The MonkCast

RedMonk

Join the developer-focused industry analysts at RedMonk as they discuss news and trends in the software space with leaders and practicioners in cloud, AI, IaC, security, DevOps, developer relations, observability, data, and more. Can't get enough of the Monks? Visit the RedMonk YouTube channel or check out our research at RedMonk.com. You can also follow RedMonk on Bluesky, Twitter (X), and LinkedIn. Meet RedMonk's AnalystsJames Governor, Principal Analyst & Co-founder @monkchips, LinkedIn, Blog Stephen O'Grady, Principal Analyst & Co-founder @sogrady, LinkedIn, Blog Rachel Stephens, Research Director @rstephensme, LinkedIn, Blog Kate Holterhoff, Senior Industry Analyst @KateHolterhoff, LinkedIn, Blog

  1. 3 days ago

    "Somebody is always paying the token bill": AI and Open Source with Brian Proffitt & Jason Brooks

    Generated code is arriving faster than maintainers can read it. RedMonk's Steve O'Grady discusses this new reality with Jason Brooks and Brian Proffitt, both managers in Red Hat's Open Source and AI Program Office. Proffitt's teams are adding what he calls human speed bumps upstream: PR templates that ask whether AI wrote the patch, and if so, what the prompt was. The point is transparency, not blocking the flow. Brooks argues for the importance of human decision makers because writing code may cost close to nothing now, but getting another person to accept it still costs plenty, and someone always pays the token bill. The conversation also touches on maintainer burnout, why saying "no" is still a legitimate answer to a pull request, Fedora Hummingbird and its agentically assembled packages, and the thing Proffitt worries about most: trust. This RedMonk video is sponsored by Red Hat. Show notes: https://redmonk.com/videos/brian-proffitt-jason-brooks/ Chapters 00:04 Introduction to AI and Open Source Governance 00:32 Guest Introductions: Jason Brooks and Brian Proffitt 02:10 AI's Ubiquity and Industry Impact 03:06 Guardrails for AI Code Quality in Projects 04:22 Implementing Human Speed Bumps for AI Contributions 05:17 Encouraging Transparency in AI Contributions 06:46 Automated Review and Guardrails in Open Source 07:50 Verifying AI-Generated Code in Fedora 09:10 Human Oversight in AI Processes 13:39 Developer Burnout and Managing Contribution Floods 16:09 Trust and Transparency in AI-Driven Ecosystems 18:30 Evolving Policies for AI in Fedora 20:16 Future Challenges and Community Trust in AI 21:11 Closing Remarks and Future Outlook

  2. 3 Sept

    From Stock Photos to Trillions of Artifacts: Shutterstock's Data Journey with Jefferson Frazer

    In this conversation recorded at Fastly Xcelerate, James Governor talks with Jefferson Frazer, Director of AI at Shutterstock, about how a two-decade-old media company reinvented itself for the age of foundation models. Frazer explains how Shutterstock's long history of human-reviewed, meticulously labeled content left it uniquely positioned when hyperscalers began seeking diverse, web-scale datasets for multimodal training. Frazer digs into the technical backbone too: a 100-plus petabyte footprint, cloud-agnostic architecture built on Fastly's private fiber and Wasm-based edge compute, and the discipline of tracking data provenance through standards like C2PA and SynthID. Looking ahead, he makes the case that unified embedding spaces and portable metadata—not any single model provider—will define the next chapter of AI-ready content. This RedMonk video is sponsored by Fastly. Show notes: https://redmonk.com/videos/jefferson-frazer/ Chapters 00:00 Introduction to Shutterstock and AI 04:14 Data Scale and Infrastructure 07:25 Fastly's Role in Data Management 10:28 The Future of AI and Business Models 13:28 Regulation and Provenance in AI 16:35 Excitement for Unified Embedding Spaces

  3. 1 Sept

    Why ChatGPT Recommends Your Competitor: LLMs & the Future of DevTool Marketing with Adam DuVander

    Why does ChatGPT recommend one DevTool over another, and what can founders do about it? In this RedMonk Conversation, Kate Holterhoff sits down with Adam DuVander, Principal Consultant at EveryDeveloper and author of Developer Marketing Does Not Exist, to explore how AI assistants are transforming software discovery. They discuss Adam’s LLM Rank research, which tracks how models like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini recommend developer tools, and why those recommendations often differ. The conversation covers the practical steps DevTool companies can take to improve AI discoverability, from documentation and developer experience to use-case positioning and contextual content. Along the way, Kate and Adam examine the expanding definition of “developer,” the rise of AI-assisted builders, and why developer marketing is evolving rather than disappearing. Whether you’re building a developer product or rethinking your go-to-market strategy, this episode offers a practical framework for succeeding in an LLM-first world. Show notes: https://redmonk.com/videos/adam-duvander/ Chapters 00:00 Defining the Modern Developer 04:25 The Role of Every Developer 09:38 Marketing to the New Breed of Developers 12:37 Understanding LLM Rank and AI in Development 19:57 The Evolution of Documentation and Developer Experience 22:06 Understanding Developer Context and Use Cases 25:31 Navigating AI Recommendations for Developer Tools 28:55 The Importance of Language and Phrasing in Queries 31:50 The Long Game of SEO and LLM Rankings 36:44 Addressing Outdated Documentation and Bad Advice 42:20 The Distinction Between Discoverability and Developer Success 47:51 The Future of Developer Marketing in an AI World

  4. 27 Aug

    Why AI Agents Are Blowing Up Your Telemetry Bill with Nikhil Mungel

    Most conversations about AI agents stay on what agents can do. Less attention goes to what they leave behind: logs, traces, and tool-call chains at a volume nobody's pipeline was built for. Nikhil Mungel, Head of AI R&D at Cribl, talks with Kate Holterhoff about why that is becoming observability's cost and noise problem. They discuss why token prices keep falling while total spend climbs, how employee spend differs from the tokens a product burns serving customers, credit-based versus outcome-based billing, why users always reach for the priciest model, and how the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF) standardizes what agents emit. Underneath all of it sits the question the industry keeps dodging, which is whether to keep scaling the backend or get stricter about what gets collected at all. This RedMonk conversation is sponsored by Cribl. Show notes: https://redmonk.com/videos/nikhil-mungel/ Chapters 00:25 Leading AI research and development at Cribl 01:46 Token prices fell, token bills grew 03:39 The research agent that thought all night 06:54 More software, more agents, more telemetry 09:37 Employee spend versus cost of goods sold 12:05 Credits, outcomes, and other ways to bill for agents 14:46 Shadow AI and the cloud governance rerun 17:00 Writing policy: cost, access, and blast radius 17:49 Local models and regulated industries 18:40 What Cribl collects, plus Cribl Guard 21:24 Token gateways as the enforcement point 24:56 Model anxiety and automatic routing 27:29 What OCSF is and why it caught on 30:15 Observability as an information compression problem 33:48 Zero data retention versus model safety 35:45 Should agents know what they cost? 36:35 Where to find Nikhil and Cribl's research

  5. 25 Aug

    The Digital Sovereignty Questions Every Enterprise Should Be Asking with Jason Willeford

    James Governor sits down with Jason Willeford, Global Lead for Secure Global Support at Red Hat, to dig into digital sovereignty and why it's become such a big deal for European enterprises. Jason explains Red Hat's Confirmed Sovereign Support, launched last year, which keeps EU customer data and the engineers handling it inside the EU. They cover what sovereignty actually means, why banks and telcos now care about it as much as public sector agencies do, and how AI complicates the picture when you don't know where a model was trained or what data it consumed on the way there. The conversation also touches on IBM's Sovereign Core, Project Lightwell, and RHEL for SAP. This RedMonk conversation is sponsored by Red Hat. Show notes: https://redmonk.com/videos/jason-willeford/ Chapters 00:00 Introduction to Digital Sovereignty 02:26 Understanding Sovereignty: Definitions and Spectrum 05:31 The Complexity of Sovereignty in Europe 08:21 Data Sovereignty and Support Models 11:28 AI Sovereignty and Its Implications 14:15 Operational Sovereignty and Customer Engagement 17:20 The Role of Red Hat in Sovereignty 20:40 Sovereign Core and Global Expansion 23:36 Mindset Shift Towards Sovereignty 26:22 Engaging Developers and Enterprises on Sovereignty 29:36 The Future of Sovereignty and Open Source

  6. 20 Aug

    The Data Behind the Agents with MongoDB's Boris Bialek & Intellect Design's Raman Jatkar

    In this RedMonk conversation, Stephen O'Grady sits down with Boris Bialek, VP of Industries at MongoDB, and Raman Jatkar, Head of Product Management for Purple Fabric at Intellect Design, to examine where agentic AI and data platforms converge. The discussion makes the case that data, not models, determines enterprise outcomes. Raman reframes hallucination as a data architecture and sequencing problem, solved through deliberate ingestion, chunking, and retrieval strategies rather than model swaps. Boris stresses governance, lineage, guardrails, and the often-overlooked security risks of agent-to-agent interactions like open banking. Both argue that data and AI platforms should be treated as one interconnected capability, with governance built in rather than bolted on. The conversation closes on the renewed importance of operational, real-time data, what Boris calls OLTP returning to center stage, and keeping the human customer at the end of every workflow. This RedMonk conversation is sponsored by MongoDB. Show notes: https://redmonk.com/videos/boris-bialek-raman-jatkar/ Chapters 00:00 Introduction to the AI Agentic Era 01:58 Understanding Purple Fabric and Its Tech Stacks 05:52 Addressing Hallucinations in AI Models 09:26 Governance and Compliance in AI Systems 12:33 Challenges and Opportunities in Data and AI Integration

  7. 13 Aug

    Evidence Over Certificates: John Ellis on the Eclipse Trustable Software Framework

    What does it mean to trust software? For this RedMonk Conversation, Kate Holterhoff sits down with John Ellis, President of Codethink and the contributor to the Eclipse Trustable Software Framework, to pull that question apart. Ellis leans on an old image: the bridge builders who once slept under their own bridges to prove the work was sound. Modern software rarely faces that kind of test, even when it steers a car or flies a plane. He explains where trust tends to break, especially the integration step where hidden dependencies finally show themselves, and points out that a safety certificate almost never uses the word "safe." Rather than pass-or-fail box-ticking, the framework asks teams to state their confidence and back it with evidence that others can inspect and challenge. They also dig into AI-written code, the EU Cyber Resilience Act, and why rising software recalls suggest current habits fall short. This RedMonk video is sponsored by the Eclipse Foundation. Show notes: https://redmonk.com/videos/john-ellis/ Chapters 00:04 Introduction to the Eclipse Trustable Software Framework 02:57 Understanding Trust in Software 05:59 The Integration Moment of Truth 08:54 Challenges in Software Development Lifecycle 11:25 The Role of the Eclipse Trustable Software Framework 14:39 Managing Change in Software Development 17:20 Versioning and Continuous Improvement 20:01 Risk Analysis and Trustworthiness in Software 24:39 Automating Testing and Confidence in Software 25:23 Bridging the Gap with Regulators 27:15 The Complexity of Software and Safety Standards 29:18 Understanding Certification and Safety Claims 31:12 The Need for a Shift in Mindset 32:16 The Role of the Eclipse Trustable Software Framework 34:18 Navigating the EU Cyber Resilience Act 37:41 The Journey of Compliance and Awareness 39:16 AI's Impact on Software Provenance 43:34 Future Directions for the Eclipse Trustable Software Framework

  8. 12 Aug

    From Dashboards to APIs: Day Two Operations in VCF 9.1 with Sehjung Hah

    In this MonkCast conversation, Rachel Stephens talks with Sehjung Hah, a product marketing engineer at Broadcom, about how VMware Cloud Foundation 9.1 is shifting private cloud operations from click-driven dashboards toward programmable, API-first workflows. Hah walks through the expanded VCF API surface that lets developers pull network details, vSphere diagnostics, and real-time infrastructure health in a self-service fashion. They also discuss a new fleet management capability that centralizes password rotation, certificate updates, and identity management across massive compute footprints. This RedMonk video is sponsored by VMware by Broadcom. Show notes: https://redmonk.com/videos/vcf9dot1-dashboards-to-apis-sehjung-hah/ Chapters 00:00 Intro 00:30 Removing Developer Friction in Private Cloud 02:44 Fleet Management for Platform Engineers 04:23 From Dashboards to Telemetry-as-Code 08:27 Killing Static Credentials and Shrinking the Blast Radius 11:29 AI Workloads, Sovereignty, and Cost Visibility 14:56 The 3 AM Scenario 17:27 Putting It All Together

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About

Join the developer-focused industry analysts at RedMonk as they discuss news and trends in the software space with leaders and practicioners in cloud, AI, IaC, security, DevOps, developer relations, observability, data, and more. Can't get enough of the Monks? Visit the RedMonk YouTube channel or check out our research at RedMonk.com. You can also follow RedMonk on Bluesky, Twitter (X), and LinkedIn. Meet RedMonk's AnalystsJames Governor, Principal Analyst & Co-founder @monkchips, LinkedIn, Blog Stephen O'Grady, Principal Analyst & Co-founder @sogrady, LinkedIn, Blog Rachel Stephens, Research Director @rstephensme, LinkedIn, Blog Kate Holterhoff, Senior Industry Analyst @KateHolterhoff, LinkedIn, Blog

Information

  • Creator
    RedMonk
  • Years Active
    2023 - 2026
  • Episodes
    217
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2025 RedMonk

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