Day 3 kicked off with Sam Ramji, who oversees the gestalt that is the open source Cloud Foundry Foundation—where software choice and freedom are safe, and where inclusion, participation, and accountability keep it that way.
Day 3 also leaned more heavily into Spring—all grown-up and with new bounce in its step through the enterprise. We offer the day’s highlights…
Zen And The Art Of Platform
Sam Ramji, CEO, Cloud Foundry Foundation
In under two years the Cloud Foundry Foundation—steward of the releases and processes for Cloud Foundry, booted up by a tremendous gift from Pivotal—has become more than the sum of its parts. To Ramji it was always a positive sum game. He noted how the history of civilization is a series of positive-sum games, played at expanding scales where the self identifies with the other: from family, to tribe, to nation-states. Sam used the single brushstroke Zen symbol of wholeness (Ensō) to illustrate how an OSS community can bring everyone involved closer to a whole, where self=other. The more we contribute and share, the more it works for the self and and others.
Key points
- When the self=company, the power is not how much you can horde and amass, but what you share.
- As you get bigger and more complex it gets difficult to keep parties inside the circle. In open source, open source is a liberating factor.
- Cloud Foundry aligns with Linux and Spring, extending it on a platform into one common whole. Platforms are positive-sum games, where solutions, services, and products stand up on them. Platforms also produce network effects, and when you combine them with a positive-sum game you create breakouts (like Uber; and conversely, the more folks that are included, the greater the network effect).
- Cloud Foundry exists to bring operators and developers into the future: “The only the only thing better than a great line of code is a great line of code that you don’t have to write.”
Cloud Foundry gives the freedom of every datacenter and cloud in the world to move applications around. In one year:
- 2,300+ patches, 2,100 contributors, 130+ core contributors, 25+ releases, 63 member companies from more than 105 cities.
- It’s about velocity. CF sees a release every two weeks.
- A platform is ubiquitous and flexible, and only vibrant if it is inclusive and allows a diversity ideas inside. It respects all thoughts and ideas, but is ultimately pragmatic: prototypes beat theories.
Big Numbers From Bloomberg
Justin Erenkrantz, Head of Compute Architecture, Bloomberg LP
Justin calls Bloomberg a ‘firehose of information’ and he’s not kidding: Since 2009 growth in that data that Bloomberg reconstitutes as information at one point saw 100 billion market messages put out in single day, with 500 stories a second being published.
Justin’s team is indispensable to making that happen. They refine and improve that flow for financial types, through 100 million lines of javascript (and lots of ruby, C++, python, Fortran and more), scale 4,000 production deployments per day (or 1 per engineer).
Bloomberg, too, is a story of the positive-sum game to achieve velocity, and to make it meaningful for all contributors, ensuring 100 milliseconds availability, and 1.5 million saved searches.
Justin boiled it down to culture, tools, and a platform—and self services.
“If we have to ask for permission to do things, we have failed.”
Key points
- Promote a culture of open source contribution, to understand the ecosystem and to contribute smartly with opinionated code.
- Promote a culture of internal contribution to fuel productivity—contribute markdown file in each repository; pull requests come from anyone
- Need a Platform: Bloomberg started with OpenStack and now Cloud Foundry—a self-service platform where you don’t need permission and a strong community-led platform
We’re kind of busy here…
Results Should Be More Fun
Andy Zitney, SVP Infrastructure Services, McKesson
Andy Zitney likes to give business managers a clear message: You need to change. There is no going back. His aim though is to thaw the middle of organizations, where developers and operators are frozen in waterfall mindsets and process. Zitney wants business to set their developers free—to remove the Yak (computing’s Sisyphean metaphor) and all the time spent shaving it.
Zitney knows about the enterprise culture of protection. He kick-started transformation for his previous company, and if that wasn’t enough, he’s bringing that to the 182-year old McKesson—a Fortune 5, $189b/year company from which 1 of every 3 prescriptions are shipped and filled.
Noting how software has been eating the world for some time now, he spoke of legacy mindsets and architectures.
Zitney’s blueprint for putting down the shears:
- Get out of shaving the yak or you’ll get beat doing undifferentiated services. Set the developer free from shaving the Yak, or doing operations-level configurations, so they can write beautiful, revenue-generating code for the business.
- SpringBoot, Spring Cloud—You don’t have to deal with all that kernel, just to get ready to write business logic and separate business logic from system services.
- Run it on PCF, so day 1 you’re building code that will drive the business and market.
- It is about people: Drive creativity, productivity, and bring the energy back.
All of this echoed the sentiments of Sam Ramji and Justin Erenkrantz, where self-service is not just noble but a pragmatic (and organization-saving) goal.
The excitement of the developers creates a snowball effect where you churn out good code and bring revenue into the company. As Andy stated, “Start writing the microservices on the platform. Silicon Valley—and everybody—is coming.”
Fireside Chats
Highlights as Pivotal SVP of Product, James Watters who talked to Google, Comcast and Accenture, and Microsoft and Manulife (edited and paraphrased).
James noted that as we expand and apply ideas, Pivotal will need partners and engineering partnerships to expand the cloud across the world, and transform them into modern agile microservices.
Great comment from @wattersjames at #s1p – how risk management has changed – the real high risk is not being able to deliver code fast.
— Charles Humble (@charleshumble) August 3, 2016
Google Cloud Platform And Pivotal Cloud Foundry, Together
Jay Marshall, Principal Strategic Adviser (Google) and PCF
While quiet—but always looming—Google has been doing cloud work around compute, network, and storage for the past 15 years, with a lot of large enterprises and partners looking to expand on Google’s cloud. Google is now working with Pivotal Cloud Foundry on top of Google Cloud. Jay noted that a collaboration with Pivotal that started with one engineer in past year, now has a dedicated Google team on this.
- Full support for Pivotal Cloud Foundry running on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). It lets PCF developers deploy their applications to the same worldwide infrastructure that serves billions hours of YouTube video per month, does trillions of web page searches—in milliseconds—and provides storage for over a billion Gmail users.
- Creates a continuous delivery platform at great scale: From PCF Brokers for GCP’s data and machine learning services. Developers will access Google cloud services—in storage, data and machine learning—natively within PCF.
Accenture And Comcast And The Practical Shift From Legacy To The New
Christopher Tretina, Director, Common Infrastructure Platforms, Comcast
- Our goals are to solve the same things, time-to-market, resiliency (very important) and migrating key platforms to PCF to improve performance, create elastic scalability. PCF to help there.
- On hard work and results: Biggest learning is on cultural advancement. Going to cloud alone is not doable; it’s about the culture. Two peers had an issue on a platform issue, a long week. But with DevOps practices and team, we fixed and deployed in an afternoon at peak business hours, with no issues. That is the value of the platform.”
- On Agile: “It’s one thing to do agile with two-pizza box teams, and another to do it at scale… the playbook from Accenture has helped guide us here.”
Nigel Barnes, Chief Architect, Accenture
Nigel noted the hard work it takes in assessing and migrating with care in converting a monolith, to independent architectures and microservices.
- Not every component is Cloud Native ready. Next is migration—practical approach to agile, and to provide continuous delivery, at scale.
- Help others understand what are the services that are unique to that component and how to create a loose coupling that does not drag the rest of the system down when you build a new one.
- “We aim to keep the new and old world together… really making sure that we understand the correct services upfront, and pull that component independent of the state.”
When Microsoft Came To Java
Corey Sanders, Partner Director of Product, Azure Compute at Microsoft, Jesse Bean, VP Head of Global Innovation, Manulife and Sebastian Blandizzi SVP & CIO, Manulife.
Choice and freedom have perhaps taken their most radical turn, with Microsoft at a java conference talking about… Java deployments! Azure has a new partnership with Pivotal.
Top takeaways:
- Corey Sanders explained that with Azure you have on-premise and hybrid story, with Azure stack and the public cloud, and that gives customers a lot of choice.
- The really powerful part of PCF is choice: bringing an awesome Java story on Azure, giving customers choice for .NET and Java.
- For Manulife, both Jesse and Sebastian noted that as a Microsoft shop through-and-through, deploying PCF on Azure has opened them up to new possibilities. Both also noted the huge role Pivotal Labs played in bringing the whole approach that would make it possible to create a culture that embraces a new code cycle. That culture was essential.
@sebblandizzi throws down the gauntlet on the #S1P main stage "@Azure , we need you everywhere!" @CoreySandersWA
— Cornelia Davis (@cdavisafc) August 3, 2016
Notables And Numbers
- Home Depot on PCF, by the numbers: 3000 Apps, 4000 App Instances, 2 billion log messages a month, 14000 cf pushes
- In the past 9 months, Spring has generated 1,080,533 projects
- Cloud Foundry: 2,300+ patches, 2,100 contributors, 130+ core contributors, 25+ releases, 63 member companies from more than 105 cities
— Charles Humble (@charleshumble) August 3, 2016
Data-Minded
We’ve had forward-looking sessions where data and analytics are engaging with runtime platforms. Here are are some posts and thoughts from our data colleagues on the ground:
- My Understanding of Database Provisioning and Deployment with Pivotal Cloud Foundry by Cesar Rojas
- Reflections from a “Data” Guy on Day 1 at SpringOne Platform 2016
- Schema registries and microservices – Takeaways from SpringOne Platform (part 2)
Thoughts in 140 Characters
Shhh. Dont tell anyone but when web companies grow they turn into Java shops @horse_monkchips #SpringOne. @redmonk pic.twitter.com/Wtj9BfL8Es
— Barton George (@barton808) August 3, 2016
Awesome talk by Thomas and Ashish @MerrillCorp – @pivotal and @Azure really are better together! #sp1 pic.twitter.com/z4jf3KYB7K
— Matt Nelson (@Williplettfan) August 2, 2016
i've never been to a major vendor conference that had anything like this level of customer commitment to developer experience. #sp1 @pivotal
— Band Gif (@monkchips) August 3, 2016
If you want to learn @pivotal CI tool Concourse this tutorial is awesome. https://t.co/0Bw5ikjTAQ Matt Curry#sp1
— Charles Humble (@charleshumble) August 3, 2016
“We’ve seen enormous benefits switching to TDD. A little more time upfront means major time savings later.” -Michael Claassen, Manulife #S1P
— Jared Ruckle (@jaredruckle) August 3, 2016
"How do we do Java on Azure? And Pivotal was the answer." @Manulife at #SP1 pic.twitter.com/CLaNLl8SvW
— Pivotal (@pivotal) August 3, 2016
"in my distributed system, my ___ will always work": you don’t think it, but do you act that way? @brianwdunlap building for failure at #S1P
— Dormain Drewitz (@DormainDrewitz) August 4, 2016
In the last 9 months, https://t.co/xJZy2D0Wj7 has generated 1,080,533 projects. Awesome community! @springboot #S1P
— Stéphane Nicoll (@snicoll) August 3, 2016
Data that developers at @Bloomberg and elsewhere need to process is growing and growing. #springone #sp1 pic.twitter.com/SbI2S4E2bN
— Jeff Kelly (@jeffreyfkelly) August 3, 2016
here's the #zipkin demo app I showed at #S1P https://t.co/v9kAk8XsSW
— Adrian Cole (@adrianfcole) August 3, 2016
Remember to follow us on Twitter to get updates of all the great talks happening on the last day of the conference!
Recaps from other days
Read the rest of the recaps to see what else went down at SpringOne Platform: Day 1, Day 2, and Day 4.
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