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A short post, I’m excited to share that I will be presenting a Webinar for the CNCF Malaga meetup on the 11th June 6.30pm CEST where I’ll be talking about OpAMP – registration link. I hope you can join me to hear about the value of the OpAMP protocol, which originated from the CNCF OpenTelemetry project. I’ll be talking about what the protocol can do for us, how it works, and while it has…

I’ve written a bit about AI in the development process; this has been driven largely by my own experiences, colleagues’ experiences, and blog content from people I trust. So I thought it would be worthwhile to validate my perspectives against those who are more in the know on the subject. So here is my review of the book Vibe Engineering by Tomasz Lelek and Artur Skowroński. The book opens with…

There are a lot of posts on various platforms about how AI is generating ‘slop’, and it is actually costing a lot of time to take what was generated and put it right. Cleaning up after AI is something people are even incorporating into their online biographies. On the other hand, others indicate they’re getting good results. So what is the reality? I think what we’re seeing is a combination of…

Something that vendors like Microsoft have been really good at is reducing the friction on getting started – from simplifying installations with MSI files and defaulted options through to very informative error messages in Excel when you’ve got a function slightly wrong. Apple is another good example of this; while no two Android phones are the same, my experience is that setting up an iPhone is…

As a Manning author, I am fortunate to see the books in their MEAP (early-release state). If you have a Manning online subscription or have already ordered a copy, you’ll have this privilege as well. I’ve been reading the MEAP copy of Enterprise RAG by Tyler Suard. At the point of writing, there are still 4 more chapters to come. But, of the first 6 chapters, I have to say, I’ve been impressed.…

Let me start by clarifying some terminology. an informal noun referring to the mood, atmosphere, or aura produced by a particular person, thing, or place that is sensed or felt This is deeply at odds with the idea of software engineering, where the OED describes engineering as: the activity of applying scientific and mathematical knowledge to the design, building, and control of structures,…

There has been a rapidly growing series of articles being written about the limited launch of Mythos, a new LLM. The evolution of models has helped quickly advance AI-assisted software development. But the capabilities of Mythos and Project Glasswing that really grabbed attention and concern. Glasswing is an initiative that allows major partner software and service vendors to access the Mythos…

The software industry’s current upheavals due to AI are showing signs of unexpected and unintended victims, one of which is open-source software. Open-source foundations run very deep, from Linux to web and app servers, and even to key cryptography technologies. While there are commercially funded open source efforts, such as chunks of Kubernetes, depending upon which reports you look at, 10-30%…

Time to share a short update on our OpAMP project to support Fluent Bit and Fluentd in a supervisor model. We’ve just put a V0.3 label on the GitHub repo (https://github.com/mp3monster/fluent-opamp). The trigger for this has been the refactoring so that the framework on the client side is as reusable as possible for both Fluentd and Fluent Bit (the benefit of implementing Opamp using a supervisor…

There’s a growing narrative that Agentic AI and “vibe coding” (AI-assisted development is probably a better term) signal the end of SaaS, what some are calling ‘SaaS-pocalyse‘, as reflected by share price drops with some SaaS vendors. The reality is more nuanced. SaaS vendors are being pulled in multiple directions: Pressure to invest heavily in AI to accelerate productivity and…

With KubeCon Europe happening this week, it felt like a good moment to break cover on this pet project. If you are working with Fluent Bit at any scale, one question keeps coming up: how do we consistently control and observe all those edge agents, especially outside a Kubernetes-only world? This is exactly the problem the OpAMP specification is trying to solve. At its core, OpAMP defines a…

A number of books on the use of LLMs demonstrate how to generate queries against a table from natural language. There is no doubt that providing an LLM and the definition of a simple database and a natural language question, and seeing it provide a valid result is impressive. The problem is that this struggles to scale to enterprise scenarios where queries need to run on very large databases…

A couple of years ago, we wrote about the idea of Chat Ops, why the idea is valuable and interesting (see Fluent Bit – Powering Chat Ops, Fluent Bit with Chat Ops, for example). The essence of the idea was: Using a collaboration or chat platform like Slack could ease and even accelerate the response to operational issues (as systems process more data and faster). Conversational collaborative…

Fluent Bit and OpenTelemetry’s Collector (as well as many other observability tools) are designed to use a distributed/agent model for deployment. This model can pose challenges, including ensuring that all agents are operating healthily and correctly configured. This is particularly true outside of a Kubernetes ecosystem. But even within a Kubernetes ecosystem, more than basic insights are…

This may come across as potentially maudlin, possibly depressing, but as the popular financial advisor Martin Lewis says, the grim reaper gets us all, and leaving your partner, family in the dark about how to pick up and manage the finances, etc., is pretty hard. But any half-committed music collector will want their collection treated with the consideration that personal effects like jewellery…