DevToolsDigest: Issue #261

The Week in Developer Tools

There Are No Repeat Incidents

It is very easy and natural to see two distinct outages, with nearly identical failure modes, impacting the same components, and with no significant action items as repeat incidents. However, when we look at the responses and their variations, we can find key distinctions that shows the incidents as related, but not identical.

Monitoring is a Pain

It is very simple to monitor a small application or service. Almost none of those approaches scale. Instead monitoring becomes an endless series of small failures. You set up these tools with the mentality of "set and forget" but they actually require ever increasing amounts of maintenance. Some of the tools break and are never fixed.

Industry Research

Enterprise DevOps: Importance and Key Benefits You Need to Know

Many entrepreneurs consider DevOps solutions useful for startups and technology companies. The reason behind this notion is the chief objective of DevOps implementation, which is to help companies build their culture or establish cloud-native roots. However, the reality is completely different.

AI Weights are Not Open "Source"

AI licensing is extremely complex. Unlike software licensing, AI isn’t as simple as applying current proprietary/open source software licenses. Because of these complexities, AI licensing has many layers, including multiple components and additional licensing considerations.

Developer Venture News

Databricks Strikes $1.3 Billion Deal for Generative AI Startup MosaicML

Databricks says the deal combines its AI-ready data-management technology with MosaicML’s language-model platform, enabling businesses to build low-cost language models themselves with proprietary data. Right now, most businesses rely on third-party language models trained on troves of publicly available data accessed online. 

IBM to Buy Software Co Apptio for $4.6 Billion to Bolster Cloud Offerings

The acquisition of Apptio, a software-as-a-service business with over 1,500 customers and partnerships with cloud companies from AWS to Salesforce, will benefit IBM's Red Hat business, AI portfolio and its consulting business, the technology giant said.

From the Heavybit Community

Going to Market as Commercial Software

In this talk, dbt Labs CRO Nicholas Erdenberger provides an overview of effective sales strategies and tactics for open-source products and services, as well as practical tips and examples of successful sales approaches in the open-source space.

Why Do Developers (Actually) Hate Marketing?

Many developers do hate most marketing. The idea is directionally accurate because developers do appear to be disproportionately (and loudly) skeptical of marketing in general and in many individual marketing efforts. But if we go no further, then devtool companies and developer marketers will artificially limit themselves to “acceptable” marketing or avoid marketing altogether.