“No organization is changing as fast as the world is changing,” said Chris Fussell, a SpringOne Platform main stage presenter and former Navy SEAL and President of the McChrystal Group. This astute observation was the theme and underlying thesis at the Day 3 SpringOne Main Stage. From the military to legacy enterprises, the main stage presentations centered on how organizations are adapting, growing, and iterating as the world becomes increasingly software-oriented. We heard how the US Air Force is “making ship happen,” why education around AI is so important, why security teams need to align with product teams, and more.
Software For Everyone
“Great software shouldn’t be limited to profits [organizations], it should be available for everyone,” said Rob Mee, CEO of Pivotal. Mee kicked off the main stage by announcing Pivotal ACT, a new program where Pivotal will work with charities and nonprofits to build technology that addresses social and humanitarian problems.
Pivotal CEO Rob Mee
Baseball, Software, and Multi-Cloud
Following Mee, Jon Schneider, Principal Software Engineer at Pivotal, introduced Spinnaker—an open source, multi-cloud continuous delivery platform—by way of analogy to the scrappy 1922 St. Louis Cardinals, a team from a less pretentious era of no names on jerseys, uniform swaps, and casual position switches. In other words, the Cards did what they needed to and adapted to every game. His takeaway? The enterprise is not about one thing, nor are the platforms needed to run it. Developer teams switch shirts all the time—one day it's VMs, the next day to IaaS, and along comes containers and now serverless.
In a multi-cloud world, the same job always needs to be done, even if the cloud platform changes. Schneider walked through Spinnaker's unique take and big embrace of multi-cloud and through CI and CD, with a continuous delivery solution to integrate pipelines and bring more tools than a CI/CD platform to help developers deliver them.
What Makes Teams Great
President of the McChrystal Group Chris Fussell
In Fussell’s presentation, he explained why 15 to 20 years ago a hierarchical structure within teams was the norm, and necessary due to the instability and unpredictability of networked teams—they couldn't scale.
Today, however, developers have unlocked limitless scale for networked teams. Fussell emphasized that it was only organizations that adhere to a network structure where there is a lack of silo-ing and where trust, common purpose, shared consciousness, and empowered execution are the central tenets will win in the information age.
Making Ship Happen
Captain Bryon Kroger and Director Cyberspace Innovation Lauren Knausenberger of the US Air Force.
The Department of Defense has been on the cutting edge of technology since its inception, with a spend of nearly seven billion dollars on R&D, the largest in the world. Out of the DoD came revolutionary inventions such as GPS and the ability to refuel planes mid-flight. But, as a complex organization in a world that is increasingly software-based, simple technologies such as email, migrating to the cloud, and Microsoft Word were found to be a bit harder.
The Air Force’s Lauren Knausenberger, Director Cyberspace Innovation, and Captain Bryon Kroger explained how, in collaboration with Pivotal Labs, the United States Air Force is mitigating this. Kessel Run, a new project by the USAF, which through processes like pair programming and agile development are allowing the USAF to operate like a startup. "We found that we can do agile, in a classified environment, and with partners that represent the best of Silicon Valley," said Knausenberger.
Since the beginning of this partnership, the USAF has been achieving their mission of continuously delivering valuable software that their airmen love. And they have the results to show it. Where the benchmark for deployments was once up to 10 years, the USAF now deploys 303 times per week—a gigantic, important leap for the organization. Capt. Kroger maybe summed it up best: “We make ship happen.”
The Java Party
Bruno Borges, Azure Cloud Developer Advocate at Microsoft, started his main stage presentation by taking us back to 1995 and giving a history of Java. He touched on Johnny Mnemonic, Azure service integration with Spring Boot, Minecraft, and his journey to Microsoft (which would definitely come as a surprise to 2008 Bruno). Watch his presentation above to experience this fun history lesson.
Customer Panel on Security
Afterward, Justin Smith, Chief Security Officer for Product at Pivotal interviewed industry leaders from Merrill Corp., West Corporation, MasterCard, and Express Scripts to talk about the changes that are happening in enterprise security and how each of these organizations are adapting to the change.
Reimagining Work in the Age of AI
Accenture Chief Technology and Innovation Officer Paul Daugherty.
Chief Technology and Innovation Officer of Accenture Paul Daugherty then spoke on the human and machine connection. He stated that while AI isn’t coming for your job, investment in lifelong learning is still the responsibility of every organization—especially as AI quickly becomes the technology that drives our world.
All Things Spring
If you need a review of all the product announcements and why it’s a great time to be a Spring developer, read this post by Diogenes Rettori.
Want another hot-take? Here's a great recap on muti-cloud and data replication by Jagdish Mirani.
Other Highlights:
Other big announcement of the day at @s1p: #RSocket built by @facebook, @netifi_inc and @Pivotal. Reactive messaging with back pressure propagated to the clients over the network is a major game changer! https://t.co/kXGLHz6AVc pic.twitter.com/9rR2BbuiC7
— Sébastien Deleuze (@sdeleuze) September 26, 2018
Lance Rochelle of @WellsFargo talking about Digital transformation of highly regulated bank in a highly regulated industry... from custom buildpacks to weekly repaving of 100s of containers and VMs with @pivotalcf at #SpringOne #DigitalTransformation pic.twitter.com/b4AFPgUcYO
— Yatin Khadilkar (@tatyaRao) September 26, 2018
“The most successful transformation projects are the ones where the team views the vendors as partners and not suppliers” - @DaveBartoletti with @Boeing digital transformation leaders at @pivotal #SpringOne #S1P @forrester pic.twitter.com/GgyoDAurjt
— Amanda Cohen (@forrAmanda) September 26, 2018
“Microservices are less about lines of code and more about a deployment strategy... bounded context should determine your single-deployable unit!” @VaughnVernon to a jam-packed room at #SpringOne
— Denise Yu (@deniseyu21) September 26, 2018
Less than 18 months after moving to #PivotalCloudFoundry, these are the metrics @Yahoo_JAPAN_PR has experienced. Wow. + another full slide. #SpringOne #s1p #pivotal #agile pic.twitter.com/kYBoqkVaFw
— Courtney McShane (@CourtneyMcShane) September 26, 2018
Tiffany Larsen schooling the class on TDD and styles of learning @s1p
— Michael McNichol (@codingtogether) September 26, 2018
Are you an auditory, visual, kinesthetic learner....is your pair?
Great job showing how to be empathetic through countless hours of your own personal experience!#SpringOne #womenintech #crushsoftware pic.twitter.com/PBZBdulr9u
Why go to cloud? Clear explanation by #fidelity at @s1p pic.twitter.com/5lnGjaL6n4
— Therese S (@midatlantictez) September 26, 2018
“It’s about the steps in the evolution, not just the end state.” Great insight from @ahunawar speaking with @_koleno about Citi’s transformational journey #SpringOne pic.twitter.com/qET3GHV0YI
— John Sullivan (@John__Sullivan_) September 26, 2018
Tomorrow is the last day of SpringOne, so don’t forget to tune in for the main stage presentations at 9am EDT. It’s going to be a grand finale!
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