Pivotal Conversations

Cloud Foundry for operations staff can seem a bit of a black box. Lucky for you, Duncan Winn's new book, Cloud Foundry: The Definitive Guide is freshly out, making that box much more clear. We talk with Duncan about his new book, giving an overview of the book, who it's for, and delving into some of the contents like BOSH. As always, we also discuss some recent infrastructure software news like new Google Cloud regions, Microsoft's new cloud sales force, and an early preview of SpringOne Platform. See show notes: http://pivotal.io/podcast

Operating IT in a cloud-native mindset requires changes up and down the stack, especially in operations. The degree of automation in the stack changes the need for much of the manual work and process-driven checks and balances in IT ops as we know it. In this episode, we talk with Pivotal's Tony Hansmann on what those changes are, how the technology pushes these changes, and some of the barriers. See full show notes: http://pivotal.io/podcast

In this episode we talk with Todd Persen on the topic of monitoring cloud-native applications with Pivotal Cloud Foundry Metric. We discuss the changing nature of monitoring in cloud-native platforms, how developers can now turn black-boxes into white-boxes, why time-series dominates the thought-technology in this space now, and the benefits of open source taking over most innovation in systems management. Richard is out this week, so Andrew Shafer returns to fill in as co-host. Full show notes: http://pivotal.io/podcast

Previewing his CF Summit talk, Gary White explains what blockchain is and how it's being integrated into Cloud Foundry as a service. We start talking about how blockchain works and what kinds of capabilities it provides, beyond just bitcoin. We use the example of a shoe supply-chain to go over an example of using a blockchain verified ledger. Gary then goes over some examples of blockchain could be used in Cloud Foundry and how folks he's working with are integrated it into the platform for easy, reliable use by product teams. If you're interested in attending CF Summit (June 13th to 15th in Santa Clara, CA) to see Gary's talk - and many, many others! - use the code cfsv17cote when you register to get 20% off. Full show notes: http://pivotal.io/podcast

There's a whole slurry of myths about Cloud Foundry. With the platform updating so quickly, many of the issues behind these myths have long been addressed, and many were just false from the get-go. Coté and Richard talk about a recent post dismissing common myths. We also discuss recent news from the infrastructure software world and go over a bunch of upcoming events that Pivotal will be at. See full show notes: http://pivotal.io/podcast

Networking and storage are two of the most difficult and complex parts of a cloud-native platform. In this episode we talk with Usha Ramachandran who product managers containing networking and volume services in Cloud Foundry. We discuss the networking problems being solved with c2c and why networking problems is so difficult. While not as extensive, we have a brief conversation around storage. Also, as ever, we discuss some recent news from DockerCon, Google voice services, and the recent Spring Cloud Data Flow release. Full show notes: http://pivotal.io/podcast

In preparation for his DevOpsDays Atlanta talk, Josh and Coté (well, mostly Coté) talk about the relationship between microservices and DevOps. They use the CAMS framing to go over how microservices could provide the architectural requirements to make DevOps possible. Full show notes: http://pivotal.io/podcast

The Google SRE book is a great collection of Google's practices, approaches, and management priorities that form the basis of how Google operates and builds their overall platform. Google Site Reliability Engineers are a combination of system administrator and programmer who spend about half of their time on traditional operations "toil" and the other half actually coding updates and net-net services and platforms used by the product teams at Google. Andrew Shafer and Coté discuss a general overview of the book and then highlight some of the more interesting and generally applicable topics. Full show notes: http://pivotal.io/podcast

A new release of Pivotal Cloud Foundry was announced today, version 1.10. We bring back Jared Ruckle to discuss the highlights of the release, namely: further .Net and Windows support, monitoring and tracing improvements, several security and networking additions, and several other improvements to the platform. As usual, we also discuss some recent infrastructure and cloud news from the likes of VMware, Rackspace, and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Full show notes: http://pivotal.io/podcast

What does it really mean to "run like Google"? Is that even a good idea? Andrew Shafer comes back to the podcast to talk with Coté about how the Google SRE book and the newly announced Google CRE program start addressing those questions. We discuss some of the general princiapls, and "small" ones too that are in those bodies of work and how they represent an interesting evolution of it IT management is done. Many of the concepts that the DevOps and cloud-native community talks about pop in Google's approach to operations and software delivery, providing a good, hyper-scale case study of how to do IT management and software development for distrbuted applications. We also discuss Pivotal's involvement in the Google CRE program. See full show notes at http://pivotal.io/podcast

This week we talk with about how organizations are increasingly looking to improve how they use data and workflows around data to innovate in their business. As with discuss with our guest, Sina Sojoodi, More than the usual ideas about "big data" and "machine learning," we talk about the practical uses of data workflows like insurance claims handling and retail optimization. In many large, successful organizations the stacks to support all this processing are aging and not providing the agility businesses want. Of course, as you can guess, we have some suggestions for how to fix those problems, and also how to start thinking about data workflows differently. We also cover some recent news, mostly around Google Cloud Next and Pivotal's recent momentum announcement. See full show notes at http://pivotal.io/podcast

In this episode, Richard and Coté talk with Dieu Cao, the Elastic Runtime PMC, about how work on the open source Cloud Foundry code base works, prioritizing features, and some of the projects she works on like isolation segments. While we have her, we also talk about the naming schemes of Cloud Foundry components and the evolution of QA from way back in Dieu's early days as a tester. Our short news segment goes over Microsoft buying Deis and some cloud spending indicators around public cloud capital expenditures and bank's need to rewrite piles of COBOL. Full show notes: http://pivotal.io/podcast

There's a handful of cloud news to go over - AWS S3 going down, Google's new database, Spanner, and others. We then discuss some ideas for how enterprise architects can help out in a cloud-native organization. Then, we discuss Coté's new project, tactical advice for organizations who are finding it difficult to do all the right things that DevOps and cloud-native think prescriptions. See the work in progress at http://cote.io/cloud3. See full show notes at http://pivotal.io/podcast.

We talk about the traditional and new relationship between data and application development, and, now, DevOps. The world of databases, data warehouses, and other DBAs is not starting to collide with DevOps. In this episode, we talk with Dormain Drewitz, Stephen O’Grady, and Kenny Bastani about the evolving role of data in DevOps-think. See full show notes: http://pivotal.io/podcasts

We've got all your answers to "what exactly is 'cloud-native'?" in this episode with special guests Pivotal's Kenny Bastani and RedMonk's James Governor. Kenny gives us a good overview of what cloud-native is, as Coté summarizes it: handling the configuration and automation for your applications along with all the supporting frameworks and platforms to do that. We then discuss the process ("culture") angle, the origin of Spring Boot, the concept of "lock-in," and if public cloud is needed or not. Bonus: serverless talk! Full show notes and more at: http://pivotal.io/podcast

Improving how you do software requires changing how every layer your organization's functions day-to-day, from executive leadership, to middle-management, and staff. Often, middle-management is resistant to change and acts as a "frozen middle," slowing and sabotaging leadership and staff's desires to change. Along with Pivotal's Dormain Drewitz, we're joined by RedMonk's Rachel Stephens and Stephen O'Grady to discuss this frozen middle problem and tactics to thaw it. See full shows and more at http://pivotal.io/podcasts

Once you have your shiny new Pivotal Cloud Foundry instance installed, it's time to start selecting new applications to build and existing applications to migrate. Many of this second bucket will be "legacy" applications that aren't immediately compatible with the cloud native approach. Dino Cicciarelli and his team work with Pivotal customers to navigate through this process. We talk about the common process, roadblocks, and mental shifts people go through to be successful. One of the chief thought-technologies deployed is to start working on real, actual applications rather than inflicting a long process of analysis paralysis on yourself. We also cover a sampling of recent news: Visual Studio and Cloud Foundry, patent troll protection in Azure, and Snap's whopping spend on public cloud. See full show notes at http://pivotal.io/podcasts

What's the best way to categorize and prioritize your IT projects? Splitting them up between systems of record (ERP) and systems of engagement (user-facing apps) is a popular mode of thinking, highly related to bi-modal IT. In this episode, guest Ian Andrews explains why this framing is a bad idea and offers a value-driven way of thinking about it instead, along with plenty of commentary from Coté and Richard. See full show notes at: http://cote.io/conversations49

How do containers fit into your cloud native planning? That's a the question we start with this week, with (returning guest) John Feminella. We quickly arrive at a conversation on the larger question which is how to build a cloud platform and the allure of building it yourself. Also, we cover recent news in the infrastructure software space. Show notes: https://content.pivotal.io/podcasts/avoid-the-ninja-anti-pattern-planning-out-your-cloud-platform-project

One of your favorite technologies is on the death wagon, again. Gartner recently recommended avoiding JEE for new, cloud native application development. This predictably kicked up all sorts of push-back from the JEE stalwarts. In this episode we discuss the report, the responses, and all the context to figure out what to make of all this. Spoiler: JEE isn't dead, as ever, it's just a part of the ongoing gumbo that is a Java application. See full show notes at http://cote.io/conversations47