I had a great final day at this offsite, and am thankful to work with such talented and kind folks. Today’s reading list is full of product info, general purpose insights, and a couple freebies.
[blog] Does Crossplane Replace Terraform? Part I: the Theory. Ian performs a useful deep dive into APIs, cloud services, and control planes to figure out if the open source Crossplane project is a valid choice for modern teams.
[blog] Google is a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: AI Foundation Models for Language, Q2 2024. I haven’t seen an analyst assessment like this in a while. The distance between the leader (Google Cloud) and the rest is unusual. Read their analysis.
[article] LangChain and Google Gemini API for AI Apps: A Quickstart Guide. Here’s a quick demo that anyone at home can follow along with.
[blog] AI Assistants are Now Organizational Accelerants. Siloed assistants might be the future, but most of us are betting on something that is connected from end-to-end.
[blog] TBM 291: Why Your Product Transformation Will Fail. This reads like something that would come out of a productive pre-mortem where you consider all the ways an upcoming effort will go sideways.
[blog] How to use feature flags. I haven’t heard many of these perspectives on feature flags, and found this an educational read.
[blog] All Google Cloud courses and labs are now available at no cost through Innovators. Free, high quality training? What’s the catch? Only that you get an email newsletter from me every week, which is admittedly a burden for you.
[blog] Develop Kubernetes Operators in Java without Breaking a Sweat. This walkthrough from Docker shows how to test those custom Kubernetes operators written in Java.
[blog] NotebookLM goes global with Slides support and better ways to fact-check. Now available in 200 countries and based on our latest models. Try out this research and writing assistant.
[blog] BigQuery adds first-party support for Delta Lake. We’ve got some nice new integrations here for those that like open lakehouses.
[blog] 10 Years of Kubernetes. Happy birthday Kubernetes! It’s been te years since the first public commit was pushed to GitHub. Lots of history and links in this post.
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Richard Seroter's Architecture Musings 
Liked Ian’s videos and just subscripted to his channel – quite informative indeed.
Regarding the Forrester report, equally surprised at the distance between Google Cloud and the rest. Also a bit surprised at how the rest line up against each other.
Great pointer to the Google Cloud Skills Boost courses and labs. Completed all but the last Gen AI learning path (“Advanced: Generative AI for Developers Learning Path”). 99.7% finished minus a last lab (“Inspect Rich Documents with Gemini Multimodality and Multimodal RAG”), which has been down for few weeks. Hopefully will be up and running soon and can celebrate a small but meaningful victory. 🙂
Thank you for continuing to curate great content.
Dale