Last week I had a chance to stop by the Nasdaq Entrepreneurial Center in San Francisco to witness the first Pivotal Cloud Foundry Industry Day. The event is the brainchild of Pivotal’s Josh McKenty, who started the year off with a new mandate to expand the number of “tiles” available on Cloud Foundry. For the not-yet-initiated, tiles are on-demand services in Cloud Foundry parlance. They allow developers to click the tile and that service is automatically deployed and available. These services are fully functional, portable components used to build out applications. Examples of tiles range from focused services like monitoring or behind the scenes services like authentication.
Late last year, we opened up tile creation to partners, and since then six partners have stepped up and contributed. But Josh wants more. A lot more.
“This is the part where Cloud Foundry becomes really exciting. I want a huge library of ready-to-roll tiles that developers can use to quickly string together the scaffolding of their applications, freeing them up to focus on real innovation. I’m really pleased that every partner I asked showed up this week. It means that there will be somewhere north of 21 new tiles that will be entering private beta in the next few weeks. While that quadruples the number of partner tiles now, it’s especially interesting because of the actual services it will create.”
Pivotal Cloud Foundry Industry Day
While I can’t share the description of the actual services, I can share the names of some of the companies involved—and any developer will understand why Josh is so excited:
- Apigee
- CA Technologies
- Crunchy Data Solutions
- Deep Information Sciences
- Dynatrace
- ECS Team
- EnterpriseDB
- Fastly
- ForgeRock
- Gemalto/SafeNet
- Iron.io
- Mulesoft
- Nurego
- ScaleArc
- Signal Sciences
- Tridium
Partners Are Excited Too
Ivan Dwyer, Iron.io at the Pivotal Cloud Foundry Industry Day
While the event was free, many of the partners came from all over the US to San Francisco for this first event. Set as a 2 day workshop, there was a component of training and there was actual pairing with Pivotal engineers to help jump-start development. It was also the place where Josh and team unveiled a new tool, the PCF tile-generator, to help accelerate partners delivering their services via Pivotal Cloud Foundry.
All of these partners had previous intentions or efforts to create tiles, and all of them were very excited by the tangible progress they made at the event.
“It’s been a great getting the chance to be hands-on with the Pivotal experts. I’ve been using Pivotal docs for the past few weeks in anticipation, but this event really made a difference. I’ve achieved more progress in the past day than all the previous weeks combined.” —David Ferriera, ForgeRock
“I learned more yesterday than I ever thought possible.” —Ivan Dwyer, Iron.io
Stay Tuned
Josh made it clear that this was just the start.
“The turnout we have had, and progress we have made with each partner is great commercial validation of this program. I am already planning another Industry Day event on the east coast in Q2, so interested partners should let us know if they would like to join now. We may have to do a third.”
Josh also predicts that most of the tiles will be available for private beta in the next 6 weeks. If any of these company names appeal to your Cloud Foundry efforts, we encourage you to contact your Pivotal platform architect to get into the closed beta program.
Editor’s Note: New Industry Day announced for June 8th & 9th in downtown Manhattan. See website for more information and registration.
About the Author
