From Objects to Capabilities: Joe Hoh on Infrastructure Team to Platform Team

What's different about the day in the life of a DevOps Platform pro from an infrastructure pro? In speaking with Joe Hoh of Great American Insurance Company it's all about delivering capabilities instead of objects. The work isn't measured by the number of VMs delivered and tickets fulfilled. It's about adding new capabilities to developers and their business use cases. And that is much more rewarding work.

What helps? Embracing the reality of change and making rework easier with a platform. With so much base capability automated, the platform team gets more return on spending time with developers, helping them be successful. "A lot of what DevOps is is educating each other."

What did Joe bring to his platform role from infrastructure days?

• A firm handle on networking, particularly DNS, HTTP, connections, where firewalls can block applications from a client or server perspective
• Understanding webservers and monitoring

What new things did Joe need to learn?

• BOSH, the underlying lifecycle manager in Tanzu Application Service
• The way containers are secured. Dig into container basics and more on KubeAcademy.
• How modern applications are structured and built. Read up on various patterns on Tanzu Developer Center.
• Python. Check out the Python guides on Tanzu Developer Center.

Want to hear from more folks who made the shift from infrastructure to platforms? 

• Listen to this episode with John Paice of DICK's Sporting Goods
• Listen to this episode with Neville George of Comcast

Share this episode on Soundcloud

Subscribe to the Tanzu Talk podcast (formerly known as "Pivotal Conversations") on iTunes.

Send feedback to podcasts@pivotal.io.

About the Author

Dormain leads Product Marketing and Content Strategy for VMware Tanzu. Before VMware she was Senior Director of Pivotal Platform Ecosystem, including RabbitMQ, and Customer Marketing. Previously, she was Director of Product Marketing for Mobile and Pivotal Data Suite. Prior to Pivotal, she was Director of Platform Marketing at Riverbed Technology. Prior to Riverbed, she spent over 5 years as a technology investment analyst, closely following enterprise infrastructure software companies and industry trends. Dormain holds a B. A. in History from the University of California at Los Angeles.

Follow on Twitter Visit Website More Content by Dormain Drewitz