Pivotal Conversations

When Federal people ask to secure a DevOps app creation and delivery process, what do they mean? Chris Willis joins Coté in this episode to answer that question with a #vmwaretanzu customer example: the Tanzu Build Service, buildpacks, Tanzu Application Service (Pivotal Cloud Foundry), and other components. He covers FIPS encryption requirements, STIGs, working with the authorizing official, and the overall practices and culture-think for securing build pipelines.

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? Read the full show notes at: https://tanzu.vmware.com/content/podcasts/from-objects-to-capabilities-joe-hoh-on-infrastructure-team-to-platform-team

In this episode, Coté is joined by Rick Clark and Sophie Seiwald to discuss management challenges of remote working. You know the drill: everyone has been working from home since the spring, taking away all the advantages and habits of working face-to-face. What’s new in this conversation is some advice for doing strategy communication, something that’s especially important when you’re relying on autonomous developer teams. We also discuss keeping people’s spirits up and making casual conversations with the boss more like running into each other in the hallway instead of an ominous “we need to talk” meeting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJsnVT_LqTM&list=PLAdzTan_eSPRNuA52_34wh5VTBC-0Rz7U&index=8&t=425s

"Cloud computing is a risk management exercise" In this episode, Dormain talks with Kevin L. Jackson, author of "Click to Transform," about the business case for cloud computing. Kevin argues that the real value is in delivering products better, faster, and to more people. In many cases this involves a jump from physical products to virtual experiences. But the technology isn't the hard part; shifting to an ecosystem approach is much harder. What about cost savings in the cloud? Kevin points out that cloud computing will cost more if it's not accompanied by a change in operating models. Read the full show notes here https://tanzu.vmware.com/content/podcasts/the-business-case-for-cloud-computing-with-kevin-jackson

What platform operations and “platform as a product” means, how it differs from existing ops, and why it’s so. Also, some “therefore, do these things” tactics. Original video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ROovjWTcng

As the saying goes, before you judge or criticize someone (or a team), you should walk a mile in their shoes. In this week's episode, Dormain sits down with Adam Furtado (Twitter: AdamSFurtado), who recently went from leading product development teams at Kessel Run (a division of the United States Air Force), to walking a mile in the platform teams shoes. What has he learned? Have a listen and read the show notes here: https://tanzu.vmware.com/content/podcasts/sympathy-for-the-platform-team-with-adam-furtado-of-kessel-run

Jorge Castro explains how the kubernetes community works, the different parts, how to get involved, and what developers should know about it. Also, see the interview video: https://youtu.be/c1OVw8Pt7dY

We cover interesting finds from the 2020 survey: popular Spring Frameworks in us, how many apps are containerized, and kubernetes plans.

Originally broadcast live: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/748574487?filter=archives&sort=time

In this episode, Rick and I discuss something I've been thinking about recently: kubernetes as an enterprise architecture. As we open up with, kubernetes people like to call it an "API," which always seems weirds to me as a former programmer. But, there's something important that they're getting to: a standard set of interfaces, processes, and data formats that comes together to define a programming and operations model. You know: an enterprise architecture. Also, Rick tell us what his weird Twitter handle means.

Sometimes you feel like a microservice, sometimes you feel like a monolith. In this episode, Coté talks with Nate Schutta about his new book Responsible Microservices: when to use them, when to use a service mesh, the (false?) hope of polyglot programming, monolithic shaming, and giant zucchinis.

This year's SpringOne conference is packed with great talks. In this episode, Rita and Coté tell you their picks. Go to SpringOne.io to register and attend for free!

In part one, Rohit showed how to analyze and sort an application portfolio to find apps that should be modernized first. In part two, we discuss the process of breaking down a monolith. It starts by making sure that everyone agrees on goals and objects.

This week Coté talks with Jen Handler about two of the sessions she’ll be in at the SpringOne conference. They’re both on product management walking through some of the key functions product managers do with a few real world examples. They also discuss Nancy Drew, The Hardy Boys, and the Murder She Wrote/Magnum PI cross-over.

Whatever you want to call it, “legacy” software is a problem. In one of our recent surveys, 76% of executives said they are too invested in legacy applications to change how they do software. It can seem hard, but fixing that blocker is possible. As with all things in software, there is no quick fix, it just takes discipline, work, and time. In this episode, Coté talks with VMware Tanzu’s Rohit Kelapure who’s been working in application modernization for years. He goes over the initial portfolio analysis and thinking that the Pivotal Labs application modernization teams walk customers through. This episode is pretty visual, though audio only works well too. We recorded it in Twitch, which you should subscribe to to start seeing other videos like this. Check out the original recording if you want to see Rohit’s most excellent whiteboarded diagrams. https://www.twitch.tv/videos/694237498?t=00h1m00s

With all the attention on application development, it’s easy to forget about data. Just as agile, DevOps, and cloud native have changed app development, those improvements have changed the world of data as well. In this episode, Bob Glithero tells us all about it. We also discuss haircutting strategies.

“Taking a course on Kubernetes is helpful, but it’s also really helpful to just fail at it." Failing at anything feels uncomfortable. But, as John Paice, a platform reliability engineer at DICK's Sporting Goods points notes, failing at something can be the best way to learn it. In this episode, Dormain talks to John about his journey from a HyperV and vSphere expert to one of the founding members of the DICK's Sporting Goods platform engineering team. Along the way, he's had to learn new scripting languages, get familiar with the differences between cloud providers, and strengthen his Linux know-how. Read the full show notes here: https://tanzu.vmware.com/content/podcasts/making-time-to-fail-in-order-to-learn-john-paice-on-the-journey-from-vsphere-pro-to-devops-pro

Container usage is finally getting big time in the enterprise. Gartner is estimated a 34% growth rate, going up to $1bn by 2024. With new co-host, Rita, we look at what “containers” and “cloud native” has become as a market. Our conversation starters this episode are about checking in on how much executives are actually transforming and discussing trade-offs in decision making. Also: olive oil. Full show notes: http://tanzu.vmware.com/podcast

In this episode, I (Dormain) am joined by Rita Manachi (@ritam) and Derrick Harris (@derrickharris) to dissect three analyst reports: *Forrester's Top 10 Trends That Will Shape Modern Infrastructure and Operations in 2020 *Gartner's Application Modernization Should Be Business-Centric, Continuous, and Multiplatform *Gartner's Best Practices to Enable Continuous Delivery with Containers and DevOps What we observe are that many of these insights and recommendations are related to each other. Process and automation, for example, are like two sides of the same coin. Automation plays a big part in modern I&O and continuous delivery, but what are you automating? A process. At some point—possible to automate at all—processes need to be revisited. Product thinking and the role of containerization in dev ops and modernization are also themes that cut across these reports. See full show notes: https://tanzu.vmware.com/content/podcasts/process-automation-and-continuous-everything-analyst-report-insights

There are more VMware Admins out there than Cloud/Platform Engineers... but with vSphere 7 with Kubernetes, that is likely to start to change. To give a taste for what is to come for vSphere admins out there, Dormain sat down with Neville George who himself made the transition from VMware administrator to Platform Engineer at Comcast. He shares what has stayed the same and what has changed, as well as what he has had to learn along the way. A must-listen for anyone managing VMware infrastructure today. See full show notes here: https://tanzu.vmware.com/content/podcasts/there-is-no-team-without-tea-neville-george-on-the-path-from-vsphere-admin-to-platform-engineer

In this episode, Dormain and Richard take turns with Jared Ruckle and Scott Buchanan to describe a flurry of recent milestones across the Tanzu portfolio, as well as another round of work-from-home tips. Somehow eight-legged raccoons and rhombus-shaped houses also come up. See full show notes here: https://tanzu.vmware.com/content/podcasts/tour-de-tanzu-milestones

So, you're digitally transforming... what does "good" look like? "Getting developers to the point where developers want to change." In this episode, Dormain sits down with Paul Pelafas (@paulpelafas) and Jonathan Regehr (@jonathanregehr) to hear how two different organizations navigated digital transformation journeys. They discuss what "good" looks like, how a healthy software culture is sustained (and destroyed), and the difference between grassroots and executive-led transformations. See full show notes here: https://tanzu.vmware.com/content/podcasts/a-tale-of-two-digital-transformations

In this episode, we talk with Joe Beda about, of course, kubernetes, but also about an organization's platform, the roles that work in the software supply chain in enterprises, types of developers, and other topics like what DevOps "is" now. This discussion will give you a good view of how to model and think about enterprise software development and operations now-a-days, and thinking through the strategy you want to take to transform your organization to be cloud native.

VMware recently released and outlines its Tanzu and major updates to vSphere. To understand how the Tanzu Application Service, Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, vSphere and VCF all fit together, we have Jared Ruckle on. He walks us through the portfolio, new names and products, and we discuss where the Tanzu products are positioned in the cloud native stack. Also, a discussion of Latin. As Coté mentioned, we have Spring Live coming up, a 24 hour online conference chocked full of developer content, plus some cloud native infrastructure and culture talk. You can attend for free. And if you miss it, don't worry, it'll be recorded to watch later. https://connect.tanzu.vmware.com/Spring_Live.html

"The more we can get into our [developers'] hands [...] the faster we've seen adoption, the faster we've seen growth, the more we've seen folks understand the tools because they're diving in and taking ownership" - Miranda LeBlanc, Developer Enablement, Liberty Mutual In this episode, Dormain chats with three people (Miranda LeBlanc, Matt Ruel, and Kevin Ingvalson), all with different roles that impact the developer experience at Liberty Mutual. She finds out what moves the needle, what changes when you think about getting to production as part of the developer experience, and why containers matter... But the meta takeaway is that all three are laser focused on building a delightful (and secure) experience for developers. That alone speaks volumes to how far and wide the "developer centric" mindset can and should go. See full show notes here: https://content.pivotal.io/podcasts/developer-experience-is-a-team-effort-at-liberty-mutual

Hannah works on the platform operations team at VMware. Her teams helps organizations put platform teams in place that run their cloud native platform, like Pivotal Cloud Foundry. As she says, the platform team that delivers an internal platform as a service to the developers. Hannah has spent a lot of time finding and working with those operations people who end up being SRE-like, coding folks. They're running those centralized cloud platforms in large organizations. We discuss some approaches to changing ops people's work, working through resistance to change, helping ops people become systems programmers, a bit of SRE, and putting in place a friendly culture.

In this episode, I talk with Dawn Foster about companies working in open source, the kubernetes community, and a few other topics. I was especially interested to hear about the goals of the kubernetes community, what is it that that community wants? We also discuss: the multitude of roles in open source communities, beyond programming or even documentation; why hardware vendors get interested in open source; and what's kept Dawn working in open source all these years.

We're kicking off the new year with Paul Czarkowski talking all about kubernetes and…soup. First, we discuss Paul's take on drinking broth, especially bone broth.

As a security expert and consultant, Wim Remes (@WimRemes), was fed up with clients using security products that had lacking API security themselves. But he knew that it was a multi-faceted problem that couldn't be addressed in one place. So, he developed a maturity model for security APIs that could serve as a check list for clients evaluating products, procurement teams involved in purchasing security products, and security vendors building the products. As it turns out, it's a pretty good checklist for any developer building APIs. Read the full show notes here: https://content.pivotal.io/podcasts/a-checklist-for-api-security-with-wim-remes

In this episode, we talk with Paula Kennedy who heads up our education and platform groups. She talks about the type of education about cloud native development and operations that our customers find useful and also the platform as a product concept and methods. We also go over some predictions for 2020, not all super-nerdy, but mostly.

In this episode, Coté talks with AirFrance-KLM's Fabien Lebrere about starting AirFrance-KLM's platform group. They discuss how and why the platform team started, how they determined what they needed to do, and how they're working with developers. Fabien also discusses how to prioritize which services to work on and gives advice for those just starting out. For even more, check out Fabien and friend's presentations from Cloud Foundry Summit 2018 and 2019.

With a mandate to adopt cloud to cut costs, the team at Intrado (formerly known as West Corporation) found themselves stuck in early 2018. They had 600-700 application instances on the Pivotal Platform, but that was far from their projected goal. Why were they stuck? Terry Miles, platform owner at Intrado, describes it as the "last mile" issues, including workflows and processes. How did Intrado triple the number of application instances on the platform in the next year? In this episode you'll hear Terry and Jason Nash, Product Engineering Manager at Intrado, describe how they identified blockers and "broke the dam." Read the full show notes at: https://content.pivotal.io/podcasts/solving-the-last-mile-to-the-cloud-at-intrado

In this episode we talk with Pivotal's Demetrious Robinson about his experience becoming a programmer, starting with RPG games, learning in Last Mile while in prison, and then through a General Assembly coding Boot Camp and into Pivotal. We also cover recent Pivotal related news with Pivotal Container Service (PKS), PAS on Kubernetes, and the Pivotal Build Service.

Ahead of their January 23 webinar (https://content.pivotal.io/webinars/jan-23-app-modernization-with-net-core-how-travelers-insurance-is-going-cloud-native-webinar), Dormain sat down with Viraj Naik, Lead Solutions Architect at Travelers Insurance, and Rohit Kelaure (https://twitter.com/RKela), Principal Solutions Architect at Pivotal. We talked about why and how the team at Travelers modernized a workload off of the mainframe on to .NET Core running on Pivotal Platform. Tune in to learn about why the team needed more scaling flexibility, how they overcame performance challenges, and how they used Domain Driven Design (and RabbitMQ!) to arrive at the right number of microservices. See full show notes at: https://content.pivotal.io/podcasts/modernizing-from-mainframe-to-net-core-at-travelers-insurance

In this episode of Pivotal Conversations, T-Mobile's Mohammad Salman and Matt Murphy, along with Altoros' Ryan Meharg share insights into building platform automation, deploying and operating PKS, and building trust between teams. See full show notes here: https://content.pivotal.io/podcasts/platform-automation-and-kubernetes-with-t-mobile-and-altoros

With SpringOne Platform over, Danielle Burrow and Bryan Friedman join us to re-cap the conferences, esp. their favorite sessions and some notable fun findings. The news segment also covers Pivotal Application Service 2.7, Azure Spring, and the Pivotal Vanguard program.

Emily Casey got into tech "by accident," but we're sure glad she did. As an engineer on the Cloud-Native Buildpacks contributor team, Emily has been working to mature how people build container images. Last year, she presented about "Cloud Foundry Buildpacks and the Future of Opinionated Cloud Builds" at SpringOne Platform. Since then, the vision for cloud-native buildpacks has become a reality. Casey and team have been tackling how to make the more modular cloud-native buildpacks more interoperable, among other enhancements. This year at SpringOne Platform, you can hear her talk about "Pack to the Future: Cloud-Native Buildpacks on k8s." If you're a developer building on Kubernetes, you won't want to miss her session. Read full show notes here: https://content.pivotal.io/podcasts/pack-to-the-future-cloud-native-buildpacks-on-k8s-with-emily-casey

SpringOne Platform is in just one week! Richard and Coté talk about the conference, some of their highlights, and some quick food recommendations (burgers!). Perhaps too quick! We also cover some recent news in .Net, serverless, and Azure security. Richard discusses a DevOps Report webinar he did with Dr. Nicole Forsgren, and Coté gives an overview of the new book he's working on (The Business Bottleneck) and preview of a two part webinar on the topic (part one, part two). There's still time to register for SpringOne Platform. It's Oct 7th to 10th in Austin, Texas - Coté's home town! Use the code S1P200_Cote to get $200 off.

"The Product Manager is the one who leads the product." In this SpringOne Platform interview, Coté talks with Alexandra Lung about her and Fanny Verney's talk at SpringOne platform: "Leading Product: The Sparks, the Challenges, and the Victories." They discuss enterprise product management, an example from Orange, and the daily work of product managers. There's still time to register and come see this talk and many, many other awesome ones. SpringOne Platform is Oct 7th to 10th in Austin, Texas. When you register, use the code S1P200_Cote to get $200 off!

While many organizations *want* to use the public cloud, they aren't in a position to do so. With applications written decades ago and an offshoring strategy, companies need to invest in re-engineering applications for the cloud era. This is where Northern Trust found itself a couple years ago. In this podcast, you'll hear how Northern Trust began to modernize core software and build new functionality according to 12 Factor principles. You'll hear how they worked closely with Pivotal and Solstice to adopt agile and a cloud-native application platform, which now supports 600 developers. You'll also hear how they included compliance and risk teams at the financial institution into the automation process. See the full show notes here: https://content.pivotal.io/podcasts/unwinding-folklore-to-modernize-at-northern-trust-with-len-hardy

Mark Heckler talks with Erin Schnabel about her SpringOnePlatform talk, "Metrics for the Win: Using Micrometer to Understand Application Behavior." SpringOne Platform is Oct 7th and 10th in Austin, Texas. Register before August 20th to get a comfy, $200 discount by using discount code S1P200_MHeckler.

Mark Heckler talks with Cora Iberkleid about two of her SpringOnePlatform talks: "Square Pegs, Square Holes: CI/CD That Fits" and "Reactive Architectures with RSocket and Spring Cloud Gateway." SpringOne Platform is Oct 7th and 10th in Austin, Texas. Register before August 20th to get a comfy, $200 discount by using discount code S1P200_MHeckler.

Mark Heckler talks with Zoe Vance about two of her SpringOnePlatform talks: "RabbitMQ and Kafka" and "Building Reliable Services on Kubernetes." SpringOne Platform is Oct 7th and 10th in Austin, Texas. Register before August 20th to get a comfy, $200 discount by using discount code S1P200_MHeckler.

This week, Mark Heckler talks with Madhura Bhave about her talk at SpringOne Platform 2019, "How to Get Productive with Spring Boot." SpringOne Platform is Oct 7th and 10th in Austin, Texas. Register before August 20th to get a comfy discount, or listen to this episode to hear a discount code that'll shave off $200.

This week, Mark Heckler talks with Ria Stein about her talk at SpringOne Platform 2019, "Hello, Spring Security 5.2." SpringOne Platform is Oct 7th and 10th in Austin, Texas. Register before August 20th to get a comfy discount, or listen to this episode to hear a discount code that'll shave off $200.

This week, Mark Heckler talks with Trisha Gee about her talk at SpringOne Platform 2019, "Fully Reactive: Spring, Kotlin, and JavaFX Playing Together." SpringOne Platform is Oct 7th and 10th in Austin, Texas. Register before August 20th to get a comfy discount, or listen to this episode to hear a discount code that'll shave off $200.

Analysts relations, kubernetes for konservative konsumers, and pig brains, with Rita Manachi We've got Rita Manachi back this week to talk about industry analysts in the tech world. As ever, we discuss some relevant news first - lots of VMware! - and then talk with Rita about the in's and out's of working with analysts. Also, we discuss some actual industry trends like kubernetes and how analysts have looked at and advised around it over recent years. And, remember: SpringOne Platform is coming up on Oct 7th to 10th in lovely Austin, Texas. Register with the code S1P200_Cote to get $200 off!

This week, Mark Heckler talks with Olga Maciaszek-Sharmaabout her talk at SpringOne Platform 2019, "How to Live in a Post–Spring Cloud Netflix World." SpringOne Platform is Oct 7th and 10th in Austin, Texas. Register before August 20th to get a comfy discount, or listen to this episode to hear a discount code that'll shave off $200.

Transforming an IT organization from within is notoriously difficult, sometimes impossible. Instead, when going through digital transformation, many organizations decide to create brand new groups that can start from scratch. This sounds, easy, of course, but is full of all sorts of small tactics and moves that add up to big change. In this interview from Pivotal Paris 2019, Coté talks with Accenture's Regis Allegre about Accenture's program to help companies put New Tech Foundries in place. Don't forget to check out our upcoming conference, SpringOne Platform. It's in Austin, Texas, October 7th to 10th. Use the discount code S1P200_Coté for $200 off (make sure to get the accented e in there).

In our last podcast on chaos engineering with Tammy Butow , we learned about the basic concepts of chaos engineering, failure injection, and "game days." This time, Derrick Harris interviews Karun Chennuri (@karunchennuri) and Ramesh Krishnaram (@RKrishnaram) of T-Mobile about how they are applying this at T-Mobile, where they are running about 3,000 applications and nearly 40,000 containers on Pivotal Cloud Foundry-based platform. What they learned is that chaos engineering tools are not one-sized fits all. Read the full show notes here: https://content.pivotal.io/podcasts/making-chaos-engineering-real-for-pcf-at-t-mobile

This week, we talk about Pivotal's recent announcements about alphas for running several parts of PCF on kubernetes. We also discuss proper taco eating technique and why Coté is part of the global warming problem, probably. Don't forget to check out SpringOne Platform, Pivotal's annual conference. It's October 7th to 9th in lovely Austin, Texas. You can $200 off registration if you sign up before August 20th.