To the clouds and beyond...
Based on an interview with Steve Semelsberger (CEO and co-founder) and Peco Karayanev (CTO and co-founder), recorded live at DevOpsDays Austin, May 6, 2026. Last year at DevOpsDays Austin 2025, I sat down with Peco Karayanev. He d just started building the Autoptic platform, and the company along with it. The DevOps change resilience platform was [ ]
Yesterday, Sam Alba and Andrea Luzzardi announced that the Mendral team is joining Anthropic. They are winding down their hosted AI DevOps engineer, transitioning customers, and heading to work on Claude Platform. The speed is what gets me. If memory serves, Mendral was first mentioned publicly in January of this year and emerged from Y [ ]
The following is based on my recent conversation with Obot co-founder and CEO Sheng Liang. The full interview is embedded below. Eighteen months ago, when I sat down with Obot co-founder and CEO Sheng Liang, AI agents were generating a lot of buzz but were limited in their capability. Sheng, a veteran of the Kubernetes [ ]
The week before last I attended two very different conferences: the Open Source Summit in Minneapolis and WSO2con back here in Austin. A study in contrast: t-shirts and developer-heavy crowds at the first, button-downs and CTO/CIO types at the second. What they did have in common however was Open source (and not surprisingly a focus [ ]
John Willis is one of the original authors of the DevOps Handbook and has spent decades on the operations side of technology. So when generative AI came along, his first thought, not surprisingly, was: what does this mean for operations, and what role could he play in helping people understand AI s broader impact? What he [ ]
AI is changing the role of the developer, shifting work from coding toward agent orchestration and higher-level architecture. While not the only area seeing results, developer productivity is where AI s traction is most visible and measurable, particularly among individual developers, small teams, and greenfield shops free of legacy systems and layered processes. Enterprise adoption is [ ]
The industry is sitting on the edge of its collective seat as it awaits the release of DeepSeek V4 – which some are expecting next week. DeepSeek, you may remember, was the AI model that debuted a little over a year ago, rocking the AI world and tanking the entire market (not to mention giving [ ]
I listen to a lot of podcasts. Like many people, I listen in the car, in the morning while getting ready, at night before bed, and when doing things around the house. They run the gamut. Some are built around short stories, others take deep dives into individual songs, some are interview-based, others focus on [ ]
TL;DR: The market’s trillion-dollar AI boom is built on one assumption: whoever spends most on infrastructure wins. DeepSeek briefly exposed how fragile that belief is, and how quickly the system could unravel if it’s wrong. It could happen again. On the last Monday of January, markets lost over a trillion dollars in value. Nvidia alone [ ]
About a month ago I wrote about my frustration with ChatGPT-4o’s pull-down menu and its mess of mismatched models. I ended my post saying that I hoped ChatGPT 5 would address this. Last Thursday my prayers were answered. The pull-down was gone and with it the hodgepodge of models. In its place there was one [ ]
At their foundation, AI systems are massive data engines. Training, deploying, and operating AI models requires handling enormous datasets—and the speed at which data moves between storage and compute can make or break performance. In many organizations, this data movement becomes the biggest constraint. Even with better algorithms, companies frequently point to limitations in data [ ]
I subscribe to OpenAI s ChatGPT Plus and find use it regularly for research, writing and general queries. Recently, however, I used ChatGPT to edit and tighten a blog draft and was taken aback by how poorly it performed. Curious, I turned to Anthropic’s Claude. Claude didn’t just perform well—it blew me away with its polished [ ]
My son and I were watching a Malcolm in the Middle marathon recently when, rather than typical detergent or Nissan ads, multiple 30-second spots from Meta popped up. Each advert highlighted the virtues of open source through their Llama LLM and ended with taglines like, Open source AI. Available to all, not just the few. [ ]
AI is widely recognized as a fantastic tool for coding. Beyond that, however, things start to get a bit fuzzy. While I’m sure most folks reading this are well aware of the utility of generative AI and are making frequent use of it, if the above web spot for Copilot is any indication, AI companies [ ]
One of the companies that impressed me at AI Infrastructure Field Days was Solidigm. Solidigm, which was spun out of Intel’s storage and memory group, is a manufacturer of high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs) optimized for AI and data-intensive workloads. What I particularly appreciated about Solidigm’s presentation was, rather than diving directly into speeds and feeds, [ ]
At Cloud Field Day, I sat in on a presentation from Catchpoint, a company focused on digital experience monitoring. Their platform delivers real-time insights into the performance and availability of applications, services, and networks. What sets Catchpoint apart is how they’re reframing observability—moving away from infrastructure-centric monitoring and placing the focus squarely on end-user…
At Cloud Field Day 22, cybersecurity leader Fortinet shared its vision for managing the growing complexity of cloud-native environments. Their focus: enabling security teams to move faster, reduce alert fatigue, and make smarter decisions using AI-driven threat detection and automation. Navigating Modern Cloud Security Challenges In traditional data centers, firewalls protected predictable network…
Presented at Cloud Field Day in Santa Clara Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to participate as a delegate at Cloud Field Day in Santa Clara. As delegates, we engaged directly with the presenting companies, offering feedback on what resonated, what needed clarification, and how their strategies could evolve. The first presenter was Infoblox, [ ]
Note (April 2025):This post was originally written in early February, just after DeepSeek’s R1 model sent shockwaves through the AI world. Since then, the model has been downloaded thousands of times, sparked forks and spinoffs, and raised serious questions about the future of proprietary AI. The original post has been lightly updated for clarity and [ ]
Originally published February 3, 2023 10 years ago, Dell’s first developer system, the Ubuntu-based XPS 13 developer edition became available in the US and Canada. What made this product unique was not only that it had been developed out-of-process and by a team largely made up of volunteers, but it targeted a constituency completely new [ ]
I m currently working on a blog post that compares genAI chatbots, ChatGPT and Bard and I need an image to accompany it. Coincidentally, earlier today I read that Google had just unveiled their new image-generation tool. The new tool, ImageFX, is powered by the Imagen 2 text-to-image model which has also been incorporated into Bard. What [ ]
We are proud to announce the latest and greatest Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition. The system, which is based on 10th Gen Intel® Core™ 10nm mobile processors, represents the 10th generation of the XPS 13 Developer Edition (see a list of the previous nine generations below). This 10th generation system features an updated design and [ ]
Passionate about Linux? About Developers? We’ll have we got the opportunity for you. 😊 The Project Sputnik team is planning to beef up our efforts and we’re looking for a passionate soul to join the cause and help drive Dell s line of developer laptops and workstations. This individual would have an opportunity to handle community [ ]
At the beginning of last month, we announced the roll out of the first configurations of Dell’s latest XPS 13 developer edition. Today, in honor of Halloween, we are excited to announce that we are increasing the number of configurations in the developer edition portfolio by a factor of eight. In total, we now offer [ ]
One subject we often get feedback on, and it doesn’t tend to be the positive kind, is the difficulty in finding Linux systems on Dell.com. The following tweet does a good job of summing up people s frustrations Im sure you get this all the time but I dont understand why it s so hard to [ ]