Pivotal Conversations

We don't have enough people, and the people we have don't have the right skills. That's a gasp oft heard during the machinations of digital transformation. To investigate this sentiment, the Cloud Foundry Foundation recently fielded a survey to probe into both sentiment around developer skills and how organizations are addressing it. The findings were actually optimistic, but there's still work to be done. In this episode, we dig into this survey and what the findings mean for how IT departments need rethink their approach to training and hiring. To do so, we invited Abby Kearns and James Governor. Abby is the Executive Director of the Cloud Foundry Foundation who did the survey. James is one of the founders of the analyst firm RedMonk. See full show notes: http://pivotal.io/podcast

How are analysts reckoning with "cloud native"? Rita Manachi joins us again to talk about industry analysts and what they're up to. We briefly recap what analysts relations (AR) does, and then jump into how analysts are thinking about Pivotal now. There's several new reports out that are good reads for the Pivotal-minded. Having just talked with several analysts over some chafer warmed lunch, we discuss how analyst meetings go and what to get out of them. We also cover recent news, primarily, the slew of announcements out of AWS re:Invent last week. Full show notes: http://pivotal.io/podcast

Home Depot has been using Pivotal Cloud Foundry and developing in the Pivotal way for over a year now. Thus far, they have roughly 150 applications running in Pivotal Cloud Foundry across all parts of their business. While at Gartner's Application Strategies & Solutions Summit, we talk with Tony McCulley about Home Depot's journey putting cloud native thinking and technologies in place. Tony had just given a talk about this experience so we all had the topics fresh in out minds. There are two great talks Tony's given before on this topic: one from 2015 at a MeetUp, and another from SpringOne Platform. Tony's great for talking about what works, what doesn't work, and how to plan out transforming from the "old way" to the "new way" of doing IT. See full show notes: https://content.pivotal.io/podcasts/045-cloud-native-at-home-depot-with-tony-mcculley

We're seeing more adoption of agile in large organizations than ever before. More interestingly, they're really doing it, totally transforming the multiple layers of process to boil down to the the leanest bucket of parts that ensure quality, useful software. While there's a lot - a lot! - of work to be done, there's a slew of useful best practices, stories, and anecdotes emerging. In this episode we discuss this general trend and two of the related topics: scaling agile up and pair programming. We also cover spate of recent news about Cloud Foundry performance, .Net rolling out into various ecosystems, the new leadership at the Cloud Foundry Foundation, and lobster eggs benedict.

Companies that want to get better at software are staffing and organizing themselves in new ways. The traditional "silos" approach clusters teams together into functional groups, whereas modern approaches cluster around product. We cover skills by looking at a recent Cloud Foundry Foundation survey on developer skills and then discuss some sections of Coté's upcoming cloud native journey booklet related to team composition and outsourcing. While news is sparse this week, we point to some "what does the US election mean for tech" news and also cover Microsoft Teams in relation to how "chat ops" has been extended to be SOP in most modern IT shops or, rather, how it should be.

Containers are as big a deal in the Cloud Foundry world as anywhere else; what was once an obscure method of process isolation is a good way to boost developer productivity. In this episode we talk with Pivotal's Onsi Fakhouri and James Bayer about containers and Pivotal Cloud Foundry. After discussing the history of containers, we talk about how containers are supported in Pivotal Cloud Foundry, and then discuss how to think through the use of containers versus buildpacks, or using containers at all. See full show notes here: https://blog.pivotal.io/pivotal-conversations

There's no end of discussion about the Internet of Things now-a-days, but much of it is either about flashing toothbrushes or crazy-making huge numbers with abstract use cases. This week we talk with Pivotal's Saurabh Gupta about the work he's been doing in the IoT space with Pivotal customers. He has a great model illustrating how to think about IoT use cases which we cover in-depth, with several examples. At the end of our discussion, you'll have a good appreciation of IoT is improving the business of "the big, noisy, dirty machines." We also discuss some recent news: clouderati's new jobs, CenturyLink buying Level 3, new MacBooks and Surfaces, AI market-sizing hijinks, and an example of cloud native business thinking in the hotel industry. See full show notes: https://blog.pivotal.io/pivotal-conversations

Distributed systems are hard. Building a microservices architecture that supports evolutionary changes without breaking “contracts” among services? Especially hard. In this podcast, we grabbed Oliver Gierke, Kenny Bastani, and Andrew Clay Shafer to talk about inter-service communication, consumer-driven contract testing, and service versioning. Listen in as we wrestle with tricky concepts, and still end up as friends. See full show notes at https://blog.pivotal.io/pivotal-conversations.

Live to Tape from DellEMCWorld (Ep. 38) by Pivotal Software

When you're moving fast, things will break more often. It's little wonder, then, that with a microservices approach you need to pay close attention to ensuring the safe, yet speedy change to APIs. The idea of "consumer-driven contracts" has been percolating for a long time. The idea is to shift the "power" in the relationship between the provider of APIs and the consumer of those APIs more to the consumers. In this episode, I talk again with Marcin Grzejszczak on this topic and we discuss how the newly GA's Spring Cloud Contract enables all this thinking. See https://blog.pivotal.io/pivotal-conversations for full show notes.

Building a high performance organization requires more than just putting good technologies and practices in place for developing and delivering product, it requires the right culture as well. In large organizations, this often means changing the culture. At the heart of that is people, so it's natural that Human Resources will get involved, hopefully sooner rather than later. To discuss these topics, we bring back Joe Militello for the second time to discuss how Pivotal thinks through HR and the consultative work our team has been doing on these topics. His framing that I really liked relates to his summary of what HR does: improving "the experience of our employees and candidates.” We go over some best practices for transforming how HR operates and give a little peek into how Pivotal manages employee's experience.

Released a few weeks ago, Pivotal Cloud Foundry 1.8 is chock full of new features and improvements. We talk with Jared Ruckle about them, delving into security, databases, and new services. These features deliver on the Pivotal Cloud Foundry goal of speeding up time to market (with faster release cycles) and, yet, still being a general purpose application platform that organizations can use to run all their customer software. We also discuss another recent piece from Jared on opinionated platforms - check out that tree house! In the news, we cover the recent data breach at Yahoo, Windows Server 2016 and Docker support, Azure's ever growing geographic foot-print, and our hopes and dreams for the rumored Twitter acquisition. See full show notes: http://pivotal.io/podcast

Backed up into a corner, developers will start coding. It's little wonder then that as large organizations have been faced with modernizing their approach to software - all that "digital transformation" - developers in years past have been focusing on building their own platforms. Our guest this week, Matt Walburn, worked on one such project. He joins us this week to talk about the lure of the DIY platform and why, now that options like Pivotal Cloud Foundry are available, it's usually a poor use of organization time. Not only do you need to build the full platform with all the features from the development phase to running in production, but you have to maintain it as well. As Matt says, this will run you several millions of dollars in staff salary alone. And then, after all that, you still have to write all those applications you originally set out to make. See full show notes at http://pivotal.io/podcast

No matter how fresh and new your company is, you're going to have some "legacy" applications to work with when you're mounting your cloud native efforts. The nature of those legacy apps and services are varied: mainframes, ESBs, batch job, and plain old J2EE and .Net apps. If you find yourself unable to make changes quickly enough without the fear of it all blowing up in your face, you're probably dealing with legacy. Pivotal's Rohit Kelapure talks with us in this episode about the type of analysis and, then, types patterns he and his team use to "break up the monolith." Before all that we discuss some recent news: HPE selling off its software group, Google buying Apigee, Richard and Abby's recent commentary on the container market, and fresh coiffure advice for listeners. Visit https://blog.pivotal.io/pivotal-conversations/ for show notes and other episodes.

Microservices aim to bring an unprecedented amount of agility to complex, distributed systems: each service can update at will, always getting the latest innovations and functionality into production. That said, this amount of rapidly moving parts brings a whole new set of management and operations needs to the forefront, not to mention simple acts like looking up a service to use. In this episode, we talk about the history of how Netflix solved these problems with their Netflix OSS stack. Some time ago, Spring Cloud sprouted up around this stack, making it easier to manage and consume, and, of course, this means Pivotal Cloud Foundry comes with the resilient microservices framework out of the box. Richard and Coté discuss some of the more important components in Spring Cloud like Eureka, Hystrix, and Spinnaker. We also discuss recent news, like Rackspace going private and figuring out practical applications for AI. See https://blog.pivotal.io/pivotal-conversations/ for full show notes.

Continuing our Circle of Code agenda, we talk with Ronan Dunlop of Pivotal Tracker. Tracker was developed over ten years ago as the in-house project management software used by Pivotal Labs and has since then become a product in its own right used by many teams. We discuss what Tracker's history, what it does, and most importantly the philosophy behind tracker. We also discuss some recent news about the Gartner IaaS Magic Quadrant (see free reprint and Coté's highlights), SQL Server support in the Google Cloud, and the wrap of SpringOne Platform, including just released videos of many of the talks. See https://blog.pivotal.io/pivotal-conversations/ for full show notes.

While at SpringOne Platform 2016 I, Coté talks with Marcin about one of the projects he works on, Spring Sleuth. There's plenty of technical overviews of Sleuth out there, but I wanted to talk with Marcin about the "why" of Sleuth, how he came to use, and get a high-level overview of how it works. Sleuth, based on Zipkin, is a framework for distributed tracing which turns out to be handy for the types of architectures we see in cloud native applications, particularly microservices. Monitoring a single user interaction across a mutli-service, composed application has historically been difficult: you can lose track of what code and service is participating and doing what, ending up in a lot of log salad and correlation hacks after the fact to diagnose problems and monitor for overall performance. Check out Marcin's blog at http://toomuchcoding.com/ and find him in Twitter at @MGrzejszczak. More: Visit http://pivotal.io/podcasts for show notes and other episodes. Feedback: podcast@pivotal.io

While at SpringOne Platform I talked with John Feminella about his talk on platforms and contracts. He uses the legal metaphor of contracts to describe the beneficial trade-offs between things like 12 factor coding and continuous delivery. As the abstract for his talks puts it: Platforms like Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) can be viewed as contracts between applications and the people who build, operate, and deploy them. At the root of these contracts is a core premise: if your application checks off a few boxes, the platform can provide enormous amounts of power and enable capabilities that wouldn't otherwise be possible. Check back from the video recording of the talk and find John in Twitter at @jxxf. Visit http://pivotal.io/podcasts for show notes and other episodes. Feedback: podcast@pivotal.io

This week, while at SpringOne Platform, Richard and I talk with Josh McKenty, head of the partnering engineering team. With a general purpose application stack like Pivotal Cloud Foundry there's a lot of partner applications, services, and consulting that typically gets used beyond what Pivotal provides out of the box. Josh's team does the implementation with partners around these extensions and service integrator partnerships. We discuss how the program works, why it's needed, different modes of operating with partners (from agile to Gnatt-planned out waterfall style), why an ecosystem is needed, and how service integrators fit in. Since Josh has worked on OpenControl we slip in an overview and update of that compliance automation framework. Josh in Twitter: @jmckenty. Visit http://pivotal.io/podcasts for show notes and other episodes.

When you put all of the step needed to create good software up on the board, there's a lot of them. It's a lot more than just writing code, or even writing requirements and stories. Around Pivotal, we think of this full, end-to-end process as the circle of code: Ideas → prioritization / planning → coding → deployment → runtime → monitoring → feedback, and back again. Richard and Coté discuss these steps and how organizations are starting to appreciate "the big picture." They also cover some cloud native news: Amazon buying a browser-based IDE, Cloud9; Google expanding their cloud; and Verizon's purchase of Yahoo! News AWS buys Cloud9, makers of a cloud-based IDE. Also Codenvy and the related Eclipse project. Google add West Coast cloud spot. Yahoo! And Verizon love child. Coté's collection of coverage. Main Topic "Circle of Software," Onsi’s talk where he outlines this concept: Ideas → prioritization / planning → coding → deployment → runtime → monitoring → feedback, and back again What do Coté and Rich