Michael Coté
cote.io
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Actions
Michael Coté studies how large organizations improve how they build software to run and grow their business. His books Changing Mindsets, Monolithic Transformation, and The Business Bottleneck cover these topics. He’s been an industry analyst at RedMonk and 451 Research, done corporate strategy and M&A, and was a programmer. He also co-hosts several podcasts, including Software Defined Talk. His daily-ish newsletter is at newsletter.cote.io.
Badges
Area of Expertise
Topics
Working with Reluctance to Change
The DevOps community pushes for people to change how they think and operate. When it comes to working better, we have proven tools, techniques, and even big picture ways of thinking like CALMS. You’re more than likely eager to try these new things, get better, change. However, many more people seem less than eager to change - your co-workers, managers, and the countless “others” in your organization. In the discussions I have with change agents and executives in large organizations, this reluctance to change is one of the top three concerning topics. I invite you to this discussion to talk about why people are reluctant to change, how you’ve worked helped people change, or, perhaps given up, and, hopefully, to share stories about your own experience overcoming reluctance. Our goal will be to move beyond being frustrated with “frozen” minds and middles, and get a sense for what to do about it…if anything. To start the discussion, I’ll start with a few stories and methods for getting people to change that I’ve encountered in the past few years.
Platform Engineering for Private Cloud
“Platform engineering” is the art of building and managing the infrastructure that powers your applications: a mix of cloud, a handful of DevOps, a pinch of SRE, and a thick glaze of product management. While it’s “nothing new,” many organizations are just starting to practice it—and for good reason. But what happens when your platform is running on private cloud?
With around 50% of enterprise apps still running on private clouds, platform engineering for private platforms is surprisingly under-discussed. This talk dives into real-world examples and stories from large organizations tackling this challenge. The hurdles often lie in adapting platform engineering to existing IT stacks and processes—most organizations can’t simply start from scratch, nor would they want to abandon what’s currently driving revenue.
If you support your organization’s apps, platform engineering is something you’ll probably be doing soon. Come learn how your peers are navigating these challenges and share your own experiences.
This talk will highlight how Tanzu Platform and VCF fits into many organizations' private cloud strategies.
Platform Engineering and AI - Two Buzzwords Finally Meet!
Two Buzzwords Finally Meet! How should we manage AI in large organizations? What are the "services" developers need to add AI to enterprise apps, and what role do platform engineers take? Where do data scientists fit in? How does MCP, A2A, and whatever the latest AI API is fit in? There are so many questions because the field of managing AI in enterprises barely exists. We need to figure it out quickly however, before we see a repeat of a past patterns, like shadow AI and unmanageable apps in production. Based on real-world examples, this talk will go over what we currently know about using platform engineering to help developers use AI.
How to survive and thrive in a BigCo
If you work at a small, cool company, you can skip this talk. The rest of us in large, slow moving companies that rely on meetings, email, and inbox 2,000 to get the daily work done need some therapy and advice for thriving in big, "dumb" companies. I've worked in such companies and figured out how to thrive in the "back to back meetings" world we're taught to avoid. I'll tell you my tactics: avoiding work by assigning work, the power of boring corporate PowerPoints, champions and mentors, and how to innovate in a BigCo.
Goblins are the only thing holding back the AI Takeover: Using Cloud Foundry and Dungeons & Dragons
Is AI really a substitute for humans? What better way to answer that question than having AIs play a Dungeons & Dragons dungeon master? D&D follows an intricate, yet ambiguous set of rules, requires constant creativity and unexpected imagination, empathy, and playfulness. Coté has developed a sort of Turing test that uses a handful of D&D scenarios to test how human AIs can act: things like how it DMs a goblin ambush, role plays generic tavern encounters, and creates interesting open-ended adventures and world-building. More than benchmarking, this is an excellent way to learn how to create prompts, to understand what AIs are, and pretend like you’re working which you’re having fun playing games. It's also a good way to explore what the basics and best practices of creating and maintaining AI-based apps. To go beyond the limits of public generative AI models, this talk will build the needed generative AI apps on Cloud Foundry.
Developer productivity is waste
We've become developer productivity obsessed, worse, developer productivity METRICS obsessed. How often do we deploy apps? How many story points did we complete? What's our MTTR? What's the network admins eNPS? An obsession with developer productivity is good at small doses, but it becomes a distraction when taken too far. And, besides, who is this focus on productivity really benefit? In this talk, I'll first give an overview of the latest in developer productivity metrics. Second, I'll go over some techniques to avoid descending into metrics madness. Finally, I'll go over what we should be paying more attention to instead of productivity.
We built it, and no one came - How to Market Your Internal Developer Platform
You’ve built the perfect platform, but those pesky developers aren’t using it. I’ve hear this story frequently over the years. More than not, it means the platform team is not doing the marketing needed. Branding, t-shirts, platform advocacy, community management, staffing for marketing, and the other basics of a marketing program. I know: you read the word marketing and you feel a little revolted. For a successful platform in a large organization, though, you need it! Thankfully, there are many years of organizations figuring out what platform marketing is and how to do it. This talk will go over what platform and product marketing is and then tactics learned in organizations like Mercedes-Benz, ING, BT, Garmin and others.
Lessons learned from 7 years of running developer platforms
This talk covers best and worst practices for Platform engineering. The trick is, we didn't always use this phrase, so we actually have many years of experience to learn from. Who are you? You're in a DevOps, wait, I mean SRE...nope, scatch that..."platform engineering" team. People are coming at you to get kubernetes up and running and then build some kind of platform on-top of kubernetes. But you just got a build pipeline in place! Getting kubernetes ready for developers may be a new problem, but building and running developer platforms has been going on for at least ten years. This talk will cover the lessons those organizations have learned such as: product managing the platform, attracting and retaining developers, seeding trust and skills, re-skilling existing ops staff, and more. Examples are drawn from organizations like Mercedes-Benz, the US Airforce, large insurance companies and banks, and more.
Escaping the Legacy Trap - a proven method for application modernization
You're facing a big, multi-year re-write of your core applications. How do you start? This talk will explain one method used by large organizations, SWIFT. Sadly, older applications and services too often slow down and stop business innovation. Yet, 76% of executives said they are too invested in legacy applications to change. They’re caught in the legacy trap! Organizations simply can’t figure out how to prioritize this invisible work over adding new features and apps. But today, there’s no room to avoid modernizing core systems if your business wants to keep up. No more new features can be added to software and no more progress can be made on transformation journeys until this fear is faced. Come hear how people are escaping the legacy trap. This talk is based on the book by Coté and Marc Zotter, The Legacy Trap.
Low Growth DevOps
We're in an era of low-growth DevOps. Recent surveys find that anywhere between 50% to 70% of respondents are not automating their builds and tests, let alone deployments to production. Survey respondents also say that only around 35% of their apps are managed with a DevOps mindset. Meanwhile, first and second generation DevOps companies are tinkering with OSS licenses or merging into mega-tech companies. The business of DevOps is not what it used to be. Is this good? Is this bad? Is this expected? Is it helpful? How did platform engineering sneak into our party and drink all the cold beer? In this talk, Coté will give an analysis of DevOps usage and DevOps businesses 15 years later. So much has improved, and there's more improvement to come. Hopefully.
PlatformCon 2025 Sessionize Event
NDC Oslo 2025 Sessionize Event
Cloud Foundry Day North America 2025 Sessionize Event
NDC Oslo 2024 Sessionize Event
Infobip Shift 2023 Sessionize Event
PlatformCon 2023 Sessionize Event
TEQnation 2023 Sessionize Event
DevOpsDays Austin 2023 Sessionize Event
Future Tech 2023 Sessionize Event
Build Stuff 2022 Lithuania Sessionize Event
DevOpsDays Austin 2022 Sessionize Event
DevOpsDays Zurich 2021 Sessionize Event
NLVMUG UserCon 2020 Sessionize Event
DevOpsDays Austin 2020 Sessionize Event
devopsdays Amsterdam 2019 Sessionize Event
Michael Coté
cote.io
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Actions
Please note that Sessionize is not responsible for the accuracy or validity of the data provided by speakers. If you suspect this profile to be fake or spam, please let us know.
Jump to top