Introducing Atmosphere: A Newsletter on the Cloud-Native Ecosystem

June 11, 2015 Abby Kearns

 

sfeatured-atmosphereWelcome to the first installment of Atmosphere!

This newsletter is a roundup of what is happening in the cloud and platform space with a Pivotal perspective on key advancements in the world of platforms, containers, IoT, cloud-native application architecture and DevOps.

In this inaugural post, we highlight the recent Cloud Foundry Summit, as well as momentum in the industry. Specifically, we cover how J.P. Morgan Chase, Huawei, and Microsoft are boarding the Cloud Foundry bandwagon. There are a number of investments being made in IoT, so we take briefly view that growing market. Lastly, we take a look at cloud-native application architectures, and the journey that many organizations are undergoing to achieve a digital transformation.

Cloud Foundry Summit Highlights

We kick-off this newsletter on the heels of an exceptional Cloud Foundry Summit.

Leading up to the event, Pivotal podcaster-extraordinaire, Coté, had a chance to interview Sam Ramji, CEO of the Cloud Foundry Foundation. In the podcast Sam does a great job of laying out the vision of Cloud Foundry and the Cloud Foundry Foundation, as well as how Cloud Foundry is poised to fundamentally change technology.

In case you missed Cloud Foundry Summit, one IBMer offered a great recap of how people felt at the event. Stark and Wayne recapped all things BOSH, and how to keep applications running. And, Altoros cleverly highlighted the top 100 quotes from the conference. Recently, we also provided our view with a Cloud Foundry Summit by The Numbers post, that included the number of attendees, sponsors, customer presentations, as well as the top tweets, blogs and media quotes. Pivotal had 20 sessions at Cloud Foundry Summit, including 10 customer and 10 Pivotal-led sessions, each of which are great recaps of how far we have come in the last year. A playlist has also been created for all of the Cloud Foundry Summit 2015 videos, so you can re-live the entire event over and over.

This year also represented the first diversity event at Summit. The event brought together over 125 women to discuss the gender gap in technology. We look forward to continuing the conversation with our community.

Momentum: J.P. Morgan Chase, BNY Mellon, Citigroup, GE, EMC, and Microsoft

The momentum that we saw last year in the market has only increased this year. Recently, we have seen J.P. Morgan Chase join the Cloud Foundry Foundation, with the Wall Street Journal quoting George Sherman, CIO of J.P. Morgan’s Global Technology Infrastructure, as saying, “It’s definitely around speed to market, but it’s also about getting it right faster.” Another recent Wall Street Journal article highlighted a financial services trend of avoiding vendor lock-in—covering why the Bank of New York Mellon joined the Cloud Foundry Foundation last December, and how Citigroup is “actively exploring opportunities” to join as well.

The last month we saw GE announce the launch of an Industrial Dojo for IoT, working with Pivotal and Cloud Foundry. And EMC launched their Project Horizon content management system on Pivotal Cloud Foundry. Finally, Microsoft announced their support for Cloud Foundry on Azure, bringing the multi-cloud conversation front and center.

IoT Platforms: More Big IoT Investments, GE Benchmarks GemFire

IoT is an area that we at Pivotal are paying close attention to. In fact, earlier this year we brought on Benjamin Black to lead our IoT strategy. We believe the promise of IoT is not in the near future, but happening right now as it evolves from hype cycle to the new normal.

The IoT market is starting to see significant investments from companies that want to take advantage of the vast capabilities it can provide. For example, Andreesen-Horowitz recently invested $25 million into IoT wireless sensor system developer, Samsara, in their first round. Berkshire Hathaway and GE Ventures invested $22.5 million in eVolution Networks, a provider of energy-saving software for mobile base stations. And finally, Google invested $15 million in an AgTech start-up to help farmers gather data from arrays of sensors and analytics, and is also building an OS for IoT dubbed “Brillo.”

GE is at the forefront of the industrial internet, and recently spoke at Cloud Foundry Summit about how important industrial IoT is, and how they are blazing the path for others. Pivotal has been working with GE on IoT platforms since our birth. Recently, a group of GE engineers put Pivotal GemFire through three rounds of benchmark testing against other in-memory data grids. The team configured GemFire with 5 terabytes of memory to continuously ingest 100,000 time series data points per second for five straight days—that’s 43.2 billion data points in 5 days. We rocked it.

Pivotal is focused on solving IoT concerns for specific verticals and Connected Vehicle is at the forefront. We’re excited about initiatives such as OpenXC that will expose vehicle data through standard API’s and accelerate application innovation.

Cloud-Native Application Architectures

As demonstrated by the standing room only Cloud Foundry Summit talk “Deploying Microservices Architectures with Cloud Foundry,” there is a lot of interest in microservices. This as a conversation that comes up a lot with customers that are interested in the agility that smaller, purpose-built applications can bring. In a recent book by Matt Stine, Migration to Cloud-Native Application Architectures, he addresses how customers can be successful in the shift to an application architecture that enables a rapid pace of innovation.

Martin Fowler, in a recent blog, discussed a Monolith First approach to microservices architecture. Which debates the merits of starting with a monolithic application architecture, and then moving towards a microservices architecture when the appropriate level of complexity was reached.

This article recaps Sam Ramji’s keynote at GlueCon 2015—explaining that microservices success requires four elements: 1) rapid provisioning, 2) basic monitoring, 3) rapid application deployment, and 4) a DevOps culture. Cloud Foundry Foundation’s Chip Childers recently explained the topic further at ApacheCon, and talked at length about modern application architecture. Coté also published a podcast on this very topic with Apiary’s CEO, Jakub Nešetřil.

In other Cloud Foundry related news, the OpenStack Foundation announced a community application catalog at their OpenStack Summit, allowing applications like Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry to be installed with just a few clicks. InformationWeek also gave a rundown of the Linux containers to watch, citing Cloud Foundry as “one of the best integrated open source platforms available for building containerized applications.”

Digital Transformation: DevOps, and Culture Shifts That Disrupt Industries

Companies going through digital transformation powered by cloud and big data platforms are soaking up the spotlight across every industry right now. Recently, we published a list of 20 examples of how big data is transforming 12 industries. This is just the tip of the iceberg though, with stories popping up daily across industries like automotive or oil and gas, and healthcare.

IBM’s Watson is being used to make decisions about cancer care, and their CEO, Ginni Rometty, recently said, “On the future, every decision mankind makes, every decision, is going to be informed by a cognitive system like Watson and, as a result, our lives in this world are going to be better for it.” United Healthcare’s Optum division is using similar predictive platforms in healthcare while innovative start-ups like Kyruss are looking to reinvent healthcare with big data. Digital transformation is having an impact on industries historically reticent to tackle technology shifts in a big way.

Of course, Pivotal is adding to the narrative as we continue to publish stories on how we are helping companies make the journey. Companies like Humana are making significant strides towards becoming a software-driven company.

We will wrap up this month with a recap of Pivotal ‘s Rob Mee who presented at the Global ICT Summit in Tokyo, where he talked about software is disrupting industries globally, and how culture plays a big part in the transformation journey.

Upcoming Events

We love spending time with our customers in the field. Here is a list of the places you can find us over the next month:

Roadshows:

Meetups:

Cloud Foundry Meetups are happening all over the world—London, France, Barcelona, Vienna, Israel, Shanghai, Bangalore, Beijing, Buenos Aires, Malaysia, and many more. Here are a few coming up this month:

Here are just a few more that are located in the US – Palo Alto, NYC, Austin, Boston, and Atlanta.

 

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