just can't scale. And not only can it scale, you also face the much stricter environmental regulations and the lack of energy that you have there.

And so it's a transfer of the economics back to the buyer, um, uh, rather than to the seller, right? So now the corporations, um, have to own the CapEx again, rather than Microsoft owning it and taking advantage of the huge economies of scale. So the, the sovereign IT sovereign IP sovereign cloud issue is not strictly a European issue.

As a matter of fact, I'd say the US is pushing for their own sovereign data and sovereign it, right? And we wanna, we wanna own the whole process from manufacturing all the way through. But you're seeing it in Asia, you're seeing it, it's the balkanization of the internet.

Now, what happens though for, with this sovereign it, sovereign cloud is, is the local market big enough to warrant an investment to, in essence recreate a whole cloud, a whole public cloud infrastructure for a given jurisdiction for a given sovereignty, right? Much like GovCloud was done for the federal space, right? You recreated an entire kind of public cloud infrastructure.

Now, if the EU can speak as one market with 30, what is there, 32 countries or something in the EU now, um, that, well, that's certainly a big enough market to invest into creating an EU wide true public cloud in every sense of the word, you know, uh, hyperscaler kind of infrastructure that would be sovereign to the eu. If the EU is gonna say each of the 32 individual nations need to have their own sovereign cloud or their own sovereign IT data, well then, then providers are gonna have to pick and choose certainly Germany, France, maybe Italy and, and Spain are big, but am I putting one in Albania? Am I doing Lichtenstein, Switzerland?

Well, Switzerland's pretty big Denmark. Yeah. You know, but now you're starting to get into the, the nitty gritty of 32 different markets.

I, if it stays as one you, it, it's certainly a big enough market to justify a a hyperscaler. I think the term sovereign too is a little bit misleading to be honest, because no matter what you do, you're still dependent upon Microsoft, right? Mi you know, it's, uh, they still have vendor lockin.

Uh, it's still, you know, uh, it's ex it's exposed to US laws because it's, you know, Microsoft, so, well, it might be a local or private. It's hard to say. Uh, the, the term sovereign, I think is a little bit marketing.

Well, but, but the, the, the wording there, right, is local control. I, I think what you're seeing in a lot of these sovereign deals, if you will, is that the vendor, in this case, Microsoft, but it could be AWS could be Google, could be others are saying that they are going to comply with local government regulations. So if the government, you know, most often this comes, can you turn over this data to the government?

Will you give the government access? Or better yet, will you give the US government access to data? Well, That's, yeah, it doesn't, it doesn't solve the skepticism around, uh, and, and being so attached and dependent upon a US institution.

But I think, I think it's two different things, though. I think one is a concern about being dependent on US organizations for the technology. And the other concern is the data and data sovereignty and who can actually get access to that data.

And I think that there's a little bit of, um, rose colored glasses there. The fear, particularly with the Patriot Act, was that the US would come in and suck up EU citizen data, right? And therefore, they want that data to be resident in the eu, not in the us.

Um, but that of course leaves that data subject to EU governments sucking up that data. And there's actually a lot less protection there than there is on the US side. Um, but regardless, I think that there, there are two separate concerns.

One is the data sovereignty, and one is, are we independent of US vendors? Well, there's also the, uh, the problem of Hotel California and the cloud. Your data can check in, but you can never leave.

That's a problem too. It's hard to get out. I would ask Alan the following question, how far can this go?

Will the state of New York wake up one morning and say, you know what? We don't want data to be subject to the laws of Florida or Texas or any other Blame, but, but seriously though, so there, you know, we do, we do have interstate commerce, clause of the Constitution, and we do have, uh, a web of laws when it, you know, it comes to controlling, that's a federal, right? If it's, when it comes to commerce as between these sovereign states, uh, it's a federal that the federal government is preempted that for themselves.

So I would say New York or any state who made that sort of claim, even this Ling Duck Supreme Court that we have now would probably still have to uphold the constitution and the interstate commerce clause. Well, it's, it's, it's not as clear cut as that, unfortunately, right now you have a pat, we have a patchwork of privacy regulations. You have California and Virginia that have con overlapping and sometimes conflicting regulations.

And I don't think any corporation is yet brought suit to the Supreme Court to say that it, but it's, the potential of conflict is there with multiple states getting into their own version of the GDPR and the different requirements. And there are reporting requirements on data losses that are different between each. So it becomes complicated very quickly, which is what the Commerce Clause was meant to prevent.

But we're not there yet. Frankly, this is why, you know, the preferred method of regulation is a national, and whether we're talking about cybersecurity and privacy, or we're talking about AI usage or what have you, obviously preferred would be a federal, nationwide type of, of regulation. But, you know, we don't have the political will at the federal level to get things done a lot.

And so it falls to states, We have a Supreme Court that also seems to wanna defer to the states whenever it can. So, you know, states' rights may prevail. I I still think there's an argument to be made for the Congress clause, my 2 cents for what it's worth.

All right, let's take a break. We'll come back and we've got our C block. This sounds like something out of like the movie Big with Tom Hanks platform, fortune Teller.

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com talking about the cost of it and essentially makes an argument that says it's getting so expensive these days is that you cannot afford to not embrace platform engineering. 'cause otherwise the cost will just be through the roof. And so Tracy, we've been talking about platform engineering on the show before and where it fits in DevOps, but is there something bigger happening here and is it gonna be driven not just by better developer experiences, but flat out hardcore costs?

Okay, well, I, when I saw this article, I kind of laughed because when I've ever heard these two, the term fortune telling associated to platform engineering, it's sort of a joke to be quite honest. It's sort of something that is, you know, we talk about, you know, how can you build the perfect golden path and uh, and watch developers create their own pipelines anywhere. And you, you, you know, ahead of time what they need.

Um, but, you know, maybe there is something more to it than just a, a, a frame of reference to what potentially could happen or what we're trying to do. Uh, I, again, i i, I kind of giggled when I, when I read it, because it, I always thought it as being a kind of a torical reference to what platform engineering is attempting. But, you know, the farther we get down the world of ai, I believe that we can do better, um, you know, predictive work so that we don't have to be quite so reactive and in that space.

I don't think it's a joke, I think it's a serious matter and, and a matter that we've been working on for quite some time. I mean, these environments are really, really complex. Um, when you think about trying to manage a Kubernetes environment, even tracking the cost is difficult.

Uh, we have terraform, we have DevOps tools, tooling that we need to be a adding, we need to have cybersecurity issues that we're addressing. So yeah, it would be kind of nice to have some fortune, te fortune telling around the platform engineering space. But, um, you know, what we build in the next two years and build an, uh, with ai, uh, we'll, we'll tell the story.

Well, Tracy, I took that, I, i, I think it was somewhat tongue in cheek, but I took it really as the higher level message is really, um, a very old one, which is, uh, don't for focus on the short-term tactics, but focus on long-term strategy, right? And, you know, we can, we can spend all our day, every day being reactive and fighting the fires that are right in front of us. And if we do that, we never plan for the future.

And we never figure out what our platform really needs to look like to support something that's six months out or a year out, let alone 2, 3, 5 or 10 years out, right? And I think it was, to me it was more of a parable of how do you get people to start thinking about, we've been doing platforms and you know, the cloud and platform engineering for 20 plus years now we need to start at the big level, start thinking about and planning about these things as long-term projects. Not let's just implement the next thing.

Shiny object that comes in front of us. Mitch, the Boy Scouts have a motto says, be prepared. This is essentially the IT equivalent.

So is this achievable and how come we're always so reactive? Well, the article certainly was aspirational. And I mean that in a positive way, a positive way.

I like the analogy of comparing of fortune tellers versus fortune spenders and you know, we've all been in situations where we're thrown into a mess and we've gotta clean it up. That's one scenario. Prob probably a very likely scenario for a lot of platform engineering.

And I think the message here is be prepared as in raise Periscope. Don't just, you know, pipe underwater and try to solve all the technical challenges, but figure out where you're going and why you want to go there. And more importantly, towards the end of the article, we talked about using cost management as a strategic advantage.

In other words, kind of going back to the nineties, it's about the budget stupid or about the economy, stupid talk, talk the money story. What are the, what's the value that's that platform engineering is bringing to the business? Yes, I like that it's focused on developers and their cus who the customers are of platform engineering, but ultimately the customer's, the business, right?

What's the benefit you're bringing? Um, and I think there's a great story to tell. I I thing I like to say about platform engineering is platform engineering can be the force multiplier to DevOps.

It's the thing that can really leverage it, accelerate it, spread it across multiple projects without the chaos that can happen when it's just done organically. So I think that strategic look is, is well advised, Stacy, are we psychologically capable of achieving this goal? 'cause it's really about the humans at the end of the day.

It is. And we can strive to, I mean this don't be reactive. Try to be proactive is, you know, one of the swan songs of the security industry as well.

So I hear it so much and you know, I think as humans we can try, strive to be as proactive as possible and to try and forecast, but we're still gonna be reactionary. We're still gonna see what comes right in front of us. And sometimes that just eclipses everything we wanna do.

It's kinda like when you wake up in the morning, you think, here's what I'm gonna get done all day. And then you get done maybe half of it, right? Best laid plants, mice, and men and maybe platform engineers.

And so I think, you know, we can strive to, and this is the article is a good reminder to think in that mindset. It is a way of thinking. And I think we can all use that mindset of remember what we can strive to do, not just what's in front of us because then we can solve long term problems and the bigger picture as well.

But we have to carve time and make the time to in that thought process. So there's a, there's a culture that we've established, uh, in this area in DevOps and in platform engineering that I have been b******g about for a very long time. And one of those that part of that culture, uh, comes from open source, which I, you know, everybody knows I'm a huge fan of open source, but in this particular area, we have put so much time and effort in building everything we do through scripted processes.

Everything we do is scripted in this area. This is holding us back. It's, uh, keeping us from being fortune tellers, but we're not spending either.

Because what occurs is these platform engineers, they go directly to open source tools and start writing these things. And you know, they build out their own terraform. They have all their get ups, all of this is scripted.

There are, there's not a lot of real serious tooling that's being implemented because why not? Because they would have to go ask for budget and they don't have budget authority. So we are in a, we're in a loop.

Uh, and in order to get out of that loop, we have to change the culture. And I believe that C-level execs have to understand that if they wanna a more solid environment, uh, tooling, proper tooling moving away from scripting is going to be important. And the other thing that we're gonna see are MCP servers that are gonna start managing these workloads.

It's not, that is not far away. Something you ra makes me think of, uh, Clayton Christensen's, the innovator's dilemma, right? And one of the challenges it sounds like we're facing is we're using the wrong metrics.

And I think, you know, what Mitch highlighted from the article is changing the metrics from looking at cost as a cost center to looking at your costs as saying, understanding what's the business value, right? And, and I think your argument is right now is that the scripting is not providing business value. It's providing just pure cost benefit and a very small cost benefit and not true business value.

And if we change how we look at these things and how we measure them, then we can start operating differently And just don't know if it's achievable. And I'll tell the story many years ago, and I was asking a fellow, he came to me and he said, you know, what do you know about X, Y, and Z? And I said, you know, well this is what we know.

And then I asked him, I said, you know, how come you're asking me? 'cause it's not like we don't publish reams and reams of content out there, and it's all available for you, and this is why we created all this stuff. And he looked at me and he smiled and he said, son, it's really hard to think about fire prevention when you're holding onto a hose for dear life.

Perfect. And this is true. That's Exactly, yes.

It's, And, and I'll tell you something along those same lines, Mike, at the end of the day, it comes down to money, right? And a lesson I've learned in my life in business is people don't like to pay for nice to haves. They pay for must-haves.

And when you're talking about things in the abstract in the future, that, and, and this is by the way, Stacy, you know, there's a problem in security. Nothing happened. Why do I gotta pay more money?

You know, you want another trinket? We, you know, it's only when you get breached that you get religion, right? And it, it's the same thing here.

Don't talk to me about what this may be able to save if such and such and such happens. And we do that, that and this, those are nice to haves, right? I'm, I'm holding onto the fire hose for dear frigging life, to your point, Mike.

And that's, that's where my priorities are. And in, and in tough budget cycles, those are the things that get funded and the nice to haves don't. It's just, I think just the way of the world.

And if you can have a developer write something that solves the problem for right now, script it out, then it gets done that way. And that's just the, we'll cont we, I, I've watched this now for 30 years and it baffles me every time we have a discussion, every time we think about evolving to the next level and being more, you know, proactive than reactive. I, I just think it's really difficult to do it on the, on the set of tools and scripts that we currently have that we're trying to manage.

It creates a reactive environment. Yeah, but that's, that, that developer is on a fixed sunk cost budget, right? That's already been allocated for, that's not new budget.

And that's why people do it, right? And they don't have budget to buy tools themselves. So they do what they have to do.

And that's why the open source community has supported this and it's why it's flourished How much of this also though, Tracy is simply, you know, a lot of developers like to write scripts because they're like, Hey, you know, it's guaranteed lifetime employment. I'm the only one who knows how it works. And therefore, I mean, I'm not gonna worry about the cost, Mike.

It is built into our way we think and our culture. And I promise you, if somebody's written a lot of those scripts, everybody prays and prays that he doesn't go outside and get it by a boss. Tracy, this might be waving the red flag in front of you, but isn't writing scripts sort of what the whole idea with developers can do it all themselves and DevOps, we kinda set us ourselves up to go down this path even more so with DevOps.

I mean, we've actually, I think some would abandoned the developers has to do every job, but we kind of created this mess even more so for ourselves. True. Agree.

Or you, you tell me. I'm I No, I'm totally true. And, and one of the reasons is because we see this process in a very fragmented way.

We see it based on each application team, let's just call it an application team. So each application team is, is given the task of addressing these problems. We don't step it up and try to see it as an entire organizational structure and how do we solve it in at a higher level because they don't wanna spend the money on that.

Each, or each team can can address it. So each team then goes and looks for the tooling that they wanna use for their particular language, for their particular environment. And it's been working.

But as we got more com complex, uh, infrastructure Kubernetes was, is very, very complex. We started building more and more of these scripts and now we're seeing, uh, the opportunity maybe to do something more automated, do something, um, with ai, an agentic ai, something that can make decisions. Where's the data coming from?

How do we see that history? How do we see what's happening? We're gonna have to figure out how to really look at the scripts and try to repeat what they're doing.

But they're all fragmented. So it's, it, it is a, it's a challenge and I'm sure someday we'll, we'll sort it out, but the way we'll sort it out, we'll just throw away the baby with the bath water and start all over again. Yeah, that's pretty much the way of it.

All right. Hey guys, I think we gotta pull the plug on this one. We're about outta time.

We have as usual our full tech strong tv, uh, schedule immediately following today's gang show. As I said at the top of the show, we're at, we're on dueling locations this week. Mike and Tracy and one of our tech strong TV film crews be in Denver for the open source summit.

Um, Mitch and I will be in New York City for Platform Con. I think that's the 26th. Uh, it's a virtual event by the way.

com and, and catch all. I don't know how many hundreds of different sessions there are there. Um, I'm doing one with our friends from check marks.

Mitch, you're doing one, right? Mm-hmm. Uh, We'll also I'm doing too actually panel and doing my own session, So very cool.

And we'll also be, uh, we'll be broadcasting live on the 26th too, from Text Drunk TV there. So stay tuned for that busy week. But for now, on behalf of Jack and Stacy and Chay and Mitch and Mike, have a great day everyone.

We're out.