An industrial giant and an entertainment leader are telling a story about software, and as it was so often in this conference, the storyline was the same: how a software team took a limited risk and tried new things that had a dramatic impact. Working inside cultures that had been hardened to say “no”, they tethered themselves to an open source Spring community that gave them the freedom to participate and benefit from the contributions of others. That experience ultimately had an outsize positive impact on their organizations, helping them make their success others’ success.
The analogue to the above is how a multi-cloud platform takes this new velocity beyond vertical hierarchies and layers. It includes, too, the distribution of new agile development practices. The platform and that culture are also moored to a community of support and contribution, where the team’s success is the company and community’s success.
In the mutual interests they have discovered, SpringOne Platform is the story of how a Spring development community catalyzed the enterprise, recharged itself, and found a partner to scale that value through the Cloud Foundry community.
“The less code I write, the more powerful I became,” said one developer. But this developer was referring not to himself, but to the team, company, and community—a positive-sum game. In the end, the common thread of this event has been helping developers build more apps at fierce speeds by enabling the continuous integration and delivery of software. It is to create a scaffolding effect, where more people get curious, get engaged, and create and receive more value. In the closing keynotes, Rob Mee affirmed Pivotal’s commitment to that arc of value, and Adrian Cockcroft added valuable insights on steering organizations to achieving it.
Rob Mee, CEO Pivotal
Rob recounted how over a decade ago, he brought the power of Spring to work with the world’s most disruptive tech titans. Then something happened.
Ruby, Grails and others pushed Java to the bench. And something else happened, as Pivotal and others went deeper into the enterprise: Java had come roaring back, thanks largely to Spring. He underscored and reminded us the energy behind and Pivotal’s role in taking that ahead, and the central role of open source communities:
“As we co-develop and build today, over 60% of those engagements are using Spring.”
- In the enterprise, Spring is the most-in demand framework—they want customers to engage with Pivotal.
- The community’s investment in Spring is unequivocally part of Pivotal’s future, and Pivotal is 100% committed to Spring.
Rob closed by noting that as many more learn to use Pivotal Cloud Foundry through Spring, they will reinforce the utility and value of both to each other.
Simplifying The Future
Adrian Cockcroft, Battery Ventures
Recounting his colorful journey through Netflix, Adrian Cockcroft closed the gathering with a fitting wisdom talk on one person’s path to simplifying products and organizations.
He started with the notion that complicated things are those you cannot do intuitively. He used the three-year old’s quick intuitive grasp of an iPad as the ability to intuitively understand things; while adults like us have the tendency to complicate them again.
Simplifying Work
Adrian cited the “Freedom Responsibility Culture” document at Netflix as an organizational linchpin. CEO Reed Hastings presented a “culture deck” to the management team, and Adrian was part of the team that iterated on it. It aimed to help people anticipate and maintain the Netflix culture. It’s two big ideas were to focus on simple organizations and things they build.
Simplify The Organization
- Create a purpose-driven culture. You don’t need to tell everyone what to do. Provide direction. Having a purpose is a simplifying actions, it allows others to organize around processes. If you impose process you drive people away. Adrian’s team found over and over again that people were producing a fraction of what they could do because process slowed them down.
- Organizing people to Conway’s Law. Netflix had a ‘cellular’ culture with local responsibility that was already set for the microservice architecture it helped create. It had high-trust, high-cohesion within teams, low trust across those boundaries. API’s were the magic gateway: it was a stable interface for loosely coupled teams.
- If you build purpose-driven systems-thinking culture, you create a flexible culture.
- We went from a monolithic architecture to get a monster in production to everyone that was delivering a service through an API, where you were on call if you broke it.
Simplify Things We Build
- Go from project to product teams. Think of those who build products. More developers and fewer people overseeing the deployment. This needs to change.
- If a team owns a piece of the system, they are continuously unlocking it—upleveling it in small incremental changes.
“It’s kind of like developers were dating and getting married and operators were dealing with the divorces… If developers own the whole lifecycle they’d just keep dating.”
- Optimize for time-to-value.
- Optimize for customers you want to have, rather than customers you have now. This creates feedback loops, and the product to stay simple. If you optimize for power users, it just gets more complicated.
- Monolithic apps only look simple from the outside. In an object-based hierarchy, they are massively complicated. Microservices forces a separation that makes it less complicated—it’s a bounded context to learn and manage things.
Adrian offered Simon Wardley’s ideas on the transitory nature of product lifecycles:
In short, stay nimble, adapt organizations and focus on products—not projects!
Spring.io
Catch up on the recaps of all things Spring—tools, trends and releases: http://spring.io/blog
Data Takeaways
The Pivotal Data team has been capturing the data current that runs throughout this new runtime world. Here are the latest dispatches:
- Spring One Platform: Culture vs. Code or Culture as Code
- CQRS, Apache Geode, and You! – Takeaways from SpringOne Platform (part 1)
- Cloud Native Platforms – Moving Beyond Early Adopters
Trade Secrets
Several speakers noted writers that launched thought meteors. We captured for you to dive into:
- Non-Zero, The Logic of Human Destiny, by Robert Wright
- Platform Revolution, by Sangeet Paul Choudary
- Continuous Delivery, by Jez Humble, David Farley
- Effective DevOps, Jennifer Davis & Katherine Daniels
- Release It! by Michael T. Nygard
- Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words, Randall Munroe
- Learning Ratpack by Dan Woods
- Learning Spring Boot by Greg Turnquist
- Building Microservices with ASP.NET Core by Kevin Hofman & Chris Umbel
Twittermonials
Turns out … distributed locks are _really really_ hard. In the words of @david_syer: “Sorry … life is hard” #S1P
— Dustin Schultz (@schultzdustin) August 4, 2016
"Everyone on my team are just great computer scientists." – Doug Sherman of @DWAnimation #s1p #microservices pic.twitter.com/nXIXiGucSr
— Rick Osowski (@rosowski) August 4, 2016
Whoa. The IT load behind a movie from Dreamworks. The heavy lifting drove them to #microservices. #S1P @DWAnimation pic.twitter.com/B0X2xDu5Vr
— Pivotal (@pivotal) August 4, 2016
'Devs should never make SW decisions based on which Infra team respond faster to a ticket' my favorite customer mtg quote #S1P @pivotalcf
— dekt (@dekt) August 4, 2016
This slide from @tushardadlani pretty much sums it up #S1P @pivotalcf pic.twitter.com/iwkOuloaxJ
— Jeff Kelly (@jeffreyfkelly) August 4, 2016
Software is not a bridge or a road. If done well the cost of change is trivial. @spring1platform #S1P pic.twitter.com/1joRNnj37y
— Ian Andrews (@IanAndrewsDC) August 4, 2016
"The future of the @springcentral community is YOU, we need YOU." @rob_winch #S1P #thatsawrap
— Pivotal (@pivotal) August 4, 2016
Phil from The Gap says that receiving app autoscaling email from @pivotalcf makes his boss happy. #s1p pic.twitter.com/ivSV2mPM2Q
— Richard Seroter (@rseroter) August 4, 2016
Platform is culture. Platform is destiny. Platform is advantage. #S1P .@pivotalcf
— Saurabh Gupta (@saurabhguptasg) August 4, 2016
"You want to build an architecture that's constantly evolving. There is no 'version' of #Netflix." — @adrianco at #SpringOne #s1p
— Oliver Gierke (@olivergierke) August 4, 2016
"Imposing process drives away talent" –@adrianco on finding talent by enabling them #S1P #springone
— Neha (@nerdneha) August 4, 2016
“We should be aspiring to build things that can be intuitively understood by a two year old.” @adrianco inspiring the audience at #s1p
— Chuck D'Antonio (@crdant) August 4, 2016
"Continuous improvement is the goal, not CI or CD” – @tushardadlani. Says give your team room to fail & they will do great things #S1P
— Jared Ruckle (@jaredruckle) August 4, 2016
The GAP on how Pivotal #CloudFoundry has changed delivery from weeks to minutes! #Cloudwisdom at #S1P pic.twitter.com/cd6nD1auFF
— Mark D'Cunha (@mdcunha) August 4, 2016
On @pivotalcf at @Gap: ”Before, it could take weeks to get a feature into production; now, it’s five minutes.“ Philip Glebow #springone #s1p
— Bridget Kromhout (@bridgetkromhout) August 4, 2016
Thanks for following along, here are recaps of Day 1, Day 2, and Day 3 in case you missed them.
Finally, a big thanks to the village that helped pull these posts together: Mischa Nachtigal, Stacey Schneider, Richard Seroter, Morgan Holzer, and Jaime Perdomo
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