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Alan Shimel

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Founder and Editor-in-Chief, Container Journal
Founder and Editor-in-Chief, Security Boulevard
Founder and Editor-in-Chief, DevOps.com
Founder and Editor-In-Chief, Techstrong.ai
Founder and Editor-In-Chief, Platform Engineering
Founder and Editor-In-Chief, Cloud Native Now
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Articles by Alan Shimel

Grok Got Caught With Its Hand in the Code Jar

By Alan Shimel Verified |Security Boulevard Verified

Researchers found that Grok Build could upload entire user repositories to company-controlled cloud storage, potentially exposing source code, credentials, API keys and other sensitive information. SpaceXAI disabled the default upload and retention behavior, promised to delete retained coding data and released the Grok Build agent harness under the Apache 2.0 license.

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The AI Stack and the Indispensability Trap

By Alan Shimel Verified |Techstrong.ai Verified

As AI becomes indispensable to every layer of technology, the infrastructure beneath it faces commoditization—and every major vendor is racing to move before the value moves somewhere else. Mitch Ashley has produced one of the clearest maps I have seen of the emerging AI market.

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When China Became the Champion of Openess in AI

By Alan Shimel Verified |Digital CxO

There was Xi Jinping, leader of one of the world’s most tightly controlled societies, standing before the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai and presenting China as the new champion of openness. Not political openness, certainly. Not an unrestricted internet, a free press or an uncensored public square.

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By Alan Shimel Verified |stg-techstrongai-staging.kinsta.cloud

Opposition to nearby AI data centers has risen from 42% to 71% in less than a year. Texas shows why the backlash began. Florida shows how quickly it is reshaping American politics. Last August, Americans were almost perfectly divided about whether they would welcome a data center near their homes. Forty-three percent supported one. Forty-two percent opposed it. By this spring, support had collapsed to 21% while opposition had surged to 71%.

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Mira Murati’s Real AI Bet Isn’t Inkling. It’s Tinker

By Alan Shimel Verified |stg-techstrongai-staging.kinsta.cloud

Mira Murati did something unusual when Thinking Machines Lab released its first AI model this week. She admitted it was not the best model in the world. “Inkling is not the strongest overall model available today, open or closed,” the company said in its announcement. In an industry where every model release arrives wrapped in benchmark victories and carefully constructed claims of frontier performance, that sounds almost like an apology. It isn’t.

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The Billionaires Got Their Data Centers. Now the People Are Revolting

By Alan Shimel Verified |Techstrong.ai Verified

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Shimmy Says: Data Centers Everywhere

By Alan Shimel Verified |Techstrong IT

Data centers. Data centers everywhere. For most of the generative AI era, artificial intelligence has had a human face. Sam Altman became the face of OpenAI. Dario Amodei became the face of Anthropic. Elon Musk became the face of Grok and xAI. Jensen Huang, with his leather jacket and seemingly endless supply of GPUs, became the face of the infrastructure powering all of it. But I think something has changed. The most recognizable face of the AI era may no longer belong to any of those people.

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Mira Murati’s Real AI Bet Isn’t Inkling. It’s Tinker

By Alan Shimel Verified |Techstrong.ai Verified

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The Cloud Has a Street Address—and Thieves Can Find It

By Alan Shimel Verified |Security Boulevard Verified

The 2007 Verizon data center robbery showed that cloud infrastructure can be breached through physical deception. Attackers posing as police officers gained access, restrained guards and removed servers without using malware or a zero-day vulnerability. Modern AI data centers concentrate far more strategic value than traditional facilities.

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Anaconda Doesn’t Want to Be Just the Python Company Anymore

By Alan Shimel Verified |DevOps.com

Anaconda’s acquisition of Kilo Code moves the company beyond Python tooling and into the AI coding-agent layer. Kilo gives Anaconda direct access to the developer interface where models are selected, agents are directed and organizational data is routed. The deal forms part of a broader platform strategy. Anaconda’s package and environment management, Outerbounds’ workflow orchestration and Kilo’s agentic development tools could become an end-to-end enterprise AI development platform.

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Apple’s OpenAI Nightmare: Becoming Just the Hardware

By Alan Shimel Verified |Techstrong.ai Verified

OpenAI’s screenless AI companion threatens more than the HomePod or Siri. It could push Apple beneath the customer relationship, leaving it as the indispensable hardware supporting someone else’s intelligence. Apple says it sued OpenAI to protect its trade secrets. Perhaps that is precisely what happened. The company alleges OpenAI used former Apple employees to obtain confidential information and accelerate its move into consumer hardware.

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Put Down the Pitchforks: AI Isn’t Killing Main Street

By Alan Shimel Verified |Techstrong.ai Verified

The angry mob has been waiting outside with its pitchforks. Ever since generative AI escaped the lab and landed in the hands of ordinary businesses, we have been warned that mass unemployment was right around the corner. Artificial intelligence would eliminate entry-level jobs, replace whole departments and allow companies to operate with a fraction of their existing workforces.

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America Wants the Intelligence Grid. Just Not Next Door

By Alan Shimel Verified |Techstrong.ai Verified

When I saw that New York had become the first state to impose a statewide moratorium on large new data centers, I did not see an isolated policy decision. I thought about a rancher in Montana driving into a town of 140 people to ask what was being built beside her property. I thought about struggling farmers in Louisiana betting that one of the largest AI campuses ever conceived might give their parish a future.

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A Coffee Company Just Spooked the Entire Software Industry

By Alan Shimel Verified |Techstrong IT

TL;DR — Key Takeaways Starbucks did not crash software stocks by replacing a few tools. It challenged the assumption that large companies must keep renting software forever. AI makes custom internal software newly plausible. Not free, not easy—but cheap and fast enough to become a credible alternative at renewal time. A lot of SaaS was protected by the cost of rebuilding it, not by uniquely valuable code. Products built mostly from forms, databases, workflows and permissions are especially exposed.

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What Is the Platform for Platform Engineering 2.0?

By Alan Shimel Verified |Platform Engineering

Platform Engineering 2.0 is having a moment. Pankaj Gupta of VMware by Broadcom has described it as the evolution the AI era demands. Gupta and Sam Barlien of the Platform Engineering community developed that thinking more fully in their joint white paper, Platform Engineering 2.0: An Evolution for the AI Era. Barlien, with contributions from Luca Galante, also explores the convergence of AI and platform engineering in the latest State of Platform Engineering Report, Volume 4.

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Don’t Charge Me Twice: For the Software and With My Data

By Alan Shimel Verified |Techstrong IT

TL;DR — Key Takeaways Enterprise data shouldn’t become a hidden second payment. Companies already pay for AI and software services—they shouldn’t unknowingly pay again with the proprietary data they contribute. The real issue isn’t AI—it’s data ownership. Whether it’s training models, enriching databases, or building new products, vendors are increasingly looking to monetize customer data. HubSpot became a cautionary tale.

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You Can Keep the Benchmarks. I’ll Take the Test Drive

By Alan Shimel Verified |Techstrong.ai Verified

I have never been one to judge technology by looking at a chart. Benchmarks are useful, especially when the technology is as difficult to evaluate as artificial intelligence. They provide common tests, measurable results and some basis for comparing one model with another. The problem is that technology companies rarely publish charts in which their own product finishes second. My test has always been more practical. Give me the technology and let me use it.

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When the Model Makers Become the Competition

By Alan Shimel Verified |Digital CxO

Alex Karp has spent the past few weeks saying aloud what a growing number of enterprise leaders have begun wondering privately. What exactly are the frontier AI companies doing with all the data, context, workflows and institutional knowledge their customers are feeding into their systems? Why are companies spending so much money on tokens when many still struggle to connect that consumption to measurable business value?

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AI is Giving Terrorists the Expertise They Could Never Recruit

By Alan Shimel Verified |Security Boulevard Verified

We have been saying for years that the bad guys get AI too. In cybersecurity, we already know what that looks like. Artificial intelligence can help attackers write more convincing phishing emails, conduct reconnaissance, automate social engineering, create deepfakes and develop malicious code. AI allows criminals to operate faster, at greater scale and with capabilities they might not otherwise possess. None of that is theoretical anymore.

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The AI Tenants Can Leave. Boxtown Cannot.

By Alan Shimel Verified |Techstrong.ai Verified

Boxtown residents James Threadford Jr. (front) and Albert Lee Wright collect firewood from a horse-drawn cart in Memphis, Tennessee, in January 1961. A power plant stands behind them. The photograph recently appeared in The Christian Science Monitor’s reporting on Boxtown. Photo by Saul Brown, Memphis Press-Scimitar Newspaper Morgue, Special Collections Department, University of Memphis Libraries.

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When the Have-Nots Become the Haves

By Alan Shimel Verified |stg-techstrongai-staging.kinsta.cloud

Decades ago, sitting in an undergraduate political theory seminar, I absorbed a lesson that has explained more of the world to me than almost anything I learned afterward. Strip away the ideologies, the rhetoric and the flags, and a remarkable number of conflicts—between nations, between classes, between companies—come down to the relationship between the haves and the have-nots. The have-nots want what the haves possess. They organize, they innovate, they undercut, they share.

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Why Your Best People Can’t Save a Broken Delivery System

By Alan Shimel Verified |staging-devopsy.kinsta.cloud

When delivery falls apart, the reflex is to blame the team. Missed dates, quality slips, a burned-out squad — leadership tends to reach for a personnel fix and quietly move on. The uncomfortable pattern in most enterprise organizations is that the system itself is the failure mode. Decision latency, priority misalignment, and layers of governance that were designed for a slower era grind against the very people leaders keep asking to grind harder.

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Mezmo Open Sources AI SRE Operations

By Alan Shimel Verified |staging-devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Site reliability engineering has been quietly buckling under its own success. The scope of what SRE teams are expected to own — observability, incident response, telemetry pipelines, capacity, cost, resilience — keeps growing while the tools underneath fragment further.

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Bespoke Kill Chains and the End of Signature-Based Email Security

By Alan Shimel Verified |Security Boulevard Verified

The old email security playbook was built on a simple premise: someone gets hit first, the malicious payload gets fingerprinted, and the signature gets shared downstream so everyone else is protected. That worked when attackers reused the same lures and infrastructure at scale. It falls apart the moment AI lets every phishing attempt look completely different, with no shared indicators for downstream defenders to catch.

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Why Your Best People Can’t Save a Broken Delivery System

By Alan Shimel Verified |DevOps.com

Vendors can use your data to provide services. Declining a vendor can stop them from using the data you shared. Exponential Interactive, Inc d/b/a VDX.tv Cookie duration: 90 (days). Data collected and processed: IP addresses, Device identifiers, Probabilistic identifiers, Browsing and interaction data, Non-precise location data, Users’ profiles, Privacy choices more Cookie duration resets each session. View details | Storage details | Privacy policy Index Exchange Inc. Cookie duration: 365 (days).

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Mezmo Open Sources AI SRE Operations

By Alan Shimel Verified |DevOps.com

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Most Container Images You Pull Today Are Already Full of Vulnerabilities

By Alan Shimel Verified |Cloud Native Now

Container image security has quietly stayed stuck on the same problem it had a decade ago. Finding vulnerabilities is trivial — every major scanner returns pages of them from the average image pulled off a public registry. Remediating those findings at scale is where the wheels have kept coming off.

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When the Have-Nots Become the Haves

By Alan Shimel Verified |Techstrong.ai Verified

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AI Didn’t Steal Your Thinking. You Gave It Away

By Alan Shimel Verified |Techstrong.ai Verified

Last year I wrote that artificial intelligence, together with social media, was contributing to what many people now call “brain rot.” I still believe there is truth in that observation. Spend enough time watching people consume algorithmically generated content or accept AI-generated answers without question and it becomes obvious that something is changing.

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The Dynamo and the Token

By Alan Shimel Verified |Techstrong.ai Verified

There is a number making the rounds right now that most of us can’t really get our heads around. In 2026, the four largest hyperscalers — Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft — are on track to spend a combined ~$725 billion in capital expenditures, up roughly 77% from a 2025 figure that was already a record. McKinsey puts the cumulative data-center bill at $6.7 trillion by 2030. The IEA expects AI to pull nearly a full Japan’s worth of electricity out of the global grid by the end of the decade.

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The AI Bull Case Quietly Assumes Intelligence Gets Cheap

By Alan Shimel Verified |Techstrong.ai Verified

The AI buildout is the largest infrastructure bet in history. If you’re a technologist, the most important thing to understand about it is where the money won’t end up. There is a number the industry keeps repeating without quite absorbing it. In 2026, the four largest hyperscalers—Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft—are on track to spend a combined ~$725 billion in capital expenditures, up roughly 77% from a 2025 figure that was itself a record.

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America at 250: Building the Intelligence Grid

By Alan Shimel Verified |stg-techstrongai-staging.kinsta.cloud

This Saturday, the fireworks will be bigger than usual. America turns 250 years old on July 4, and the country will mark its semiquincentennial the way it has marked every birthday since the first one: Flags on porches, burgers on grills, kids with sparklers, families sprawled on blankets waiting for the sky to light up. For all of its imperfections, and it has plenty, this country remains one of history’s great experiments in individual freedom and entrepreneurial ambition.

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White Paper: What Is Platform Engineering?

By Alan Shimel Verified |Platform Engineering

For the last 15 years, one job on the engineering side of the house has never really changed. Somebody has to build the shared layer that stands between developers and the raw complexity of the technology required to run software. What that layer contains keeps changing — servers, then containers, then internal portals, now GPUs and agents — but the work of absorbing that complexity so the rest of the organization does not have to has stayed exactly where it has always been.

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America at 250: Building the Intelligence Grid

By Alan Shimel Verified |Techstrong.ai Verified

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America at 250: Free as in Freedom, Free as in Beer

By Alan Shimel Verified |Digital CxO

This Fourth of July, somewhere between the fireworks and the second helping of potato salad, most of us will say the words “land of the free” without giving them a second thought. They are part of the furniture of the holiday, said so often they stop registering as an idea and start functioning as background noise. As America closes in on 250 years, it seems worth pausing on that word a little longer. Not as a political statement, and not as an argument for one flag or another in the culture wars.

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Platform Engineering vs. DevOps: Why This Is the Wrong Question

By Alan Shimel Verified |DevOps.com

For the last fifteen years, DevOps did what it was supposed to do. It broke down the wall between development and operations, it made continuous delivery a normal expectation, it made shared ownership of production a cultural default, and it moved software delivery from a scheduled event to a continuous flow. The results reshaped how modern software gets built. They also created a new problem: at enterprise scale, every team ends up practicing DevOps a little differently, and the friction adds up.

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AI Isn’t Crowding Out the Economy. It’s Hollowing It Out

By Alan Shimel Verified |Techstrong.ai Verified

Jennifer Harris published a piece in the New York Times last week that everyone in our world should read, and then read again. In “The Generational Force Hollowing Out the Economy,” Harris makes the case that AI investment has grown so large, so fast, that it is starting to choke off capital from the rest of the economy.

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The Intelligence Layer: Why Digital Transformation and AI Transformation Are Now the Same Project

By Alan Shimel Verified |Digital CxO

For 20 years, we have been telling enterprises the same story about digital transformation. Replace the paper with software. Retire the mainframe. Move to the cloud. Digitize the customer experience. Automate the process that three people used to do by hand. It was good advice, and companies that took it seriously pulled ahead of the ones that dragged their feet. But somewhere in the retelling, we started treating those projects as the destination. They were never the destination.

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The AI Native Stack Already Exists. We’ve Been Calling It Cloud Native

By Alan Shimel Verified |Cloud Native Now

Enterprise AI feels like a clean break from everything before it. Look closely at what makes it run in production, and you find fifteen years of cloud native engineering that solved these problems before AI’s name was attached to them. The story we tell about enterprise AI almost always begins with the model.

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How Cloud Native Became the AI Native Stack

By Alan Shimel Verified |Cloud Native Now

For the last fifteen years, the cloud native community has been busy doing what it does best: solving hard operational problems, usually before the rest of the industry fully understands why those problems matter. Containers, Kubernetes, GitOps, observability, service mesh, platform engineering — these were not just new tools in the stack. They were the building blocks of a new operating model for modern software.

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What Is Platform Engineering?

By Alan Shimel Verified |Platform Engineering

Most technical disciplines settle into a stable definition within a decade of acquiring a name. Networking is networking. A database administrator from 2008 would recognize most of the work a database administrator does today. Platform engineering refuses to behave this way.

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Satya Calls For AI 2.0, Open Source Makes it Possible

By Alan Shimel Verified |Techstrong.ai Verified

Few labels make technology veterans roll their eyes faster than “2.0.” It has been slapped onto every supposed reinvention from the web to enterprise software, often as little more than conference-stage seasoning. But sometimes the label fits. Not because the technology changes overnight, but because the economics do. The first act proves something is possible. The second makes it usable, affordable and hard to ignore. Artificial intelligence may be reaching that point now. That may sound early.

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Inside the Onyx C2 Ransomware Business Model

By Alan Shimel Verified |Security Boulevard Verified

Ransomware has crossed the line from organized criminal craft into a packaged retail product. For $250 a month, an operator with zero technical skill can stand up a working campaign — keylogging, remote access trojans, session cookie theft and attacker support all included. The economics of the model have flipped the old assumptions about who runs these attacks and how often they fire, and defenders are watching the volume curve bend up while the skill bar bends down.

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AI Is Accelerating How Fast We Build the Wrong Thing

By Alan Shimel Verified |DevOps.com

AI coding assistants have made it trivially easy to ship software faster — and that is precisely the problem. Human developers used to absorb the gaps in a vague spec by asking questions, reading between the lines and quietly steering toward something useful. AI tools do not work that way. They take incomplete requirements at face value and build them literally, which means small ambiguities at the front of the process compound into expensive mistakes at the back.

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PlatformCon 2026: The Platform Is Back

By Alan Shimel Verified |Platform Engineering

AI was not the story at PlatformCon 2026. It was the assumption. The New York live event for PlatformCon 2026 had the energy of a community that has stopped trying to prove itself. There were no existential pitches in the hallways, no panels dedicated to justifying the discipline’s existence, no keynotes beginning with the question of whether platform engineering is real or a passing trend. Nobody was selling the category. The category had already sold itself, and the people in that room knew it.

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Engineering Needs Every Great Mind It Can Find

By Alan Shimel Verified |Techstrong IT

Every June, International Women in Engineering Day lands on the calendar and the tech industry does what it always does — posts some supportive content, shares a few LinkedIn graphics, and moves on. This year feels a little different, and not in the way the organizers probably hoped. DEI programs across corporate America are being cut, reframed, or quietly shelved. The political headwinds are real, and anyone paying attention knows it.

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To Infinity and Beyond… But Don’t Leave Imagination Behind

By Alan Shimel Verified |Techstrong.ai Verified

It seems that for as long as we’ve been a family, Buzz Lightyear and Woody have lived in our house. My sons are now almost twenty-seven and twenty-five years old, and for every one of those years, there has been a Toy Story character somewhere under our roof. At various times, Buzz flew from the ceiling, Woody stood guard on a shelf, Jessie disappeared into a toy box, and Rex found his way into closets and under beds.

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Trying to Control AI is Like Holding Sand

By Alan Shimel Verified |Security Boulevard Verified

For the better part of a week, the debate over Anthropic’s Fable model has been framed as a dispute between one AI company and the U.S. government. That framing no longer fits. The conversation has expanded into something much larger: A public disagreement between policymakers and many of the most respected voices in cybersecurity over the nature of intelligence itself. When people like Katie Moussouris and Chris Wysopal raise concerns, it is worth listening carefully.

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When Intelligence Becomes a Commodity

By Alan Shimel Verified |Techstrong.ai Verified

I’ve been thinking about a Wall Street Journal story this week reporting that OpenAI is considering lowering the price of its AI services as it prepares for increased competition from Anthropic. The article itself is about pricing. What I can’t stop thinking about is business models. For the better part of three years, the conversation around artificial intelligence has been dominated by a single question: Who has the best model?

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You Don’t Own AI If Someone Else Can Turn It Off

By Alan Shimel Verified |Digital CxO

Several months ago, on Shimmy Says and in an earlier column, I argued that digital sovereignty is national sovereignty and digital sovereignty is personal sovereignty. At the time, the discussion focused primarily on data residency, cloud infrastructure and the increasingly complicated question of whose laws govern information stored in a world without obvious borders. Those conversations remain important, but recent events suggest we have been looking at only part of the problem.

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