The AI Industrial Revolution: Building for the Tech Singularity | The Platform Engineering Show Ep 11

Hey everyone, it's Alan Shimel. Welcome to another episode of the Platform Engineering Show, hosted by me and my friend Luca Luca, ante of the platform engineering community. Luca, how are you my friend?

I'm good. Hey, A everybody good to be here again? Where are you in?

And soon in person? My coupon soon in person. Soon in, yes.

In what they call the A TLA. The a TL. Yeah.

Yes. I've been, I've been writing a TL all the time in the, in the last, in the last two weeks. Never been though.

So looking forward, it, it's, it's a nice city Atlanta. It's a, it's, you know, they used to call it the capital of the South. Mm-hmm.

Um, I don't know if they still do, but it, it's a nice city. I think you're gonna enjoy Atlanta. Hot Atlanta.

I just pictured it way more central, you know, in my ignorance. I didn't realize it was east. No.

I mean, there is a downtown area, like Peachtree Plaza and where CNN Tower is and all that. That's downtown. But, you know, it's one of these typical American cities where it's all about the suburbs and the experts.

Yeah. Greater Atlanta, Metro Atlanta spreads out the airport. Have you ever Massive airport.

The airport there? Yeah. Yeah.

I've been, I've been through the airport. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. The airport's huge. And you know, it's, I I will tell you, I've missed more planes Atlanta than anywhere, than you just, I mean, well, just getting to the airport, the traffic could be bad.

Okay. That's good to know. Yeah, because I, I have, I have a pretty tight one on Thursday leaving the event.

I need to go see the city, believe it or not. If you can, the best way to go is the metro, the, the chain. I do believe it.

I mean, London is like that. Yes. London's like that.

So Atlanta doesn't have London's metro, but you know, from the airport, it's the best way to get into it. It works. Yeah.

Um, but Luca, why are we in a TR CubeCon? So, CubeCon CubeCon and the unofficial opening party of Cucu, which is House Cube. Um, it's, um, I don't know if I ever told you, but like this, this like, basically started as a joke, um, with Casper like five years ago when we were at a, a Cucu Valencia, um, which was like a very nice cucu.

That was like my first, I I love that cube con. Yeah. Because you, you know, you would just like walk out, it was sunny, even though it was like February or March, it was sunny.

You could go have like tapas beach 20 degrees. It was like, it was great. Yeah.

Yeah. So I love that. But you know, then you're like, man, we're like around this like nice Spanish city, good vibe.

And then like, a lot of the parties just like this boring corporate stuff, you know? And so we're like, well, what if we just did like, um, 'cause you know, we're like Berlin based, so like, what if we did like the, like the, a techno thing? Um, and so, and that's how it started.

And, and, and it was, it's funny because the next, um, uh, cuon after that was Detroit, which is also famous for techno. Right. And there's this like Berlin Detroit connection.

And so we're like, okay, we'll do it there. And it was like 80 people in a, it was basically like a big house party. Um, but fast forward to now, like the, the last one we did in London was like 6,000 registrations and like 1500 people through the door.

Oh my God. So it was like a proper rave. Yeah.

And now there was, at some point there were this like, um, like animals that we like spray painted in this like psychedelic colors. And I just like, I just like turned the corner at like 1:00 AM or something. And they were like, crowd surfing the animals.

Really? People get pretty wild. It's fun.

Yeah. Um, I don't know. I, I mean, you know, typically the European cube coupons have more attendees Yes.

Than the North American, but they're close. I, I haven't heard anything from the CNCF in terms of what they're expecting. I think it's low.

Yeah. I can see it now. Because like with, with, uh, with Ha Cube, we essentially capture always as a rule of thumb, like a third to half of the conference, um, in terms of people that sign up and, and, and, and, and the numbers are low.

So I think it's gonna be smaller than Salt Lake City. Really? Mm-hmm.

That's surprising. 'cause if you remember it, it snowed in Salt Lake City, though. It, I heard it's gonna be cold in a TL, but new, new Trump administration as well, right?

Like, I think it's, there's a lot of people fly. I think that's the fly other thing. It puts a damper on on people flying in, even from international.

Yeah. You know, it's, it's a hassle getting into the US now, and it's a shame. Yeah.

I mean, I'm not worried, you know, but I, I've, I've talked to a lot of people that are like, very worried. 'cause they hear this like, horror stores or people being became involved, blah say, and everything else, which is, if you look at the numbers, it's like, it's like being, you know, striked by lightning anyway. But it's like, but still, you know, people are worried.

So I think that also is having effect. No, I I think it's also people voting with their feet. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

You know, we, we just had an election here off year elections, just not too many big races, but I think people voted pretty clearly. They're not real happy. Yeah.

Uh, what's going on? But that, that's a shame to tell you the truth. 'cause Atlanta is a great host city, and it, and the, the, the World Congress Center where they got this, where the event is, is actually a pretty nice, nice.

Well, I can't wait. I'm excited. Absolutely.

And there's, there's gonna be some great, um, learning going on, some great sessions. You know, we did our cloud native con virtual event last week as sort of a Q con preview, and we had, I think it's one of the first times he's actually presented the new D from CNCF. Yeah.

Uh, he, he did a nice presentation there and, um, nice. We'll, we'll see. I mean, look, regardless of how many people are there, the generally the enthusiasm and passion for all cloud native and open is, is, is high.

Right? So I fully expect that and all things apart from engineering, I think that's one of the still fastest growing narratives within like CNCF and, and, and CubeCon. Like the, so you and I are gonna be the apart from engineering day Yes.

The, I think as a co-located the, the day before it starts. And that's typically one of the biggest, right? Yeah.

Of co-located. Yeah. That Backstage Con is another of the big ones.

Yeah. But it's top three I think at this point. Yeah.

You know, it's funny, I, I was talking to some folks from suse Yeah. That I was just talking to some people at SUSE today. Are you?

Oh, very cool. Yeah. I spoke to, I, I, I speak to Susa all the time, but I was talking to, uh, yesterday to their, uh, general manager for their container business, Uhhuh.

And, um, you know, it was interesting to hear and, and, and as backup, I also last week spoke to some folks at IBM mm-hmm. Bigger even than suse. It's interesting to hear how these larger companies look at the connection between like cloud native DevOps, platform engineering, right?

It's like almost the, they have like, the personas of these, of those three areas are so tightly interlocked, right? Mm-hmm. And they're, and they're key.

They're key to all, you know, all three of those are key to suse, key to IBM, IBM's making a big push in developers again. Yeah. Um, platform engineering is, is huge to them, as it is to suse.

And of course, the whole cloud native, they view as the, as the new stack. Yeah. Well, absolutely.

I mean, I was talking to, I think a, a shared friend now, pine Cash, uh, at Broadcom as well about this, right? Mm-hmm. Um, and, and, and, and also like a few folks at Red Hat, right?

Like, 'cause I think, you know, we've talked a lot about this idea of, of platform engineering being this multi-stakeholder, you know, a multiplayer game that you need to solve essentially in the enterprise. And, and I think that's where all these, this like big, uh, ultimately big platforms slash ecosystem players are realizing it's like, okay, uh, it's just getting more complex. I can no longer just focus on like a subset of these personas.

I really need to take them all on board. And so with that, to your point, it's like, okay, DevOps the platform engineer, but then also I need to like revamp my, um, developer application. Developer narrative, right.

Um, is very, very interesting. And, and then, uh, I, I think another trend that, at least that I'm seeing Luca, is, you know, cloud Native Con was called CubeCon. 'cause it was all about the Cube, right?

Yeah. But we're, but we're seeing observability, right? We talk about what are the biggest, uh, you know, zero day events.

So, you know, pre events. What are the biggest, what are the biggest projects that CNCF is, is managing these days? Well, certainly coup is still big.

The biggest, well Open Telemetry is like right up there with Kubernetes. Now Prometheus is right up there. Yeah.

You get the Grafana stuff, you know, it, it's that, that whole observability, which now then brings in security with a big way, right? Yes. Because a lot of securities, you know, based on that.

Um, so the whole cloud native community, I mean, when we did Valencia, and that wasn't that long ago, right? What was Valencia four, four years ago? Yeah.

Four or five, something like that. It was still very cube based, right? It was cube developer based, you know, the ops people, the platform engineers, all of these things are now a big part of, of, of you.

Well, and you could see, I think, in the crowd as well, right? Like, um, and this is actually an interesting thing 'cause we're just talking about the fact that, you know, like Europe usually is a little bit bigger. Whoa.

I think that's true. Um, at least like, at least I heard that's been like post COVID, like pre COVID apparently like us was bigger. Pre COVID San Diego, and then yeah, everybody says San Diego.

But then I'm also like, of course San Diego was bigger than like Detroit and Chicago. Well, what, I gotta be honest, it didn't suck in San Diego, Luca. Yeah.

But we had a big old, we rented a big old Airbnb and John Willis amazing. There. We we bought a whole bunch of guitars and what's his name from, from the DevOps move in as well.

Um, uh, Adam Clay Schafer Uhhuh. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He came and Brian, and we, we had a jam out party at this That's awesome.

Where we were staying. That's awesome. It, it was, yeah.

That, that didn't suck. But, um, but, but that's what I'm seeing. You know, like I'm seeing this, this, this also this, this, um, maturity, you know, that's like changing a lot.

And that's, I think, like, while what I wanna say is like, while um, you is bigger, I do think that, um, it's still a little bit behind, uh, slightly in terms of maturity. What I see in the US is like, you now have like maybe fewer people, but it's all like very senior enterprise practitioners that are coming with like, very high intent to CubeCon of like, Hey, they know, they know what they're looking, they're looking for. Yeah.

They know what they're looking for. They know their problems. And I think, you know, to your point, CubeCon is then adapting in terms of like the formats and the content offering to be, you know, to mature past just the pure open source plays.

And into like, okay, but how do we actually apply, you know, more observability, more security. It's just like more enterprise grade essentially. Abso you know, it's funny you say that.

I was talking to another person maybe last week, uh, about CubeCon around cloud native con the, the virtual event we did. And they said, you know, you could tell them maturity by how people address it. Yeah, yeah.

In past cube cons, the average guy would, you know, the hoodie, the guy was a t-shirt with a backpack, right? Right. And then all of a sudden you saw less t-shirts and backpacks and more like buttoned collar shirts.

Now you see people wearing sports jackets, you know, and, and carrying, you know, portfolios and so forth. And, and, and so that is, I think, an indication of, of who they're aiming at, who's coming to these things, who Yes. Right.

Who decision makers are. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

The industrialization. Yeah. Yeah.

Um, of course, Luca AI is, is on top of everyone's mind with, you know, uh, cloud native, AI native, cloud native ai, and platform engineering. I know you've been doing some, preparing some new material to take on the road with you and stuff. Give us a little pre Yeah.

Talk to us. Let me actually, we, we never do this, right? But like, I thought we could actually do some screen sharing today.

Um, and, um, yeah. Here, um, and yeah, this is like, this is like one opening that I did. Um, so recently we just talked about, uh, it's funny 'cause we literal just said the word industrialization as well.

Um, but, but, but this is like, um, you know, we recently had Platform Con Live Day in Paris, um, and, and on stage, you know, like we said the last time, we talked a lot about, you know, what can, how, you know, a AI is, is sort of, you know, if it wasn't for ai, platform engineering would be the hottest trend in, in, in, in enterprise today. Uh, and, and I think actually juxtaposing them that way is not the, the full story. The full story is actually how they can, how can they collaborate together, um, to be the, the hottest thing in enterprise today, and to make sure that AI can really deliver on its promise in the enterprise.

And, and so, and I started with this because this is like, um, you know, like if, if a few people, you know, I heard now at this point of this idea of like, AI is this like steam engine moment, you know? Um, and so I actually wanted to go back and look at the, at the real industrial revolutions. Um, and, and so like, I did like a little, a little like, uh, uh, history walkthrough, which I'm not gonna cover over entirely.

But the, but I think the interesting thing is, if you see, you know, if you go back, essentially what you see is like, you always have this like technological innovation that then triggers in a sort of a cultural organizational innovation, right? So people are now like, okay, what do I do with this, um, with this new thing, you know, that is enabling a bunch of new workflows and products and whatever. And, and you could see actually that happened with, with the steam, with the steam engine, you essentially had the, the first, the people.

We basically, you had a geographic concentration from a bunch of sort of like decentralized, uh, artisanal shops, really, right? Um, into, okay, now everybody's in this big building around this big machine, and then, you know, we're doing things. 0 that actually took another a hundred years or something to, to hit that.

You literally had this like big inflection point, you know, of, of, uh, you know, going from like, just some sort of, you know, organizational reaction to this new technology to actually this like, balance of social technical, which is this, this, this concept that we've talked a lot about in platform engineering, right? Of this idea of like, you know, balancing the, the technical, uh, elements with the, with the cultural elements. And that's really when you actually hit mass adoption and global scale with, you know, both in terms of factories, but also in terms of the output of factories.

And you're really ushered in like, you know, the modern consumer era essentially. Um, and, and so you can kind of think about it this way, right? In terms of these two cones of like, you know, you have technological innovations that then influence the organization innovation, but oftentimes they kind of run in parallel.

And then when you hit this like, sweet spot, that's really when you, you, you kind of like hit the inflection point in terms of growth. And I would argue you could essentially show the same thing. And I'm gonna skip through the presentation here, um, with, with ai, right?

Um, where essentially you've had this, you know, technological innovations, um, and you could even try here pre ai, right? Where you had like CPUs and clouds and so on. And we as an industry have tried to adapt to that, right?

Like we had Waterfall, we had Agile and so on, but it's really with platform engineering that we kind of hit that balance, and that really enables that industrialization moment of, of the, of, of the entire industry. And, you know, you essentially can layer on top of this, this GPUs. I mean, ultimately GPUs are kind of just like an iteration on CPUs, right?

Um, and, um, you know, but, but really we are, the, the, the interesting thing is that we already have this, this foundation now, and so we can, I think, you know, leveraging everything we've learned with platform engineering today, apply as a foundational framework for AI and really move, you know, avoid the whole like, you know, soul searching and, and really hit like enterprise grade very, very quickly. So, you know, if, if you study this stuff in school, right? The first industrial revolution was the steam engine.

Mm-hmm. Right? And, and it did take, you know, that was a little bit full as Folly or whatever they called it, Fulton's folly.

And, um, it, it did, it took almost a hundred years for the steam engine to kind of find its place really, really just upend. It was in truly a revolutionary, right? Yes.

You started with locomotives, with trains and how that opened up stuff, and then the modern factory and steamships and all that. It took almost a hundred years. Then if you go from the time of the modern factory to let's say Ford's assembly line, that probably got cut down to 70 years, 60 years.

Yes. And, and they call that the second industrial revolution. Yes.

Right? That's what you have there, two. Oh.

But it really didn't reach its zenif until like you had on your slide there, I noticed Lean, lean manufacturing. That's really 1950s already, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Deming and Ka ka ka katana and stuff like that. So it took another 40, 50 years for it to kind of fully blossom. Exactly.

Then right around the end of the fifties, you had really to, to the early sixties, the third industrial revolution, which is electronics, right. The digital age. And it has taken us, so figure, let, let's say 65 is, is a number, right?

Mm-hmm. 1965. Yeah.

It keeps compressing, right? Right. It only took, I mean, from 65 to the commercialization of the internet, it's 30 years.

Yes. By, by 1995, the internet goes commercial. So in 30 years, we were able to, to digest that technological innovation revolution and convert it into a societal civilization kinda shaking revolution.

Now, here we are 25 years later, right. And now you've got AI ready to disrupt, but, but there's more, but wait, there's more. Right?

You've got ai, you've got what we're calling physical ai. Robotics. Robotics.

Exactly. I don't know if you've been seeing some of these things from like figure and Tesla Yeah. And some of the new robots, the next gen, and then you've got Quantum, which is we are right on the cusp of Q Day.

Right. Those three things promise it won't be just a fourth industrial revolution. It may be a fifth indu, fourth and fifth combined.

Yeah. Within exactly five years of each other. That's gonna blow this thing up.

That's gonna change. You want to talk about platforms, talk about autonomous platforms, talk about, you know, really intelligent platforms. You know what, I, I saw a study from the uk, they think by like, uh, 2030 to 2035, 70%, seven out of every 10 jobs done ai.

Um, you know, what does that mean for, so yeah. Had it not been for AI platform engineering be the hottest thing out there. But the reality is we all have to internalize AI into everything we're doing because Exactly.

It's a new and Dutch. And, and, but, but, but I think the interesting thing is like, you know, while, you know, like we said, right? Like, it always took so long, uh, before we were able to essentially leverage this new technologies in a productive, standardized, industrialized way, right?

And I think like the opportunity that we have here, at least on, you know, in our small world of kinda like it and enterprise, it is like, well, look, we already have the foundations to, to take this, you know, and, and the principles, right? To take this and, and, and like skip the soul searching part and just going straight to like industrial scale. Um, and, and I think that's the tension that I see right now on the field, right?

Like you mentioned, um, the last time this, this like, uh, MIT study, right? Where like 95% of like pilots failed. And I think now there's like other studies saying like different things, right?

And there's tension because I think, you know, there are some people that are just doing, you know, wishy-washy AI implementations and like, you know, the demo looks really good. And then how do you go from the demo to day to day to operations, which is where you create the real value. Who knows?

You know, and people that are like, oh, wait, I can actually use the same, you know, best practices and, you know, platform as a pro, you know, the same concepts. Um, and, and that's actually how you go to day to day two and day 100 operations. And that's actually how you create value.

And you move, you move past this like, you know, initial impressive demo that then doesn't really go anywhere. You know, I know ITIL and the whole, you know, it, service management is considered old school, but there's lessons to be learned from itil, which is if everything you're doing is a one-off, that's all you're gonna have is a bunch of one-offs. Yeah.

Right? You, you, if you don't have process in place, if you don't have platform in place with repeatable processes, with repeatable practices, you, you're destined to live in that MIT study world forever, where 95% of it is, is a failure. But, but again, that's part of the evolution that sometimes takes a long time, but now it takes even less time.

Yeah. Uh, is moving from the one off, from the experiment to, to the, to the assembly line. Right.

To the assembly line. Because every one of these industrial revolutions builds on what came before it, right? Absolutely.

And at this point, we, we have the foundation to, to, to build quickly with it. Look, it, it's going to look at, you're younger than me. You're going to have to deal with this.

I, I probably won't. I, but I, I wondered what do you hear from, from the community, Luke? Are they worried about job loss?

Are they worried about is AI gonna replace them or is how is AI gonna change their day to day? I think it did. It, it, what I'm seeing is like this, this, uh, split right between people that are really embracing it and people that are just like, um, um, not acknowledging that it's even happening, you know?

Um, there is some, like, I, I'll send it to you. Uh, somebody forwarded me this like, Reddit thread, which was hilarious because it was like somebody asking something and then like, people being like, whoa. But you're aware.

You can basically, you know, do with that. And, and, and all these, all these people immediately, like downvoting, everything, every comment that was like, bro, like you can solve this with AI either now or very soon. And just like being completely downvoted, uh, which is like, why would you down vote somebody?

You know? It's like, um, and, and, and it's just like, I think it speaks to the fear that a lot of people have, especially, and I think this caught me, I think, to an extent, off guard. And I think a lot of the, the, the white collar industry, um, you know, if you wanna call it that, because I think like the common narrative, right?

Like I, I, I, I was listening to a podcast really interesting about this, right? Because we as humans perceive that, you know, white collar jobs, you know, like software use your brain is like harder, you know? And it takes more time to learn than, you know, driving a car or driving a truck, right?

But the funny thing is, like, for for LLMs, it's the other way around. Uh, you know, so it's like, actually it, it's like this, this like knowledge and like bits based stuff, um, which again, like they don't really understand, but they can replicate so well that is essentially, it's like they, they're doing it. Um, you know, and, and so the funny thing is, I think we've all been told the story of like, you know, oh, the truck drivers are gonna lose their job and like, look, maybe the truck drivers, because now you have like Tesla semis and like, you know, I have autonomous driving.

You actually do have autonomous driving, but I'm not gonna lose their job. The plumbers, the electricians, exactly. Everything that is like moving atoms, you know, is like, is gonna be, uh, rewarded and everything that it's like moving bits right, is basically gonna be replaced.

Um, but that's, that's the, the paradox here is for the first time service workers yes. Are threatened with obsolete being obsolete, right? And I'm sure there's a lot of plumbers and electricians are, you know, saying, how does it feel?

Right? Yeah. Well, that's the thing.

There's not many of them, and the few of them are, are about to make a lot of money. Yeah, absolutely. And it, quite frankly, it's the same thing, right?

We're gonna spend $3 trillion on data centers in the next couple years, next two, three years. I mean, yeah. Crazy amount of money.

8 trillion actually. Yeah. But these aren't the data centers that I was managing and operating in 1999.

There's very few people in these data centers, right? The, the jobs that the data center creates are mostly the construction jobs and building them. Yes, yes.

Once they're built, yeah. There's not a lot of people in those data centers. Um, so it, it, it is gonna be interesting.

But look, so I, I think anyone who ignores AI and all of this ignores it at their own peril, right? You've gotta embrace it. Mm-hmm.

Because things like platform engineering for things like platforms for developer platforms for software, you know, there's gonna be such possibilities, things that we're gonna be able to do that we couldn't do three years ago. Yeah. That, you know, it, I, I still think this is the most exciting time to be alive and in this than ever.

Like I'm a hundred percent, a hundred percent agree. You know, like just new jobs. Like, like, you know, like 50 years ago nobody had heard about like a content creator.

Yeah. You know, and, and the funny thing is, like now we have a lot of content creators that were probably disrupted, and so there's not gonna be any content creators anymore in like 10 years. Ah, but it's gonna be something else, you know?

So. We'll, we'll see. Yeah, we'll see where it goes.

Luca, we will see you in, uh, in Atlanta. 'cause we a TLA, the hot Atlanta a TL, we've got house of C on Monday night. How Yes.

Can people still register? Yeah. Yeah.

People can still register. Um, it's free. Um, and it's open bar, uh, great food, great drinks all night.

Where can they go? com, uh, to sign up and then you'll get all the info there. Uh, the only thing I would recommend people to come early.

Um, 'cause we normally have about a thousand people standing outside of the door, so the, the earlier the better. Very cool. And then, as you said, you'll be kind of monitoring the PE event on Monday as well as the, uh, uh, backstage.

Was it Open backstage? What do they call? Backstage Con.

Backstage Con is there. And then, you know, maybe, yeah, maybe we should check hotel since it's growing, uh, so much and I don't know. Yeah.

We'll, but we'll be around then. You're gonna come by our, our stand over there and we'll do a, we'll do a live stream. Let's do it from a TL.

Let's do it. Let's do it. Maybe Tuesday, Wednesday.

Yeah, would love to. All righty. Hey Luca, have safe, safe flight over here?

Yes. Here. It's going to be cold in Atlanta.

So just one. I know. They just sent me the screen show.

I was like, damnit, because this week was great this week. You still had like igniters. Yeah.

So Atlanta usually one time a year will get like ice or, and a little bit of snow, but the littlest bit of snow or ice shuts that town down. Um, they just can't. They're not, they're not built for that.

Right. But it's not gonna be that cold, you know, at night it'll, no, no colder. Yeah.

Yeah. It's, but it's like, it goes down to like three Celsius, so Yeah. Pretty cold.

Look, if it gets too cold, Luca, I'm only an hour, hour and 20 minute flight from, I, I told you, I'm flying directly to Sao Pao, so you'll be fine. It's gonna, but it's gonna be like a, like a funny, a funny packing for sure. Absolutely.

You're gonna need a little of this. A little of that. Yeah.

All right, my friend. I will see you in Atlanta. See you next week.

It was posted. Thank you for listening. We will continue the conversation in Atlanta.

But for now, that's this, uh, edition of the Platform Engineering Show. Bye-Bye everyone.