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Want a quick estimate of how much your business is worth? With our free valuation calculator, answer a few questions about your business and you'll get an immediate estimate of the value of your business. You might be surprised by how much you can get for it: https://flippa.com/exit -- In this episode of The Exit: Derek Collison, founder and CEO of Senadia and previously AppSera and creator of Cloud Foundry, explores his storied career in tech, entrepreneurship, and building platforms that shaped modern cloud computing. From starting with a Commodore 64 at age 12 to working at Google, VMware, and founding AppSera—Derek shares how he turned distributed systems challenges into billion-dollar ideas. He unpacks the high-speed growth, fundraising challenges, and exit to Ericsson, before launching his latest venture, Senadia, built on the NATS open-source tech now downloaded over 300 million times. Derek opens up about: Getting into tech as a teenager in the 1980s Building Cloud Foundry at VMware after a call from Paul Maritz Starting AppSera and scaling to 150 employees in 12 months Navigating an acquisition by Ericsson amidst Kubernetes disruption How to survive the VC game: from seed to Series B His playbook for product-led platform companies and why most fail The emotional toll, decision-making pressure, and rewards of being a founder Why introverts need to lean in and chase serendipity How Senadia is powering AI at the edge, connected cars, and Industry 4.0 "Be humble, lean in, and don't delay hard decisions" — Derek's advice rings true for every founder navigating the speed and pressure of today's tech ecosystem -- Derek Collison is a 30 year industry veteran, entrepreneur, and pioneer in secure and large-scale distributed systems and cloud computing. He helped change the way financial, transportation, and logistics systems fundamentally worked while spending over a decade at TIBCO, designing systems that still power much of those industries today. During his time at VMWare, Derek designed and architected CloudFoundry, the first open-source enterprise PaaS. He then founded Apcera, a company designed to drive security and policy into easy to use platform technologies. After the successful sale of Apcera to Ericsson, Derek took the messaging technology he designed to power the CloudFoundry and Apcera systems, NATS.io, and created Synadia. Synadia is pioneering secure and global messaging as a digital utility to help drive security and powerful communication and collaboration into IoT, edge, and cloud computing systems. Derek on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/derekcollison/ Website: https://www.synadia.com/ -- The Exit—Presented By Flippa: A 30-minute podcast featuring expert entrepreneurs who have been there and done it. The Exit talks to operators who have bought and sold a business. You'll learn how they did it, why they did it, and get exposure to the world of exits, a world occupied by a small few, but accessible to many. To listen to the podcast or get daily listing updates, click on flippa.com/the-exit-podcast/
Artificial intelligence is radically transforming software development. AI-assisted coding tools are generating billions in investment, promising faster development cycles, and shifting engineering roles from code authors to code editors. But how does this impact software quality, security, and team dynamics? How can product teams embrace AI without falling into the hype? In this episode, AI assisted Agile expert Mike Gehard shares his hands-on experiments with AI in software development. From his deep background at Pivotal Labs to his current work pushing the boundaries of AI-assisted coding, Mike reveals how AI tools can amplify quality practices, speed up prototyping, and even challenge the way we think about source code. He discusses the future of pair programming, the evolving role of test-driven development, and how engineers can better focus on delivering user value. Unlock the full potential of your product team with Integral's player coaches, experts in lean, human-centered design. Visit integral.io/convergence for a free Product Success Lab workshop to gain clarity and confidence in tackling any product design or engineering challenge. Inside the episode... Mike's background at Pivotal Labs and why he kept returning How AI is changing the way we think about source code as a liability Why test-driven development still matters in an AI-assisted world The future of pair programming with AI copilots The importance of designing better software in an AI-driven development process Using AI to prototype faster and build user-facing value sooner Lessons learned from real-world experiments with AI-driven development The risks of AI-assisted software, from hallucinations to security Mentioned in this episode Mike's Substack: https://aiassistedagiledevelopment.substack.com/ Mike's Github repo: https://github.com/mikegehard/ai-assisted-agile-development Pivotal Labs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pivotal_Labs 12-Factor Apps: https://12factor.net/ GitHub Copilot: https://github.com/features/copilot Cloud Foundry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_Foundry Lean Startup by Eric Ries: https://www.amazon.com/Lean-Startup-Entrepreneurs-Continuous-Innovation/dp/0307887898 Refactoring by Martin Fowler and Kent Beck https://www.amazon.com/Refactoring-Improving-Existing-Addison-Wesley-Signature/dp/0134757599 Dependabot: https://github.com/dependabot Tessl CEO Guy Podjarny's talk: https://youtu.be/e1a3WuxTY-k Aider AI Pair programming terminal: https://aider.chat/ Gemini LLM: https://gemini.google.com/app Perplexity AI: https://www.perplexity.ai/ DeepSeek: https://www.deepseek.com/ Ian Cooper's talk on TDD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IN9lftH0cJc Mike's newest Mountain Bike IBIS Ripmo V2S: https://www.ibiscycles.com/bikes/past-models/ripmo-v2s Mike's recommended house slippers: https://us.giesswein.com/collections/mens-wool-slippers/products/wool-slippers-dannheim Sorba Chattanooga Mountain Biking Trails: https://www.sorbachattanooga.org/localtrails Subscribe to the Convergence podcast wherever you get podcasts, including video episodes on YouTube at youtube.com/@convergencefmpodcast Learn something? Give us a 5-star review and like the podcast on YouTube. It's how we grow.
In this episode of the IoT For All Podcast, Frédéric Desbiens, IoT and Edge Computing Program Manager at The Eclipse Foundation, joins Ryan Chacon to discuss the latest findings from the 2024 IoT & Embedded Developer Survey Report. The conversation covers the sectors leading the IoT space, such as industrial automation and automotive, trends in sustainability, security, and safety-critical systems, the growing importance of open source, UX design in IoT, industrial IoT protocols and MQTT, and changes in safety certifications. 2024 IoT & Embedded Developer Survey Report: https://outreach.eclipse.foundation/iot-embedded-developer-survey-2024 Frédéric Desbiens is the IoT and Edge Computing Program Manager at The Eclipse Foundation. His job is to help the community innovate by bringing devices and software together. He pairs his domain knowledge, skills, and experience in open source, IoT, and cloud platforms with social engagement to grow Foundation awareness and commercial adoption. He has held positions at Pivotal Software (contributing to the Cloud Foundry open source BOSH project), Cisco, and Oracle. The Eclipse Foundation provides a global community of individuals and organizations with a business-friendly environment for open source software collaboration and innovation. They host the Eclipse IDE, Adoptium, Software Defined Vehicle, Jakarta EE, and over 420 open source projects, including runtimes, tools, specifications, and frameworks for cloud and embedded applications, IoT, AI, automotive, systems engineering, open processor designs, and many others. Headquartered in Brussels, Belgium, The Eclipse Foundation is an international non-profit association supported by over 385 members. Discover more about IoT at https://www.iotforall.com Find IoT solutions: https://marketplace.iotforall.com More about The Eclipse Foundation: https://www.eclipse.org Connect with Frédéric: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fredericdesbiens/ Our sponsor: https://www.qoitech.com (00:00) Sponsor (00:34) Intro (00:48) Frédéric Desbiens and The Eclipse Foundation (01:32) 2024 IoT & Embedded Developer Survey Report (03:09) Leading sectors in IoT and use cases (06:57) The shift to IoT solutions (08:10) Security priorities in IoT (12:08) Safety-critical systems and certifications (16:32) UX and UI design in IoT (19:24) Industrial IoT protocols and MQTT (21:32) The importance of open source (24:19) Developer demographics and insights (26:48) Learn more and follow up Subscribe on YouTube: https://bit.ly/2NlcEwm Join Our Newsletter: https://newsletter.iotforall.com Follow Us on Social: https://linktr.ee/iot4all
This episode was sponsored by the Cloud Foundry Foundation. In this episode, we interview Ram Iyengar, chief evangelist of the Cloud Foundry Foundation, about the role of buildpacks in software development today.Key talking points include:The importance of the buildpacks community Korifi, Cloud Foundry's platform for creating and deploying applications on KubernetesWhere Cloud Foundry fits in a Kubernetes worldThe importance of giving developers better tooling Further resources:Article: Transition application code to images with Cloud Native BuildpacksWebinar: From Source to Container – Gaining Productivity with Open Source Paketo Buildpacks
This week, we discuss our AI usage, recap key announcements from VMware Explore, and examine RedMonk's analysis of how open-source licensing impacts revenue and market cap. Plus, some thoughts on power bricks. Watch the YouTube Live Recording of Episode (https://www.youtube.com/live/eb85zwGi-I8?si=obl5uvVehHdNZYQ8) 482 (https://www.youtube.com/live/eb85zwGi-I8?si=obl5uvVehHdNZYQ8) Runner-up Titles Information wants to be free, yo Stay In The Bushes Tip Jar Culture Tell Me About Meatloaf I want you in here with me Platforms For Building Platforms Private SaaS Mom and Dad having a fun conversation on a road trip I have my special chargers I want it back Rundown Sign up for Coté's Newsletter (https://newsletter.cote.io) IDC's Worldwide AI and Generative AI Spending (https://blogs.idc.com/2024/08/21/idcs-worldwide-ai-and-generative-ai-spending-industry-outlook/) Private Cloud at VMware Explore - Notebook (https://newsletter.cote.io/p/private-cloud-at-vmware-explore-notebook) Cursor.com (https://newsletter.cote.io) OSS Software Licensing Changes and Their Impact on Financial Outcomes (https://redmonk.com/rstephens/2024/08/26/software-licensing-changes-and-their-impact-on-financial-outcomes/) Coté's proposal for how to fix it (https://softwaredefinedtalk.slack.com/archives/C5GPMBXQT/p1724827874689099). Another Thread from Adam Jacob on OSS (https://x.com/adamhjk/status/1828150343332700223) Zoom Docs Is Here. Is It Any Good? (https://gizmodo.com/zoom-docs-vs-google-docs-2000490313) Relevant to your Interests Apple's App Store Head to Leave in Reorganization Amid Global Scrutiny (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-08-21/apple-s-app-store-head-to-leave-in-reorganization-amid-global-scrutiny) Snowflake Outlook Fails to Ease Investor Fears of Competition (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-08-21/snowflake-outlook-fails-to-ease-investor-fears-of-competition) Microsoft revamps reporting structure to give better visibility into cloud consumption revenue (https://www.cnbc.com/2024/08/21/microsoft-changes-reporting-to-boost-cloud-consumption-visibility.html) More than 28% of Americans are searching for new jobs — the highest rate in a decade (https://www.nbcnews.com/business/economy/28-americans-are-now-searching-new-job-highest-rate-decade-rcna167368) Microsoft is reportedly making more branding changes for Copilot business services (https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-is-reportedly-making-more-branding-changes-for-copilot-business-services/) SolarWinds left hardcoded credentials in helpdesk product (https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/22/hardcoded_credentials_bug_solarwinds_whd/) Intel has hired Morgan Stanley, other advisers for activist defense (https://www.cnbc.com/2024/08/23/intel-intc-activist-defense-sources.html) The Future of the Trade Show Industry – Are We In Danger of Losing Our Soul? (https://tsnn.com/experts-opinions/future-trade-show-industry-%E2%80%93-are-we-danger-losing-our-soul) The massive Social Security number breach is actually a good thing (https://www.vox.com/technology/367986/freeze-credit-equifax-experian-transunion-ssn-breach) Continuous reinvention: A brief history of block storage at AWS (https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2024/08/continuous-reinvention-a-brief-history-of-block-storage-at-aws.html) Grafana Labs raises $270M (https://techcrunch.com/2024/08/21/grafana-labs-is-now-valued-at-6b/) Capt. Grace Hopper on Future Possibilities: Data, Hardware, Software, (https://www.nsa.gov/helpful-links/nsa-foia/declassification-transparency-initiatives/historical-releases/view/article/3880193/capt-grace-hopper-on-future-possibilities-data-hardware-software-and-people-1982/) Rackspace Goes All In – Again – On OpenStack (https://www.nextplatform.com/2024/08/22/rackspace-goes-all-in-again-on-openstack/) Sonos App Debacle Leaves Company Racing to Save Its Reputation (https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-08-22/sonos-app-issues-leave-company-racing-to-save-its-reputation) Nonsense Chick-fil-A Opens First Elevated Drive-Thru Concept (https://www.chick-fil-a.com/press-room/chick-fil-a-opens-first-elevated-drive-thru-concept) How Costco Hacked the American Shopping Psyche (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/20/dining/costco.html) NASA Picks SpaceX to Rescue Astronauts Marooned in Space (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-08-24/spacex-selected-by-nasa-to-rescue-astronauts-marooned-in-space) The startup teaching your computer how to smell (https://thehustle.co/news/the-startup-teaching-your-computer-how-to-smell) Conferences DevOpsDays Antwerp (https://devopsdays.org/events/2024-antwerp/welcome/), Coté Speaking, Sept 4–5, 2024, 15th anniversary. Civo Navigate Europe, Berlin (https://www.civo.com/navigate/europe), Sept 10-11, 2024. SREday London 2024 (https://sreday.com/2024-london/), Sept 19–20, 2024. Coté speaking, 20% off with code SRE20DAY. Cloud Foundry Day EU (https://events.linuxfoundation.org/cloud-foundry-day-europe/), Karlsruhe, GER, Oct 9, 2024, 20% off with code CFEU24VMW. SREday Amsterdam (https://sreday.com/2024-amsterdam/), Nov 21st, 2024. Coté speaking (https://sreday.com/2024-amsterdam/Michael_Cote_VMwarePivotal_We_Fear_Change), 20% off with code SRE20DAY. SDT News & Community Join our Slack community (https://softwaredefinedtalk.slack.com/join/shared_invite/zt-1hn55iv5d-UTfN7mVX1D9D5ExRt3ZJYQ#/shared-invite/email) Email the show: questions@softwaredefinedtalk.com (mailto:questions@softwaredefinedtalk.com) Free stickers: Email your address to stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com (mailto:stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com) Follow us on social media: Twitter (https://twitter.com/softwaredeftalk), Threads (https://www.threads.net/@softwaredefinedtalk), Mastodon (https://hachyderm.io/@softwaredefinedtalk), LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/software-defined-talk/), BlueSky (https://bsky.app/profile/softwaredefinedtalk.com) Watch us on: Twitch (https://www.twitch.tv/sdtpodcast), YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCi3OJPV6h9tp-hbsGBLGsDQ/featured), Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/softwaredefinedtalk/), TikTok (https://www.tiktok.com/@softwaredefinedtalk) Book offer: Use code SDT for $20 off "Digital WTF" by Coté (https://leanpub.com/digitalwtf/c/sdt) Sponsor the show (https://www.softwaredefinedtalk.com/ads): ads@softwaredefinedtalk.com (mailto:ads@softwaredefinedtalk.com) Recommendations Brandon: Ozlo Sleepbuds (https://ozlosleep.com/). Coté: Ori (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uiqb8q02ZSw)ginal Cloud Foundry launch videos, April, 2011 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uiqb8q02ZSw). Photo Credits Header (https://unsplash.com/photos/shallow-focus-photography-of-white-travel-adapter-ZUabNmumOcA) Artwork (https://unsplash.com/photos/assorted-coin-lot-in-clear-glass-jar-0htQSq0TVB0)
In an era marked by complexity, the golden path is essential for software architects, asserts James Watters, senior director of R&D at VMware Tanzu, Broadcom. This approach, emphasizing fewer application patterns, simplifies life for security personnel, developers, and infrastructure teams. VMware defines the golden path as streamlining software development, crucial in today's economic climate. Watters highlights this in the Broadcom report: State of Cloud Native App Platforms 2024, noting that 55% of organizations favor this method for its consistency and security. Watters, a pioneer in platform as a service since 2009, helped establish Cloud Foundry and now drives VMware Tanzu. Tanzu's golden operations offer standardized, consistent processes across platforms, crucial for efficiency and security. Watters advocates for minimal DIY in favor of operational consistency, providing commands for building, deploying, and scaling applications. Tanzu's focus is on integrating AI to enhance user interfaces and data access, impacting platform engineering significantly in the coming years. This integration aims to offer a better developer experience while maintaining security and efficiency. Learn more from The New Stack about golden paths: Golden Paths Start with a Shift Left Platform Engineering Not Working Out? You're Doing It Wrong. How to Pave Golden Paths That Actually Go Somewhere Join our community of newsletter subscribers to stay on top of the news and at the top of your game.
This week, we discuss Tanzu's latest releases, Microsoft Build announcements, and the Raspberry Pi going public. Plus, thoughts on expense reporting systems and tablet kickstands. Watch the YouTube Live Recording of Episode (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odJjAKS4umk) 468 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odJjAKS4umk) Runner-up Titles Coté's calendar style: quick to decline, slow to accept. Enterprise Software — Give it time and you'll love it Thanks Clayton Williams Multi-size Monkey Phase There's people I know “Yes, and” is now fully ironic Pop sockets are the future All out of tokens, going home You said Squawkbox Cote' Rundown New at Tanzu: the Tanzu Platform (https://tanzu.vmware.com/content/blog/introducing-vmware-tanzu-platform) and Tanzu Data Services (https://tanzu.vmware.com/content/blog/vmware-tanzu-data-services-for-modern-apps) A PaaS on-top of Cloud Foundry (https://tanzu.vmware.com/content/blog/introducing-vmware-tanzu-platform) and (https://tanzu.vmware.com/content/blog/introducing-vmware-tanzu-platform) Kubernetes (https://tanzu.vmware.com/content/blog/introducing-vmware-tanzu-platform) App Engine overlay (https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-Tanzu-Platform/services/create-manage-apps-tanzu-platform-k8s/concepts-about-spaces.html) Postgres, MySQL, RabbitMQ, Redis, and Gemfire in a suite (https://tanzu.vmware.com/content/blog/vmware-tanzu-data-services-for-modern-apps) Greenplum (https://greenplum.org) Microsoft Build (https://build.microsoft.com/en-US/home#live-stream) Introducing Copilot+ PCs (https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2024/05/20/introducing-copilot-pcs/) Qualcomm to Acquire NUVIA (https://www.qualcomm.com/news/releases/2021/01/qualcomm-acquire-nuvia#:~:text=The%20acquisition%20of%20NUVIA%20will,IT%20Products%20Business%2C%20Acer%20Inc) Microsoft Build 2024: Everything Revealed in 9 Minutes (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1EepB0mCbE) Microsoft Copilot+ Recall feature 'privacy nightmare' (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpwwqp6nx14o) Raspberry Pi IPO set for June 2024 (https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/22/raspberry_pi_ipo_set_for_june_2024/) Relevant to your Interests Instagram's co-founder is Anthropic's new chief product officer (https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/15/24157240/mike-krieger-anthropic-instagram-ai) VMware Workstation Pro, Fusion Pro free for personal use (https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/14/vmware_workstation_pro_fusion_pro/) More thoughts on OSS business models (https://x.com/sytses/status/1790797642714206675?s=46&t=zgzybiDdIcGuQ_7WuoOX0A) After selling his startup for a life-changing $3.7 billion, Jyoti Bansal launched a VC firm and two high-value startups. Why? (https://fortune.com/2024/05/14/jyoti-bansal-triple-duty-startup-founder-ceo-harness-traceable-unusual-venturesal-ventures/?trk=feed_main-feed-card_feed-article-content) Palo Alto Networks is buying security assets from IBM to expand customer base (https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/15/palo-alto-networks-will-buy-ibm-qradar-cloud-security-software-assets.html) ChatGPT in “4o” mode is not running the new features yet (https://simonwillison.net/2024/May/15/chatgpt-in-4o-mode/#atom-everything) With Selipsky Out, What's Next For AWS? (https://www.forrester.com/blogs/with-selipsky-out-whats-next-for-aws/) Exclusive: Vercel completes $250 mln Series E round at $3.25 bln valuation (https://www.reuters.com/technology/vercel-completes-250-mln-series-e-round-325-bln-valuation-2024-05-16/) Tech Influencing (https://www.freemanandforrest.com/) Open source is neither a community nor a democracy (https://world.hey.com/dhh/open-source-is-neither-a-community-nor-a-democracy-606abdab) Artificial Intelligence - Global | Statista Market Forecast (https://www.statista.com/outlook/tmo/artificial-intelligence/worldwide#:~:text=Artificial%20Intelligence%20%2D%20Worldwide&text=The%20market%20size%20is%20expected,US%2450.16bn%20in%202024) Improvements to data analysis in ChatGPT (https://openai.com/index/improvements-to-data-analysis-in-chatgpt/) Privacy Principles: Search, Learning and Artificial Intelligence | Legal (https://slack.com/trust/data-management/privacy-principles) As clicks dry up for news sites, could Apple's news app be a lifeline? (https://www.semafor.com/article/05/19/2024/as-clicks-dry-up-for-news-sites-could-apples-news-app-be-a-lifeline) Apple execs on iMessage for Android (https://www.threads.net/@techemails/post/C1k85lsPeko/) ‘You're Fighting AI With AI': Bots Are Breaking the Hiring Process (https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/careers/ai-job-application-685f29f7?st=vxqwd9gugswmf2k&reflink=article_copyURL_share) The deskilling of web dev is harming the product but, more importantly, it's damaging our health – this is why burnout happens (https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/the-deskilling-of-web-dev-is-harming-us-all/) Scott Galloways Predictions for 2024 at OMR24 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHZhLE8OVmk) Finance worker pays out $25 million after video call with deepfake ‘chief financial officer' (https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/04/asia/deepfake-cfo-scam-hong-kong-intl-hnk/index.html) C. Gordon Bell, Creator of a Personal Computer Prototype, Dies at 89 (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/21/technology/c-gordon-bell-dead.html?unlocked_article_code=1.tk0.DZWu.6h3GnnGnux0P&smid=url-share) The pandemic darlings: where are they now? (https://sherwood.news/markets/the-pandemic-stock-market-darlings-have-come-back-down-to-earth/) Gartner Forecasts Worldwide Public Cloud End-User Spending to Surpass $675 Billion in 2024 (https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2024-05-20-gartner-forecasts-worldwide-public-cloud-end-user-spending-to-surpass-675-billion-in-2024) ChatGPT can talk, but OpenAI employees sure can't (https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2024/5/17/24158478/openai-departures-sam-altman-employees-chatgpt-release) Scarlett Johansson claims OpenAI copied her voice for ChatGPT (https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/05/20/openai-scarlett-johansson-chatgpt-ai-voice/) OpenAI loses its voice (https://www.platformer.news/open-ai-scarlett-johansson-her-voice-sam-altman/) Nonsense Mexico City taco stand makes history as 1st to earn Michelin star (https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Food/mexico-city-taco-stand-makes-history-1st-earn/story?id=110303468) Listener Feedback Backpack / Everyday Daily Carry Recommendations Black Hole® Pack 25L (https://www.patagonia.com.au/products/black-hole-pack-25l-49298-blk?variant=39982163034184) – Matt Goruck (https://www.goruck.com/collections/travel-rucksacks) Travel (https://www.goruck.com/collections/travel-rucksacks) (https://www.goruck.com/collections/travel-rucksacks)Rucksacks (https://www.goruck.com/collections/travel-rucksacks) – Matt Crumpler | Making Messenger Bags Since 1995 (https://www.crumpler.com/) – Michael Everyday Backpack (https://www.peakdesign.com/collections/all-bags/products/everyday-backpack?variant=29743300771884) from Peak Design – Andy Conferences NDC Oslo (https://substack.com/redirect/8de3819c-db2b-47c8-bd7a-f0a40103de9e?j=eyJ1IjoiMmQ0byJ9.QKaKsDzwnXK5ipYhX0mLOvRP3vpk_3o2b5dd3FXmAkw), Coté speaking (https://substack.com/redirect/41e821af-36ba-4dbb-993c-20755d5f040a?j=eyJ1IjoiMmQ0byJ9.QKaKsDzwnXK5ipYhX0mLOvRP3vpk_3o2b5dd3FXmAkw), June 12th. DevOpsDays Amsterdam (https://devopsdays.org/events/2024-amsterdam/welcome/), June 19-21, 2024, Coté speaking. DevOpsDays Birmingham, August 19–21, 2024 (https://devopsdays.org/events/2024-birmingham-al/welcome/) SpringOne (https://springone.io/?utm_source=cote&utm_campaign=devrel&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_content=newsletterUpcoming)/VMware Explore US (https://blogs.vmware.com/explore/2024/04/23/want-to-attend-vmware-explore-convince-your-manager-with-these/?utm_source=cote&utm_campaign=devrel&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_content=newsletterUpcoming), August 26–29, 2024 SREday London 2024 (https://sreday.com/2024-london/), September 19th to 20th, Coté speaking. 20% off with the code SRE20DAY (https://sreday.com/2024-london/#tickets) SDT news & hype Join us in Slack (http://www.softwaredefinedtalk.com/slack). Get a SDT Sticker! Send your postal address to stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com (mailto:stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com) and we will send you free laptop stickers! 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Recommendations Brandon: Water Meter Valve Key (https://www.homedepot.com/p/28-in-Solid-Steel-Water-Meter-Valve-Key-with-Grips-410-302-0111/311774568) Matt: Bobby Fingers: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RIEPKEhE2s) “ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RIEPKEhE2s)Fabio and the Goos (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RIEPKEhE2s)e” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RIEPKEhE2s) Coté: Joby GripTight PRO TelePod (https://joby.com/us-en/griptight-pro-telepod-jb01534-bww/) Photo Credits Header (https://unsplash.com/photos/person-holding-black-card-ex_p4AaBxbs) Artwork (https://unsplash.com/photos/a-laptop-computer-sitting-on-top-of-a-wooden-desk-40R02bvsL3c)
Recording Date: 2023-11-15 Hosts: Tony Hansmann && Jesse Alford Guest Name: Thomas Squeo Social media: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomassqueo/ Previous interview on Youtube.com: https://youtu.be/iZCPAHwhTWI?si=CfjhBEkyqN69x4eF Guest: Thomas Squeo Title: Let's Play “Bet your Badge” with Thomas Squeo (01h:30m) One of the greatest things about being in the field for Cloud Foundry was meeting leaders who were deploying not just Cloud Foundry but an array of transformation solutions. Thomas Squeo's roots in XP go back to the early 2000s when he was an early Beck practitioner who worked with both Pivotal Labs and Thoughtworks. What sets Thomas apart is that he has done everything from being a line developer to being the CTO of Entrado, a global 911 provider, among other things. Jesse and Tony talk about what it takes to not just do XP but also what the IRL challenges you will face when transforming an organization. Grab a notebook and buckle up.
As the host of this podcast, I had the pleasure of engaging in a fascinating discussion with our special guest, David Stengel, an IT professional with a unique perspective on the cognitive load of platforms in organizations. The Concept of Cognitive Load in Platforms Our conversation began with an exploration of the concept of cognitive load in relation to platforms. David, despite being an IT professional and not a psychiatrist, brought an intriguing perspective to the table. He emphasized how platforms, such as VMware, Kubernetes, and Cloud Foundry, are designed to remove effort from users, making it easier for them to build and accomplish tasks. However, he pointed out that while everyone is focused on making the developer experience easy, they often overlook the impact of cognitive load on the entire organization. This cognitive load, or mental workload, encompasses the challenges of getting tasks done. The Purpose of Platforms in IT We then shifted our discussion to the purpose of platforms in IT, which is to reduce the cognitive burden and allow humans to focus on the business problem rather than the underlying technology. As platforms become more complex, it becomes impossible for developers to be conscious of every technical detail. The goal is to abstract away the complexity and allow developers to focus on their tasks. I added that while it's important to learn the basics, when working, developers should not actively think about them unless it's necessary. We concluded this part of our discussion by emphasizing the importance of finding platforms that are appropriate for the organization's capabilities and needs. Managing Complexity in Platforms Our conversation then moved to the concept of managing complexity in platforms. We highlighted that building a platform does not eliminate complexity, but rather manages it for a specific consumption of services. We drew parallels between the simplification of hardware infrastructure with the introduction of VMware for virtualization and the restricted choices in microservices with containers and immutable infrastructure. We also touched on the shift in responsibility from IT groups to developers in terms of managing platforms. We discussed how the level of support and access to abstractions can vary depending on the organization. We mentioned the cognitive load involved in load balancing and how the cost of elastic load balancing in AWS has become a significant expense for customers. Practical Implications of Understanding Cognitive Load We explored the practical implications of understanding cognitive load in platforms. We suggested evaluating the effectiveness of the platform and its usability by considering the activities and mental workload required for different tasks. We emphasized the importance of treating platforms as businesses with customers and gathering feedback to improve the user experience. We concluded our conversation with a mention of the potential role of AI in analyzing and optimizing cognitive load. We discussed the possibility of automating data collection and analysis to identify areas where time and effort are being spent and make informed decisions about platform usage and optimization. Cognitive Load and Its Impact on Problem-Solving and Decision-Making Our conversation revolved around the concept of cognitive load and its impact on problem-solving and decision-making. We discussed how technology has evolved over the years, making it easier to analyze data and observe behaviors to optimize processes. However, we emphasized the importance of considering the subjective experience of individuals in the organization and understanding their feelings towards their work. The Balance Between Experience and Innovation We shifted to the balance between experience and innovation, with David mentioning the danger of engineers sticking to outdated solutions. We also discussed the importance of distributing cognitive load within a team and the concept of psychological capital, which includes personal efficacy and belief in one's ability to get things done. Wrapping Up As we wrapped up our discussion, we thanked David Stengel for contributing to the conversation about cognitive load and IT architecture. We encouraged listeners to provide feedback and suggest topics they would like to hear more about. We also invited listeners to join the community at packetpushers.net to engage in discussions with other professionals. We concluded the episode with a reminder to check out the other technology content available on the Packet Pushers network and to sign up for the community at community.thenetworkcollective.com. We expressed our gratitude for the listeners' support and announced that the next episode will be released in a couple of weeks. In conclusion, our conversation with David Stengel provided valuable insights into the cognitive load of platforms in organizations. It highlighted the importance of understanding and managing this cognitive load to improve the effectiveness and usability of platforms. It also emphasized the need for organizations to consider the subjective experience of individuals and the balance between experience and innovation in managing cognitive load. The post HS059 Cognitive Load and Platforms appeared first on Packet Pushers.
Our conversation begins with an exploration of the concept of cognitive load in relation to platforms. David, despite being an IT professional and not a psychiatrist, brought an intriguing perspective to the table. He emphasized how platforms, such as VMware, Kubernetes, and Cloud Foundry, are designed to remove effort from users, making it easier for... Read more »
As the host of this podcast, I had the pleasure of engaging in a fascinating discussion with our special guest, David Stengel, an IT professional with a unique perspective on the cognitive load of platforms in organizations. The Concept of Cognitive Load in Platforms Our conversation began with an exploration of the concept of cognitive load in relation to platforms. David, despite being an IT professional and not a psychiatrist, brought an intriguing perspective to the table. He emphasized how platforms, such as VMware, Kubernetes, and Cloud Foundry, are designed to remove effort from users, making it easier for them to build and accomplish tasks. However, he pointed out that while everyone is focused on making the developer experience easy, they often overlook the impact of cognitive load on the entire organization. This cognitive load, or mental workload, encompasses the challenges of getting tasks done. The Purpose of Platforms in IT We then shifted our discussion to the purpose of platforms in IT, which is to reduce the cognitive burden and allow humans to focus on the business problem rather than the underlying technology. As platforms become more complex, it becomes impossible for developers to be conscious of every technical detail. The goal is to abstract away the complexity and allow developers to focus on their tasks. I added that while it's important to learn the basics, when working, developers should not actively think about them unless it's necessary. We concluded this part of our discussion by emphasizing the importance of finding platforms that are appropriate for the organization's capabilities and needs. Managing Complexity in Platforms Our conversation then moved to the concept of managing complexity in platforms. We highlighted that building a platform does not eliminate complexity, but rather manages it for a specific consumption of services. We drew parallels between the simplification of hardware infrastructure with the introduction of VMware for virtualization and the restricted choices in microservices with containers and immutable infrastructure. We also touched on the shift in responsibility from IT groups to developers in terms of managing platforms. We discussed how the level of support and access to abstractions can vary depending on the organization. We mentioned the cognitive load involved in load balancing and how the cost of elastic load balancing in AWS has become a significant expense for customers. Practical Implications of Understanding Cognitive Load We explored the practical implications of understanding cognitive load in platforms. We suggested evaluating the effectiveness of the platform and its usability by considering the activities and mental workload required for different tasks. We emphasized the importance of treating platforms as businesses with customers and gathering feedback to improve the user experience. We concluded our conversation with a mention of the potential role of AI in analyzing and optimizing cognitive load. We discussed the possibility of automating data collection and analysis to identify areas where time and effort are being spent and make informed decisions about platform usage and optimization. Cognitive Load and Its Impact on Problem-Solving and Decision-Making Our conversation revolved around the concept of cognitive load and its impact on problem-solving and decision-making. We discussed how technology has evolved over the years, making it easier to analyze data and observe behaviors to optimize processes. However, we emphasized the importance of considering the subjective experience of individuals in the organization and understanding their feelings towards their work. The Balance Between Experience and Innovation We shifted to the balance between experience and innovation, with David mentioning the danger of engineers sticking to outdated solutions. We also discussed the importance of distributing cognitive load within a team and the concept of psychological capital, which includes personal efficacy and belief in one's ability to get things done. Wrapping Up As we wrapped up our discussion, we thanked David Stengel for contributing to the conversation about cognitive load and IT architecture. We encouraged listeners to provide feedback and suggest topics they would like to hear more about. We also invited listeners to join the community at packetpushers.net to engage in discussions with other professionals. We concluded the episode with a reminder to check out the other technology content available on the Packet Pushers network and to sign up for the community at community.thenetworkcollective.com. We expressed our gratitude for the listeners' support and announced that the next episode will be released in a couple of weeks. In conclusion, our conversation with David Stengel provided valuable insights into the cognitive load of platforms in organizations. It highlighted the importance of understanding and managing this cognitive load to improve the effectiveness and usability of platforms. It also emphasized the need for organizations to consider the subjective experience of individuals and the balance between experience and innovation in managing cognitive load. The post HS059 Cognitive Load and Platforms appeared first on Packet Pushers.
Our conversation begins with an exploration of the concept of cognitive load in relation to platforms. David, despite being an IT professional and not a psychiatrist, brought an intriguing perspective to the table. He emphasized how platforms, such as VMware, Kubernetes, and Cloud Foundry, are designed to remove effort from users, making it easier for... Read more »
Our conversation begins with an exploration of the concept of cognitive load in relation to platforms. David, despite being an IT professional and not a psychiatrist, brought an intriguing perspective to the table. He emphasized how platforms, such as VMware, Kubernetes, and Cloud Foundry, are designed to remove effort from users, making it easier for... Read more »
This episode covers OpenSAP Course “Generative AI at SAP” starting this week, SAP BTP, ABAP Environment Release 2311, “Did You Know” shorts Nr. 2 – Deploy a Docker image to Cloud Foundry with the cf CLI, SAP Analytics Cloud 2023/Q4 Release, the Open Resource Discovery protocol and a New Learning Journey for SAP Fiori Elements and SAPUI5 in SAP Build Code.
This episode covers Devtoberfest Week 1, Comparative Analysis of Developing an Application on Cloud Foundry and Kyma, Clean code checks for ABAP – Cloud Edition, SAP TechEd Application Development and Automation and Product Updates for SAP Business Application Studio – September Edition
Kelsey Hightower joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss his reflections on how the tech industry is progressing. Kelsey describes what he's been getting out of retirement so far, and reflects on what he learned throughout his high-profile career - including why feature sprawl is such a driving force behind the complexity of the cloud environment and the tactics he used to create demos that are engaging for the audience. Corey and Kelsey also discuss the importance of remaining authentic throughout your career, and what it means to truly have an authentic voice in tech. About KelseyKelsey Hightower is a former Distinguished Engineer at Google Cloud, the co-chair of KubeCon, the world's premier Kubernetes conference, and an open source enthusiast. He's also the co-author of Kubernetes Up & Running: Dive into the Future of Infrastructure. Recently, Kelsey announced his retirement after a 25-year career in tech.Links Referenced:Twitter: https://twitter.com/kelseyhightower TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Do you wish there were cheat codes for database optimization? Well, there are – no seriously. If you're using Postgres or MySQL on Amazon Aurora or RDS, OtterTune uses AI to automatically optimize your knobs and indexes and queries and other bits and bobs in databases. OtterTune applies optimal settings and recommendations in the background or surfaces them to you and allows you to do it. The best part is that there's no cost to try it. Get a free, thirty-day trial to take it for a test drive. Go to ottertune dot com to learn more. That's O-T-T-E-R-T-U-N-E dot com.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. You know, there's a great story from the Bible or Torah—Old Testament, regardless—that I was always a big fan of where you wind up with the Israelites walking the desert for 40 years in order to figure out what comes next. And Moses led them but could never enter into what came next. Honestly, I feel like my entire life is sort of going to be that direction. Not the biblical aspects, but rather always wondering what's on the other side of a door that I can never cross, and that door is retirement. Today I'm having returning guest Kelsey Hightower, who is no longer at Google. In fact, is no longer working and has joined the ranks of the gloriously retired. Welcome back, and what's it like?Kelsey: I'm happy to be here. I think retirement is just like work in some ways: you have to learn how to do it. A lot of people have no practice in their adult life what to do with all of their time. We have small dabs in it, like, you get the weekend off, depending on what your work, but you never have enough time to kind of unwind and get into something else. So, I'm being honest with myself. It's going to be a learning curve, what to do with that much time.You're probably still going to do work, but it's going to be a different type of work than you're used to. And so, that's where I am. 30 days into this, I'm in that learning mode, I'm on-the-job training.Corey: What's harder than you expected?Kelsey: It's not the hard part because I think mentally I've been preparing for, like, the last ten years, being a minimalist, learning how to kind of live within my means, learn to appreciate things that are just not work-related or status symbols. And so, to me, it felt like a smooth transition because I started to value my time more than anything else, right? Just waking up the next day became valuable to me. Spending time in the moment, right, you go to these conferences, there's, like, 10,000 people, but you learn to value those one-on-one encounters, those one-off, kind of, let's just go grab lunch situations. So, to me, retirement just makes more room for that, right? I no longer have this calendar that is super full, so I think for me, it was a nice transition in terms of getting more of that valuable time back.Corey: It seems to me that you're in a similar position to the one that I find myself in where the job that you were doing and I still am is tied, more or less, to a sense of identity as opposed to a particular task or particular role that you fill. You were Kelsey Hightower. That was a complete sentence. People didn't necessarily need to hear the rest of what you were working on or what you were going to be talking about at a given conference or whatnot. So, it seemed, at least from the outside, that an awful lot of what you did was quite simply who you were. Do you feel that your sense of identity has changed?Kelsey: So, I think when you have that much influence, when you have that much reputation, the words you say travel further, they tend to come with a little bit more respect, and so when you're working with a team on new product, and you say, “Hey, I think we should change some things.” And when they hear those words coming from someone that they trust or has a name that is attached to reputation, you tend to be able to make a lot of impact with very few words. But what you also find is that no matter what you get involved in—configuration management, distributed systems, serverless, working with customers—it all is helped and aided by the reputation that you bring into that line of work. And so yes, who you are matters, but one thing that I think helped me, kind of greatly, people are paying attention maybe to the last eight years of my career: containers, Kubernetes, but my career stretches back to the converting COBOL into Python days; the dawn of DevOps, Puppet, Chef, and Ansible; the Golang appearance and every tool being rewritten from Ruby to Golang; the Docker era.And so, my identity has stayed with me throughout those transitions. And so, it was very easy for me to walk away from that thing because I've done it three or four times before in the past, so I know who I am. I've never had, like, a Twitter bio that said, “Company X. X person from company X.” I've learned long ago to just decouple who I am from my current employer because that is always subject to change.Corey: I was fortunate enough to not find myself in the public eye until I owned my own company. But I definitely remember times in my previous incarnations where I was, “Oh, today I'm working at this company,” and I believed—usually inaccurately—that this was it. This was where I really found my niche. And then surprise I'm not there anymore six months later for, either their decision, my decision, or mutual agreement. And I was always hesitant about hanging a shingle out that was tied too tightly to any one employer.Even now, I was little worried about doing it when I went independent, just because well, what if it doesn't work? Well, what if, on some level? I think that there's an authenticity that you can bring with you—and you certainly have—where, for a long time now, whenever you say something, I take it seriously, and a lot of people do. It's not that you're unassailably correct, but I've never known you to say something you did not authentically believe in. And that is an opinion that is very broadly shared in this industry. So, if nothing else, you definitely were a terrific object lesson in speaking the truth, as you saw it.Kelsey: I think what you describe is one way that, whether you're an engineer doing QA, working in the sales department, when you can be honest with the team you're working with, when you can be honest with the customers you're selling into when you can be honest with the community you're part of, that's where the authenticity gets built, right? Companies, sometimes on the surface, you believe that they just want you to walk the party line, you know, they give you the lines and you just read them verbatim and you're doing your part. To be honest, you can do that with the website. You can do that with a well-placed ad in the search queries.What people are actually looking for are real people with real experiences, sharing not just fact, but I think when you mix kind of fact and opinion, you get this level of authenticity that you can't get just by pure strategic marketing. And so, having that leverage, I remember back in the day, people used to say, “I'm going to do the right thing and if it gets me fired, then that's just the way it's going to be. I don't want to go around doing the wrong thing because I'm scared I'm going to lose my job.” You want to find yourself in that situation where doing the right thing, is also the best thing for the company, and that's very rare, so when I've either had that opportunity or I've tried to create that opportunity and move from there.Corey: It resonates and it shows. I have never had a lot of respect for people who effectively are saying one thing today and another thing the next week based upon which way they think that the winds are blowing. But there's also something to be said for being able and willing to publicly recant things you have said previously as technology evolves, as your perspective evolves and, in light of new information, I'm now going to change my perspective on something. I've done that already with multi-cloud, for example. I thought it was ridiculous when I heard about it. But there are also expressions of it that basically every company is using, including my own. And it's a nuanced area. Where I find it challenging is when you see a lot of these perspectives that people are espousing that just so happen to deeply align with where their paycheck comes from any given week. That doesn't ring quite as true to me.Kelsey: Yeah, most companies actually don't know how to deal with it either. And now there has been times at any number of companies where my authentic opinion that I put out there is against party line. And you get those emails from directors and VPs. Like, “Hey, I thought we all agree to think this way or to at least say this.” And that's where you have to kind of have that moment of clarity and say, “Listen, that is undeniably wrong. It's so wrong in fact that if you say this in public, whether a small setting or large setting, you are going to instantly lose credibility going forward for yourself. Forget the company for a moment. There's going to be a situation where you will no longer be effective in your job because all of your authenticity is now gone. And so, what I'm trying to do and tell you is don't do that. You're better off saying nothing.”But if you go out there, and you're telling what is obviously misinformation or isn't accurate, people are not dumb. They're going to see through it and you will be classified as a person not to listen to. And so, I think a lot of people struggle with that because they believe that enterprise's consensus should also be theirs.Corey: An argument that I made—we'll call it a prediction—four-and-a-half years ago, was that in five years, nobody would really care about Kubernetes. And people misunderstood that initially, and I've clarified since repeatedly that I'm not suggesting it's going away: “Oh, turns out that was just a ridiculous fever dream and we're all going back to running bare metal with our hands again,” but rather that it would slip below the surface-level of awareness. And I don't know that I got the timing quite right on that, I think it's going to depend on the company and the culture that you find yourself in. But increasingly, when there's an application to run, it's easy to ask someone just, “Oh, great. Where's the Kubernetes cluster live so we can throw this on there and just add it to the rest of the pile?”That is sort of what I was seeing. My intention with that was not purely just to be controversial, as much fun as that might be, but also to act as a bit of a warning, where I've known too many people who let their identities become inextricably tangled with the technology. But technologies rise and fall, and at some point—like, you talk about configuration management days; I learned to speak publicly as a traveling trainer for Puppet. I wrote part of SaltStack once upon a time. But it was clear that that was not the direction the industry was going, so it was time to find something else to focus on. And I fear for people who don't keep an awareness or their feet underneath them and pay attention to broader market trends.Kelsey: Yeah, I think whenever I was personally caught up in linking my identity to technology, like, “I'm a Rubyist,” right?“, I'm a Puppeteer,” and you wear those names proudly. But I remember just thinking to myself, like, “You have to take a step back. What's more important, you or the technology?” And at some point, I realized, like, it's me, that is more important, right? Like, my independent thinking on this, my independent experience with this is far more important than the success of this thing.But also, I think there's a component there. Like when you talked about Kubernetes, you know, maybe being less relevant in five years, there's two things there. One is the success of all infrastructure things equals irrelevancy. When flights don't crash, when bridges just work, you do not think about them. You just use them because they're so stable and they become very boring. That is the success criteria.Corey: Utilities. No one's wondering if the faucet's going to work when they turn it on in the morning.Kelsey: Yeah. So, you know, there's a couple of ways to look at your statement. One is, you believe Kubernetes is on the trajectory that it's going to stabilize itself and hit that success criteria, and then it will be irrelevant. Or there's another part of the irrelevancy where something else comes along and replaces that thing, right? I think Cloud Foundry and Mesos are two good examples of Kubernetes coming along and stealing all of the attention from that because those particular products never gained that mass adoption. Maybe they got to the stable part, but they never got to the mass adoption part. So, I think when it comes to infrastructure, it's going to be irrelevant. It's just what side of that [laugh] coin do you land on?Corey: It's similar to folks who used to have to work at a variety of different companies on very specific Linux kernel subsystems because everyone had to care because there were significant performance impacts. Time went on and now there's still a few of those people that very much need to care, but for the rest of us, it is below the level of things that we have to care about. For me, the signs of the unsustainability were, oh, you can run Kubernetes effectively in production? That's a minimum of a quarter-million dollars a year in comp or up in some cases. Not every company is going to be able to field a team of those people and still remain a going concern in business. Nor frankly, should they have to.Kelsey: I'm going to pull on that thread a little bit because it's about—we're hitting that ten-year mark of Kubernetes. So, when Kubernetes comes out, why were people drawn to it, right? Why did it even get the time of day to begin with? And I think Docker kind of opened Pandora's box there. This idea of Chef, Puppet, Ansible, ten thousand package managers, and honestly, that trajectory was going to continue forever and it was helping no one. It was literally people doing duplicate work depending on the operating system you're dealing with and we were wasting time copying bits to servers—literally—in a very glorified way.So, Docker comes along and gives us this nicer, better abstraction, but it has gaps. It has no orchestration. It's literally this thing where now we've unified the packaging situation, we've learned a lot from Red Hat, YUM, Debian, and the various package repo combinations out there and so we made this universal thing. Great. We also learned a little bit about orchestration through brute force, bash scripts, config management, you name it, and so we serialized that all into this thing we call Kubernetes.It's pretty simple on the surface, but it was probably never worthy of such fanfare, right? But I think a lot of people were relieved that now we finally commoditized this expertise that the Googles, the Facebooks of the world had, right, building these systems that can copy bits to other systems very fast. There you go. We've gotten that piece. But I think what the market actually wants is in the mobile space, if you want to ship software to 300 million people that you don't even know, you can do it with the app store.There's this appetite that the boring stuff should be easy. Let's Encrypt has made SSL certificates beyond easy. It's just so easy to do the right thing. And I think for this problem we call deployments—you know, shipping apps around—at some point we have to get to a point where that is just crazy easy. And it still isn't.So, I think some of the frustration people express ten years later, they're realizing that they're trying to recreate a Rube Goldberg machine with Kubernetes is the base element and we still haven't understood that this whole thing needs to simplify, not ten thousand new pieces so you can build your own adventure.Corey: It's the idea almost of what I'm seeing AWS go through, and to some extent, its large competitors. But building anything on top of AWS from scratch these days is still reminiscent of going to Home Depot—or any hardware store—and walking up and down the aisles and getting all the different components to piece together what you want. Sometimes just want to buy something from Target that's already assembled and you have to do all of that work. I'm not saying there isn't value to having a Home Depot down the street, but it's also not the panacea that solves for all use cases. An awful lot of customers just want to get the job done and I feel that if we cling too tightly to how things used to be, we lose it.Kelsey: I'm going to tell you, being in the cloud business for almost eight years, it's the customers that create this. Now, I'm not blaming the customer, but when you start dealing with thousands of customers with tons of money, you end up in a very different situation. You can have one customer willing to pay you a billion dollars a year and they will dictate things that apply to no one else. “We want this particular set of features that only we will use.” And for a billion bucks a year times ten years, it's probably worth from a business standpoint to add that feature.Now, do this times 500 customers, each major provider. What you end up with is a cloud console that is unbearable, right? Because they also want these things to be first-class citizens. There's always smaller companies trying to mimic larger peers in their segment that you just end up in that chaos machine of unbound features forever. I don't know how to stop it. Unless you really come out maybe more Apple style and you tell people, “This is the one and only true way to do things and if you don't like it, you have to go find an alternative.” The cloud business, I think, still deals with the, “If you have a large payment, we will build it.”Corey: I think that that is a perspective that is not appreciated until you've been in the position of watching how large enterprises really interact with each other. Because it's, “Well, what customer the world is asking for yet another way to run containers?” “Uh, this specific one and their constraints are valid.” Every time I think I've seen everything there is to see in the world of cloud, I just have to go talk to one more customer and I'm learning something new. It's inevitable.I just wish that there was a better way to explain some of this to newcomers, when they're looking at, “Oh, I'm going to learn how this cloud thing works. Oh, my stars, look at how many services there are.” And then they wind up getting lost with analysis paralysis, and every time they get started and ask someone for help, they're pushed in a completely different direction and you keep spinning your wheels getting told to start over time and time again when any of these things can be made to work. But getting there is often harder than it really should be.Kelsey: Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of people don't realize how far you can get with, like, three VMs, a load balancer, and Postgres. My guess is you can probably build pretty much any clone of any service we use today with at least 1 million customers. Most people never reached that level—I don't even want to say the word scale—but that blueprint is there and most people will probably be better served by that level of simplicity than trying to mimic the behaviors of large customers—or large companies—with these elaborate use cases. I don't think they understand the context there. A lot of that stuff is baggage. It's not [laugh] even, like, best-of-breed or great design. It's like happenstance from 20 years of trying to buy everything that's been sold to you.Corey: I agree with that idea wholeheartedly. I was surprising someone the other day when I said that if you were to give me a task of getting some random application up and running by tomorrow, I do a traditional three-tier architecture, some virtual machines, a load balancer, and a database service. And is that the way that all the cool kids are doing it today? Well, they're not talking about it, but mostly. But the point is, is that it's what I know, it's where my background is, and the thing you already know when you're trying to solve a new problem is incredibly helpful, rather than trying to learn everything along that new path that you're forging down. Is that architecture the best approach? No, but it's perfectly sufficient for an awful lot of stuff.Kelsey: Yeah. And so, I mean, look, I've benefited my whole career from people fantasizing about [laugh] infrastructure—Corey: [laugh].Kelsey: And the truth is that in 2023, this stuff is so powerful that you can do almost anything you want to do with the simplest architecture that's available to us. The three-tier architecture has actually gotten better over the years. I think people are forgotten: CPUs are faster, RAM is much bigger quantities, the networks are faster, right, these databases can store more data than ever. It's so good to learn the fundamentals, start there, and worst case, you have a sound architecture people can reason about, and then you can go jump into the deep end, once you learn how to swim.Corey: I think that people would be depressed to understand just how much the common case for the value that Kubernetes brings is, “Oh yeah, now we can lose a drive or a server and the application stays up.” It feels like it's a bit overkill for that one somewhat paltry use case, but that problem has been hounding companies for decades.Kelsey: Yeah, I think at some point, the whole ‘SSH is my only interface into these kinds of systems,' that's a little low level, that's a little bare bones, and there will probably be a feature now where we start to have this not Infrastructure as Code, not cloud where we put infrastructure behind APIs and you pay per use, but I think what Kubernetes hints at is a future where you have APIs that do something. Right now the APIs give you pieces so you can assemble things. In the future, the APIs will just do something, “Run this app. I need it to be available and here's my money budget, my security budget, and reliability budget.” And then that thing will say, “Okay, we know how to do that, and here's roughly what is going to cost.”And I think that's what people actually want because that's how requests actually come down from humans, right? We say, “We want this app or this game to be played by millions of people from Australia to New York.” And then for a person with experience, that means something. You kind of know what architecture you need for that, you know what pieces that need to go there. So, we're just moving into a realm where we're going to have APIs that do things all of a sudden.And so, Kubernetes is the warm-up to that era. And that's why I think that transition is a little rough because it leaks the pieces part, so where you can kind of build all the pieces that you want. But we know what's coming. Serverless also hints at this. But that's what people should be looking for: APIs that actually do something.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Panoptica. Panoptica simplifies container deployment, monitoring, and security, protecting the entire application stack from build to runtime. Scalable across clusters and multi-cloud environments, Panoptica secures containers, serverless APIs, and Kubernetes with a unified view, reducing operational complexity and promoting collaboration by integrating with commonly used developer, SRE, and SecOps tools. Panoptica ensures compliance with regulatory mandates and CIS benchmarks for best practice conformity. Privacy teams can monitor API traffic and identify sensitive data, while identifying open-source components vulnerable to attacks that require patching. Proactively addressing security issues with Panoptica allows businesses to focus on mitigating critical risks and protecting their interests. Learn more about Panoptica today at panoptica.app.Corey: You started the show by talking about how your career began with translating COBOL into Python. I firmly believe someone starting their career today listening to this could absolutely find that by the time their career starts drawing to their own close, that Kubernetes is right in there as far as sounding like the deprecated thing that no one really talks about or thinks about anymore. And I hope so. I want the future to be brighter than the past. I want getting a business or getting software together in a way that helps people to not require the amount of, “First, spend six weeks at a boot camp,” or, “Learn how to write just enough code that you can wind up getting funding and then have it torn apart.”What's the drag-and-drop story? What's the describe the application to a robot and it builds it for you? I'm optimistic about the future of infrastructure, just because based upon its power to potentially make reliability and scale available to folks who have no idea of what's involved with that. That's kind of the point. That's the end game of having won this space.Kelsey: Well, you know what? Kubernetes is providing the metadata to make that possible, right? Like in the early days, people were writing one-off scripts or, you know, writing little for loops to get things in the right place. And then we get config management that kind of formalizes that, but it still had no metadata, right? You'd have things like Puppet report information.But in the world of, like, Kubernetes, or any cloud provider, now you get semantic meaning. “This app needs this volume with this much space with this much memory, I need three of these behind this load balancer with these protocols enabled.” There is now so much metadata about applications, their life cycles, and how they work that if you were to design a new system, you can actually use that data to craft a much better API that made a lot of this boilerplate the defaults. Oh, that's a web application. You do not need to specify all of this boilerplate. Now, we can give you much better nouns and verbs to describe what needs to happen.So, I think this is that transition as all the new people coming up, they're going to be dealing with semantic meaning to infrastructure, where we were dealing with, like, tribal knowledge and intuition, right? “Run this script, pipe it to this thing, and then this should happen. And if it doesn't, run the script again with this flag.” Versus, “Oh, here's the semantic meaning to a working system.” That's a game-changer.Corey: One other topic I wanted to ask you about—I've it's been on my list of things to bring up the next time I ran into you and then you went ahead and retired, making it harder to run into you. But a little while back, I was at a tech conference and someone gave a demo, and it didn't go as well as they had hoped. And a few of us were talking about it afterwards. We've all been speakers, we've all lived that life. Zero shade.But someone brought you up in particular—unprompted; your legend does precede you—and the phrase that they used was that Kelsey's demos were always picture-perfect. He was so lucky with how the demos worked out. And I just have to ask—because you don't strike me as someone who is not careful, particularly when all eyes are upon you—and real experts make things look easy, did you have demos periodically go wrong that the audience just didn't see going wrong along the way? Or did you just actually YOLO all of your demos and got super lucky every single time for the last eight years?Kelsey: There was a musician who said, “Hey, your demos are like jazz. You improvise the whole thing.” There's no script, there's no video. The way I look at the demo is, like, you got this instrument, the command prompt, and the web browser. You can do whatever you want with them.Now, I have working code. I wrote the code, I wrote the deployment scenarios, I delete it all and I put it all back. And so, I know how it's supposed to work from the ground up. And so, what that means is if anything goes wrong, I can improvise. I could go into fixing the code. I can go into doing a redeploy.And I'll give you one good example. The first time Kubernetes came out, there was this small meetup in San Francisco with just the core contributors, right? So, there is no community yet, there's no conference yet, just people hacking on Kubernetes. And so, we decided, we're going to have the first Kubernetes meetup. And everyone got, like, six, seven minutes, max. That's it. You got to move.And so, I was like, “Hey, I noticed that in the lineup, there is no ‘What is Kubernetes?' talk. We're just getting into these nuts and bolts and I don't think that's fair to the people that will be watching this for the first time.” And I said, “All right, Kelsey, you should give maybe an intro to what it is.” I was like, “You know what I'll do? I'm going to build a Kubernetes cluster from the ground up, starting with VMs on my laptop.”And I'm in it and I'm feeling confident. So, confidence is the part that makes it look good, right? Where you're confident in the commands you type. One thing I learned to do is just use your history, just hit the up arrow instead of trying to copy all these things out. So, you hit the up arrow, you find the right command and you talk through it and no one looks at what's happening. You're cycling through the history.Or you have multiple tabs where you know the next up arrow is the right history. So, you give yourself shortcuts. And so, I'm halfway through this demo. We got three minutes left, and it doesn't work. Like, VMware is doing something weird on my laptop and there's a guy calling me off stage, like, “Hey, that's it. Cut it now. You're done.”I'm like, “Oh, nope. Thou shalt not go out like this.” It's time to improvise. And so, I said, “Hey, who wants to see me finish this?” And now everyone is locked in. It's dead silent. And I blow the whole thing away. I bring up the VMs, I [pixie 00:28:20] boot, I installed the kubelet, I install Docker. And everyone's clapping. And it's up, it's going, and I say, “Now, if all of this works, we run this command and it should start running the app.” And I do kubectl apply-f and it comes up and the place goes crazy.And I had more to the demo. But you stop. You've gotten the point across, right? This is what Kubernetes is, here's how it works, and look how you do it from scratch. And I remember saying, “And that's the end of my presentation.” You need to know when to stop, you need to know when to pivot, and you need to have confidence that it's supposed to work, and if you've seen it work a couple of times, your confidence is unshaken.And when I walked off that stage, I remember someone from Red Hat was like—Clayton Coleman; that's his name—Clayton Coleman walked up to me and said, “You planned that. You planned it to fail just like that, so you can show people how to go from scratch all the way up. That was brilliant.” And I was like, “Sure. That's exactly what I did.”Corey: “Yeah, I meant to do that.” I like that approach. I found there's always things I have to plan for in demos. For example, I can never count on having solid WiFi from a conference hall. The show has to go on. It's, okay, the WiFi doesn't work. I've at one point had to give a talk where the projector just wasn't working to a bunch of students. So okay, close the laptop. We're turning this into a bunch of question-and-answer sessions, and it was one of the better talks I've ever given.But the alternative is getting stuck in how you think a talk absolutely needs to go. Now, keynotes are a little harder where everything has been scripted and choreographed and at that point, I've had multiple fallbacks for demos that I've had to switch between. And people never noticed I was doing it for that exact reason. But it takes work to look polished.Kelsey: I will tell you that the last Next keynote I gave was completely irresponsible. No dry runs, no rehearsals, no table reads, no speaker notes. And I think there were 30,000 people at that particular Next. And Diane Greene was still CEO, and I remember when marketing was like, “Yo, at least a backup recording.” I was like, “Nah, I don't have anything.”And that demo was extensive. I mean, I was building an app from scratch, starting with Postgres, adding the schema, building an app, deploying the app. And something went wrong halfway. And there's this joke that I came up with just to pass over the time, they gave me a new Chromebook to do the demo. And so, it's not mine, so none of the default settings were there, I was getting pop-ups all over the place.And I came up with this joke on the way to the conference. I was like, “You know what'd be cool? When I show off the serverless stuff, I would just copy the code from Stack Overflow. That'd be like a really cool joke to say this is what senior engineers do.” And I go to Stack Overflow and it's getting all of these pop-ups and my mouse couldn't highlight the text.So, I'm sitting there like a deer in headlights in front of all of these people and I'm looking down, and marketing is, like, “This is what… this is what we're talking about.” And so, I'm like, “Man do I have to end this thing here?” And I remember I kept trying, I kept trying, and came to me. Once the mouse finally got in there and I cleared up all the popups, I just came up with this joke. I said, “Good developers copy.” And I switched over to my terminal and I took the text from Stack Overflow and I said, “Great developers paste,” and the whole room start laughing.And I had them back. And we kept going and continued. And at the end, there was like this Google Assistant, and when it was finished, I said, “Thank you,” to the Google Assistant and it was talking back through the live system. And it said, “I got to admit, that was kind of dope.” So, I go to the back and Diane Greene walks back there—the CEO of Google Cloud—and she pats me on the shoulder. “Kelsey, that was dope.”But it was the thrill because I had as much thrill as the people watching it. So, in real-time, I was going through all these emotions. But I think people forget, the demo is supposed to convey something. The demo is supposed to tell some story. And I've seen people overdo their demos with way too much code, way too many commands, almost if they're trying to show off their expertise versus telling a story. And so, when I think about the demo, it has to complement the entire narrative. And so, sometimes you don't need as many commands, you don't need as much code. You can keep things simple and that gives you a lot more ins and outs in case something does go crazy.Corey: And I think the key takeaway here that so many people lose sight of is you have to know the material well enough that whatever happens, well, things don't always go the way I planned during the day, either, and talking through that is something that I think serves as a good example. It feels like a bit more of a challenge when you're trying to demo something that a company is trying to sell someone, “Oh, yeah, it didn't work. But that's okay.” But I'm still reminded by probably one of the best conference demo fails I've ever seen on video. One day, someone was attempting to do a talk that hit Amazon S3 and it didn't work.And the audience started shouting at him that yeah, S3 is down right now. Because that was the big day that S3 took a nap for four hours. It was one of those foundational things you'd should never stop to consider. Like, well, what if the internet doesn't work tomorrow when I'm doing my demo? That's a tough one to work around. But rough timing.Kelsey: [breathy sound]Corey: He nailed the rest of the talk, though. You keep going. That's the thing that people miss. They get stuck in the demo that isn't working, they expect the audience knows as much as they do about what's supposed to happen next. You're the one up there telling a story. People forget it's storytelling.Kelsey: Now, I will be remiss to say, I know that the demo gods have been on my side for, like, ten, maybe fifteen years solid. So, I retired from doing live demos. This is why I just don't do them anymore. I know I'm overdue as an understatement. But the thing I've learned though, is that what I found more impressive than the live demo is to be able to convey the same narratives through story alone. No slides. No demo. Nothing. But you can still make people feel where you would try to go with that live demo.And it's insanely hard, especially for technologies people have never seen before. But that's that new challenge that I kind of set up for myself. So, if you see me at a keynote and you've noticed why I've been choosing these fireside chats, it's mainly because I'm also trying to increase my ability to share narrative, technical concepts, but now in a new form. So, this new storytelling format through the fireside chat has been my substitute for the live demo, normally because I think sometimes, unless there's something really to show that people haven't seen before, the live demo isn't as powerful to me. Once the thing is kind of known… the live demo is kind of more of the same. So, I think they really work well when people literally have never seen the thing before, but outside of that, I think you can kind of move on to, like, real-life scenarios and narratives that help people understand the fundamentals and the philosophy behind the tech.Corey: An awful lot of tools and tech that we use on a day-to-day basis as well are thankfully optimized for the people using them and the ergonomics of going about your day. That is orthogonal, in my experience, to looking very impressive on stage. It's the rare company that can have a product that not only works well but also presents well. And that is something I don't tend to index on when I'm selecting a tool to do something with. So, it's always a question of how can I make this more visually entertaining? For while I got out of doing demos entirely, just because talking about things that have more staying power than a screenshot that is going to wind up being irrelevant the next week when they decide to redo the console for some service yet again.Kelsey: But you know what? That was my secret to doing software products and projects. When I was at CoreOS, we used to have these meetups we would used to do every two weeks or so. So, when we were building things like etcd, Fleet was a container management platform that came before Kubernetes, we would always run through them as a user, start install them, use them, and ask how does it feel? These command line flags, they don't feel right. This isn't a narrative you can present with the software alone.But once we could, then the meetups were that much more engaging. Like hey, have you ever tried to distribute configuration to, like, a thousand servers? It's insanely hard. Here's how you do with Puppet. But now I'm going to show you how you do with etcd. And then the narrative will kind of take care of itself because the tool was positioned behind what people would actually do with it versus what the tool could do by itself.Corey: I think that's the missing piece that most marketing doesn't seem to quite grasp is, they talk about the tool and how awesome it is, but that's why I love customer demos so much. They're showing us how they use a tool to solve a real-world problem. And honestly, from my snarky side of the world and the attendant perspective there, I can make an awful lot of fun about basically anything a company decides to show me, but put a customer on stage talking about how whatever they've built is solving a real-world problem for them, that's the point where I generally shut up and listen because I'm going to learn something about a real-world story. Because you don't generally get to tell customers to go on stage and just make up a story that makes us sound good, and have it come off with any sense of reality whatsoever. I haven't seen that one happen yet, but I'm sure it's out there somewhere.Kelsey: I don't know how many founders or people building companies listen in to your podcast, but this is right now, I think the number one problem that especially venture-backed startups have. They tend to have great technology—maybe it's based off some open-source project—with tons of users who just know how that tool works, it's just an ingredient into what they're already trying to do. But that isn't going to ever be your entire customer base. Soon, you'll deal with customers who don't understand the thing you have and they need more than technology, right? They need a product.And most of these companies struggle painting that picture. Here's what you can do with it. Or here's what you can't do now, but you will be able to do if you were to use this. And since they are missing that, a lot of these companies, they produce a lot of code, they ship a lot of open-source stuff, they raise a lot of capital, and then it just goes away, it fades out over time because they can bring on no newcomers. The people who need help the most, they don't have a narrative for them, and so therefore, they're just hoping that the people who have all the skills in the world, the early adopters, but unfortunately, those people are tend to be the ones that don't actually pay. They just kind of do it themselves. It's the people who need the most help.Corey: How do we monetize the bleeding edge of adoption? In many cases you don't. They become your community if you don't hug them to death first.Kelsey: Exactly.Corey: Ugh. None of this is easy. I really want to thank you for taking the time to catch up and talk about how you seen the remains of a career well spent, and now you're going off into that glorious sunset. But I have a sneaking suspicion you'll still be around. Where should people go if they want to follow up on what you're up to these days?Kelsey: Right now I still use… I'm going to keep calling it Twitter.Corey: I agree.Kelsey: I kind of use that for my real-time interactions. And I'm still attending conferences, doing fireside chats, and just meeting people on those conference floors. But that's what where I'll be for now. So yeah, I'll still be around, but maybe not as deep. And I'll be spending more time just doing normal life stuff, maybe less building software.Corey: And we will, of course, put a link to that in the show notes. Thank you so much for taking the time to catch up and share your reflections on how the industry is progressing.Kelsey: Awesome. Thanks for having me, Corey.Corey: Kelsey Hightower, now gloriously retired. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an angry comment that you're going to type on stage as part of a conference talk, and then accidentally typo all over yourself while you're doing it.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.
In this episode of The New Stack Makers, Purnima Padmanabhan, a senior vice president at VMware, discusses three common mistakes organizations make when trying to move faster in meeting customer needs. The first mistake is equating application modernization with solely moving to the cloud, often resulting in a mere lift and shift of applications, without reaping the full benefits. The second mistake is a lack of automation, particularly in operations, which hinders the development process's speed. The third mistake involves adding unnecessary complexity by adopting new technologies or procedures, which slows down developers.As a solution, Padmanabhan introduces the concept of platform engineering, which not only accelerates development but also reduces toil for operations engineers and architects. However, many organizations struggle with implementing it effectively, as they often approach platform engineering in fragmented ways, investing in separate components without fully connecting them.To succeed in adopting platform engineering, Padmanabhan emphasizes the need for a mindset shift. The platform team must treat platform engineering as a continuously evolving product rather than a one-time delivery, ensuring that service-level agreements are continuously met, and regularly updating and improving features and velocity. The episode discusses the benefits of a well-implemented "golden path" for entire organizations and provides insights on how to start a platform engineering team.Learn more from The New Stack about Platform Engineering and VMware:Platform Engineering Overview, News and TrendsPlatform Engineers: Developers Are Your CustomersOpen Source Platform Engineering: A Decade of Cloud Foundry
So you've built an app platform. And those pesky developers aren't showing up to use. Or, worse, they grumble about it! Did you remember to tell anyone about it, to convince them to use it? You know: marketing! Also, they'll need to know how to use it. And you know what that means! Documentation. In this episode, Coté and Ben talk about the basics platform marketing: brand, principles, advocacy, internal conferences, and more. They also discuss the role of Backstage in making platforms better, as well as everyday developer life. You can also watch the video of this episode, if you prefer that kind of thing. Be sure to check out VMware's platforms: For the Kubernetes fans out there: Tanzu Application Platform. And for the PaaS fans: The Tanzu Application Service (based on Cloud Foundry).
So you've built an app platform. And those pesky developers aren't showing up to use. Or, worse, they grumble about it! Did you remember to tell anyone about it, to convince them to use it? You know: marketing! Also, they'll need to know how to use it. And you know what that means! Documentation. In this episode, Coté and Ben talk about the basics platform marketing: brand, principles, advocacy, internal conferences, and more. They also discuss the role of Backstage in making platforms better, as well as everyday developer life. You can also watch the video of this episode, if you prefer that kind of thing. Be sure to check out VMware's platforms: For the Kubernetes fans out there: Tanzu Application Platform. And for the PaaS fans: The Tanzu Application Service (based on Cloud Foundry).
Right after Cloud Foundry Day 2023, Nick and Coté do a quick re-cap of the day. Taking place in Germany, there were many people from the German community, and elsewhere of course. Nick goes over his little talk which focused on Cloud Foundry usage and metrics. His recent post on The New Stack includes a lot of the same content. Keep an eye on the Cloud Foundry YouTube channel for recordings of all the talks, including Nick's and Coté's.
Right after Cloud Foundry Day 2023, Nick and Coté do a quick re-cap of the day. Taking place in Germany, there were many people from the German community, and elsewhere of course. Nick goes over his little talk which focused on Cloud Foundry usage and metrics. His recent post on The New Stack includes a lot of the same content. Keep an eye on the Cloud Foundry YouTube channel for recordings of all the talks, including Nick's and Coté's.
Cloud Foundry is one of the most mature, most proven platform as a service stacks. And it's open source! Ahead of CF Day on June 21st, 2023 (in person and live), Coté catches up with Ram Iyengar, Chief Evangelist at Cloud Foundry Foundation. They discuss Cloud Foundry's integrations with Kubernetes and related projects, organizations that use and contribute to Cloud Foundry, how Cloud Foundry fits into platform engineering think (and doesn't), the Cloud Foundry Foundation, and how Ram ended up being a developer advocate. Cloud Foundry Day is on June 21st, 2023 in Heidelberg, Germany. It's in person and online, so you can attend whether you're in person, or cozy at home. It's free to attend online. Register for Cloud Foundry Day here. Cloud Foundry. Ram in Twitter. Ram in LinkedIn. Also, check out VMware's Cloud Foundry distro, the Tanzu Application Service (formally Pivotal Cloud Foundry).
Cloud Foundry is one of the most mature, most proven platform as a service stacks. And it's open source! Ahead of CF Day on June 21st, 2023 (in person and live), Coté catches up with Ram Iyengar, Chief Evangelist at Cloud Foundry Foundation. They discuss Cloud Foundry's integrations with Kubernetes and related projects, organizations that use and contribute to Cloud Foundry, how Cloud Foundry fits into platform engineering think (and doesn't), the Cloud Foundry Foundation, and how Ram ended up being a developer advocate. Cloud Foundry Day is on June 21st, 2023 in Heidelberg, Germany. It's in person and online, so you can attend whether you're in person, or cozy at home. It's free to attend online. Register for Cloud Foundry Day here. Cloud Foundry. Ram in Twitter. Ram in LinkedIn. Also, check out VMware's Cloud Foundry distro, the Tanzu Application Service (formally Pivotal Cloud Foundry).
Abby Kearns has a long history in the open source ecosystem as the previous CTO of infrastructure automation platform Puppet, previous CEO of Cloud Foundry Foundation, and an active investor and advisor to many open source startups. In this episode, we dig into the Puppet journey, the role organizations like Cloud Foundry play in the open source ecosystem, her views on open source projects versus products, her advice to open source startups & much more! Video episode here
Nick Kuhn talks about the upcoming release of Tanzu Application Service 4.0 and gives a high-level overview of what TAS and Cloud Foundry and how customers are using them.
What's going on in the Cloud Foundry community? In this episode, Ben and Coté are joined by Nick Kuhn (a return guest!) to talk about the recent Cloud Foundry Day at KubeCon. They discuss Cloud Foundry on kubernetes, build packs, Detroit pizza, and singing the hits of the day back in the late 80s. Mentioned: The Application Service Adaptor to wire up Cloud Foundry with kubernetes. Nick's demo of the Adaptor. Recordings of talks from Cloud Foundry Day, 2022. The Tanzu Application Service, VMware's Cloud Foundry distro. You can watch the original video recording if you prefer that.
What's going on in the Cloud Foundry community? In this episode, Ben and Coté are joined by Nick Kuhn (a return guest!) to talk about the recent Cloud Foundry Day at KubeCon. They discuss Cloud Foundry on kubernetes, build packs, Detroit pizza, and singing the hits of the day back in the late 80s. Mentioned: The Application Service Adaptor to wire up Cloud Foundry with kubernetes. Nick's demo of the Adaptor. Recordings of talks from Cloud Foundry Day, 2022. The Tanzu Application Service, VMware's Cloud Foundry distro. You can watch the original video recording if you prefer that.
This session will be an end-to-end demo showing how to build and deploy a UI5 application to Cloud Foundry that consumes an ABAP based backend system. It will use the SAP HTML5 Application Repository Service as well as an SAP Approuter (to authenticate users) at its core. The session will start from scratch explaining each of the necessary steps involved.
The new version of the Tanzu Application Service is out. In this episode, Nick Kuhn walks Coté and Ben through the new features for developers and operations staff. Find out more: Blog with full details on VMware Tanzu Application Service 3.0. Get the deep dive on the version format and updates to the long-term support track. Read about VMware's continued commitment to Cloud Foundry. Check out the Tanzu Application Service tech zone site to stay current on all the things. As you may recall, dear listeners, the Tanzu Application Service was previously called Pivotal Cloud Foundry.
The new version of the Tanzu Application Service is out. In this episode, Nick Kuhn walks Coté and Ben through the new features for developers and operations staff. Find out more: Blog with full details on VMware Tanzu Application Service 3.0. Get the deep dive on the version format and updates to the long-term support track. Read about VMware's continued commitment to Cloud Foundry. Check out the Tanzu Application Service tech zone site to stay current on all the things. As you may recall, dear listeners, the Tanzu Application Service was previously called Pivotal Cloud Foundry.
Andy is a Developer Relations professional at Twitter. Prior to joining Twitter in 2014, Andy was Developer Advocate for Cloud Foundry, the OSS Platform-as-a-Service, at VMware/Pivotal. Earlier, he spent 10 years at IBM; and 4 years at the UK Post Office, where he helped the company navigate the challenges of Y2K. Andy has over 20 years of experience with Linux, and with contributing to Open Source projects. He was a leading member of the MQTT Open Source community for five year, and took an active role in building the developer ecosystem. He has 20+ years of experience as a coder, and in collaborating with and supporting developer communities. Andy earned an M.A. in Modern History from Brasenose College, Oxford. He is @andypiper on Twitter. You can follow Andy on Social Media https://twitter.com/andypiper https://andypiper.me/ Also Follow Andy's Podcast https://gamesatwork.biz PLEASE SUBSCRIBE TO THE PODCAST - Spotify: http://isaacl.dev/podcast-spotify - Apple Podcasts: http://isaacl.dev/podcast-apple - Google Podcasts: http://isaacl.dev/podcast-google - RSS: http://isaacl.dev/podcast-rss You can check out more episodes of Coffee and Open Source on https://www.coffeeandopensource.com/ Coffee and Open Source is hosted by Isaac Levin (https://twitter.com/isaacrlevin) --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/coffeandopensource/support
With the growing adoption of Kubernetes, many technologies, including Cloud Foundry, are evolving to embrace this tectonic shift in the industry. Cloud Foundry Foundation (CFF) has been going through a major transformation to embrace this change. However, this change doesn't necessarily mean that Cloud Foundry is on its way out. On the contrary, like many major technologies, it will continue to serve a wide range of users and customers. What really matters is how Cloud Foundry leaders, including the foundation and companies sponsoring the project, look at this change; how committed they are to the users of this open source project. In this episode of TFiR Let's Talk, Swapnil Bhartiya sits down with Catherine McGarvey, Vice President of Software Engineering at VMware and Chris Clark, Program Manager at the Cloud Foundry Foundation, to discuss the state of Cloud Foundry today and how it is evolving as the momentum continues towards Kubernetes. They also discuss VMware's continued commitment to the project and McGarvey's recent appointment to the Cloud Foundry's governing board.
Why are the right values important for a company that changed the way the world builds software? How does pair programming help scale & maintain the company culture? What is it like to grow a company to 3000 employees over 30 years? Today we have the privilege of Rob Mee, former CEO of Pivotal, the real home of Cloud Foundry and Concourse CI. Rob is now the CEO of Geometer.io, an incubator where Elixir is behind many great ideas executed well, including the US COVID response programme.
Why are the right values important for a company that changed the way the world builds software? How does pair programming help scale & maintain the company culture? What is it like to grow a company to 3000 employees over 30 years? Today we have the privilege of Rob Mee, former CEO of Pivotal, the real home of Cloud Foundry and Concourse CI. Rob is now the CEO of Geometer.io, an incubator where Elixir is behind many great ideas executed well, including the US COVID response programme.
Matt Butcher (@technosophos, Co-Founder/CEO @fermyontech) talks about building the next-generation PaaS platform around WebAssembly. SHOW: 633CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK - http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotwCHECK OUT OUR NEW PODCAST - "CLOUDCAST BASICS"SHOW SPONSORS:Datadog Kubernetes Solution: Maximum Visibility into Container EnvironmentsStart monitoring the health and performance of your container environment with a free 14 day Datadog trial. Listeners of The Cloudcast will also receive a free Datadog T-shirt.Streamline on-call, collaboration, incident management, and automation with a free 30-day trial of Lightstep Incident Response, built on ServiceNow. Listeners of The Cloudcast will also receive a free Lightstep Incident Response T-shirt after firing an alert or incident.Pay for the services you use, not the number of people on your team with Lightstep Incident Response. Try free for 30 days. Fire an alert or incident today and receive a free Lightstep Incident Response t-shirt.SHOW NOTES:Fermyon (homepage)Fermyon launches WebAssembly PaaS platform (June 2022)Fermyon Open SourceFinicky Whiskers (WebAssembly game)Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. Let's talk about your background, as well as the team as Ferymon, as you all have some experience building application platforms.Topic 2 - Before we get into Fermyon, let's talk about WebAssembly. What is it, and how does it connect to your previous world of being heavily involved in containers and Kubernetes?Topic 3 - Let's talk about what it means to be a WebAssembly PaaS. We've seen PaaS platforms in the past (Deis, Heroku, dotCloud, Cloud Foundry, OpenShift, etc.). What do developers need to do, and what does the platform take care of? Topic 4 - Walk us through the Spin project and what it delivers? Can it be compared/contrasted to a container experience, or something else developers are familiar with?Topic 5 - What are some of the unique capabilities and use-cases where WebAssembly is a good fit and delivers unique value today?Topic 6 - How are people able to engage with Fermyon today?FEEDBACK?Email: show at the cloudcast dot netTwitter: @thecloudcastnet
In this episode, we cover: Aaron talks about starting out as a developer and the early stages of cloud development at RBC (1:05) Aaron discusses transitioning to developer advocacy (12:25) Aaron identifies successes he had in his early days of developer advocacy (20:35) Jason asks what it looks like to assist developers in achieving completion with long term maintenance projects, or “sustainable development” (25:40) Jason and Aaron discuss what “innersource” is and why it's valuable in an organization (29:29) Aaron answers the question “how do you keep skills and knowledge up to date?” (33:55) Aaron talks about job opportunities at RBC (38:55) Links Referenced: Royal Bank of Canada: https://www.rbcroyalbank.com Opportunities at RBC: https://jobs.rbc.com/ca/en TranscriptAaron: And I guess some PM asked my boss, “So, Aaron doesn't come to our platform status meetings, he doesn't really take tickets, and he doesn't take support rotation. What does Aaron do for the Cloud Platform Team?”Jason: [laugh].Jason: Welcome to Break Things on Purpose, a podcast about reliability, learning, and building better systems. In this episode, we talk with Aaron Clark, Director of Developer Advocacy at the Royal Bank of Canada. We chat with him about his journey from developer to advocate, the power of applying open-source principles within organizations—known as innersource—and his advice to keep learning.Jason: Welcome to the show, Aaron.Aaron: Thanks for having me, Jason. My name is Aaron Clark. I'm a developer advocate for cloud at RBC. That is the Royal Bank of Canada. And I've been at the bank for… well, since February 2010.Jason: So, when you first joined the bank, you were not a developer advocate, though?Aaron: Right. So, I have been in my current role since 2019. I've been part of the cloud program since 2017. Way back in 2010, I joined as a Java developer. So, my background in terms of being a developer is pretty much heavy on Java. Java and Spring Boot, now.I joined working on a bunch of Java applications within one of the many functions areas within the Royal Bank. The bank is gigantic. That's kind of one of the things people sometimes struggle to grasp. It's such a large organization. We're something like 100,000… yeah, 100,000 employees, around 10,000 of that is in technology, so developers, developer adjacent roles like business analysts, and QE, and operations and support, and all of those roles.It's a big organization. And that's one of the interesting things to kind of grapple with when you join the organization. So, I joined in a group called Risk IT. We built solely internal-facing applications. I worked on a bunch of stuff in there.I'm kind of a generalist, where I have interest in all the DevOps things. I set up one of the very first Hudson servers in Risk—well, in the bank, but specifically in Risk—and I admin'ed it on the side because nobody else was doing it and it needed doing. After a few years of doing that and working on a bunch of different projects, I was occasionally just, “We need this project to succeed, to have a good foundation at the start, so Aaron, you're on this project for six months and then you're doing something different.” Which was really interesting. At the same time, I always worry about the problem where if you don't stay on something for very long, you never learn the consequences of the poor decisions you may have made because you don't have to deal with it.Jason: [laugh].Aaron: And that was like the flip side of, I hope I'm making good decisions here. It seemed to be pretty good, people seemed happy with it, but I always worry about that. Like, being in a role for a few years where you build something, and then it's in production, and you're running it and you're dealing with, “Oh, I made this decision that seems like a good idea at the time. Turns out that's a bad idea. Don't do that next time.” You never learned that if you don't stay in a role.When I was overall in Risk IT for four, almost five years, so I would work with a bunch of the teams who maybe stayed on this project, they'd come ask me questions. It's like, I'm not gone gone. I'm just not working on that project for the next few months or whatever. And then I moved into another part of the organization, like, a sister group called Finance IT that runs kind of the—builds and runs the general ledger for the bank. Or at least for a part of capital markets.It gets fuzzy as the organization moves around. And groups combine and disperse and things like that. That group, I actually had some interesting stuff that was when I started working on more things like cloud, looking at cloud, the bank was starting to bring in cloud. So, I was still on the application development side, but I was interested in it. I had been to some conferences like OSCON, and started to hear about and learn about things like Docker, things like Kubernetes, things like Spring Boot, and I was like this is some really neat stuff.I was working on a Spark-based ETL system, on one of the early Hadoop clusters at the bank. So, I've been I'm like, super, super lucky that I got to do a lot of this stuff, work on all of these new things when they were really nascent within the organization. I've also had really supportive leadership. So, like, I was doing—that continuous integration server, that was totally on the side; I got involved in a bunch of reuse ideas of, we have this larger group; we're doing a lot of similar things; let's share some of the libraries and things like that. That was before being any, like, developer advocate or anything like that I was working on these.And I was actually funded for a year to promote and work on reuse activities, basically. And that was—I learned a lot, I made a lot of mistakes that I now, like, inform some of the decisions I make in my current role, but I was doing all of this, and I almost described it as I kind of taxed my existing project because I'm working on this team, but I have this side thing that I have to do. And I might need to take a morning and not work on your project because I have to, like, maintain this build machine for somebody. And I had really supportive leadership. They were great.They recognize the value of these activities, and didn't really argue about the fact that I was taking time away from whatever the budget said I was supposed to be doing, which was really good. So, I started doing that, and I was working in finance as the Cloud Team was starting to go through a revamp—the initial nascent Cloud Team at the bank—and I was doing cloud things from the app dev side, but at the same time within my group, anytime something surprising became broken, somebody had some emergency that they needed somebody to drop in and be clever and solve things, that person became me. And I was running into a lot of distractions in that sense. And it's nice to be the person who gets to work on, “Oh, this thing needs rescuing. Help us, Aaron.”That's fantastic; it feels really good, right, up until you're spending a lot of your time doing it and you can't do the things that you're really interested in. So, I actually decided to move over to the Cloud Team and work on kind of defining how we build applications for the cloud, which was really—it was a really good time. It was a really early time in the bank, so nobody really knew how we were going to build applications, how we were going to put them on the cloud, what does that structure look like? I got to do a lot of reading and research and learning from other people. One of the key things about, like, a really large organization that's a little slow-moving like the bank and is a little bit risk-averse in terms of technology choices, people always act like that's always a bad thing.And sometimes it is because we're sometimes not adopting things that we would really get a lot of benefit out of, but the other side of it is, by the time we get to a lot of these technologies and platforms, a bunch of the sharp edges have kind of been sanded off. Like, the Facebooks and the Twitters of the world, they've adopted it and they've discovered all of these problems and been, like, duct-taping them together. And they've kind of found, “Oh, we need to have actual, like, security built into this system,” or things like that, and they've dealt with it. So, by the time we get to it, some of those issues are just not there anymore. We don't have to deal with them.Which is an underrated positive of being in a more conservative organization around that. So, we were figuring there's a lot of things we could learn from. When we were looking at microservices and, kind of, Spring Boot Spring Cloud, the initial cloud parts that had been brought into the organization were mainly around Cloud Foundry. And we were helping some initial app teams build their applications, which we probably over-engineered some of those applications, in the sense that we were proving out patterns that you didn't desperately need for building those applications. Like, you could have probably just done it with a web app and relational database and it would have been fine.But we were proving out some of the patterns of how do you build something for broader scale with microservices and things like that. We learned a bunch about the complexities of doing that too early, but we also learned a bunch about how to do this so we could teach other application teams. And that's kind of the group that I became part of, where I wasn't a platform operator on the cloud, but I was working with dev teams, building things with dev teams to help them learn how to build stuff for cloud. And this was my first real exposure to that scope and scale of the bank. I'd been in the smaller groups and one of the things that you start to encounter when you start to interact with the larger parts of the bank is just, kind of, how many silos there are, how diverse the tech stacks are in an organization of that size.Like, we have areas that do things with Java, we have areas doing things with .NET Framework, we have areas doing lots of Python, we have areas doing lots of Node, especially as the organization started building more web applications. While you're building things with Angular and using npm for the front-end, so you're building stuff on the back-end with Node as well. Whether that is a good technology choice, a lot of the time you're building with what you have. Even within Java, we'd have teams building with Spring Boot, and lots of groups doing that, but someone else is interested in Google Guice, so they're building—instead of Spring, they're using Google Guice as their dependency injection framework.Or they have a… like, there's the mainframe, right? You have this huge technology stack where lots of people are building Java EE applications still and trying to evolve that from the old grungy days of Java EE to the much nicer modern ways of it. And some of the technology conversations are things like, “Well, you can use this other technology; that's fine, but if you're using that, and we're using something else over here, we can't help each other. When I solve a problem, I can't really help solve it for you as well. You have to solve it for yourself with your framework.”I talked to a team once using Vertex in Java, and I asked them, “Why are you using Vertex?” And they said, “Well, that's what our team knew.” I was like, “That's a good technology choice in the sense that we have to deliver. This is what we know, so this is the thing we know we can succeed with rather than actually learning something new on the job while trying to deliver something.” That's often a recipe for challenges if not outright failure.Jason: Yeah. So, it sounds like that's kind of where you come in; if all these teams are doing very disparate things, right—Aaron: Mm-hm.Jason: That's both good and bad, right? That's the whole point of microservices is independent teams, everyone's decoupled, more velocity. But also, there's huge advantages—especially in an org the size of RBC—to leverage some of the learnings from one team to another, and really, like, start to share these best practices. I'm guessing that's where you come into play now in your current role.Aaron: Yeah. And that's the part where how do we have the flexibility for people to make their own choices while standardizing so we don't have this enormous sprawl, so we can build on things? And this is starting to kind of where I started really getting involved in community stuff and doing developer advocacy. And part of how this actually happened—and this is another one of those cases where I've been very fortunate and I've had great leaders—I was working as part of the Cloud Platform Team, the Special Projects group that I was, a couple of people left; I was the last one left. It's like, “Well, you can't be your own department, so you're part of Cloud Platform.” But I'm not an operator. I don't take a support rotation.And I'm ostensibly building tooling, but I'm mostly doing innersource. This is where the innersource community started to spin up at RBC. I was one of the, kind of, founding members of the innersource community and getting that going. We had built a bunch of libraries for cloud, so those were some of the first projects into innersource where I was maintaining the library for Java and Spring using OIDC. And this is kind of predating Spring Security's native support for OIDC—so Open ID Connect—And I was doing a lot of that, I was supporting app teams who were trying to adopt that library, I was involved in some of the other early developer experience things around, you complain this thing is bad as the developer; why do we have to do this? You get invited to one of the VP's regular weekly meetings to discuss, and now you're busy trying to fix, kind of, parts of the developer experience. I was doing this, and I guess some PM asked my boss, “So, Aaron doesn't come to our platform status meetings, he doesn't really take tickets, and he doesn't take support rotation. What does Aaron do for the Cloud Platform Team?”Jason: [laugh].Aaron: And my boss was like, “Well, Aaron's got a lot of these other things that he's involved with that are really valuable.” One of the other things I was doing at this point was I was hosting the Tech Talk speaking series, which is kind of an internal conference-style talks where we get an expert from within the organization and we try to cross those silos where we find someone who's a machine-learning expert; come and explain how TensorFlow works. Come and explain how Spark works, why it's awesome. And we get those experts to come and do presentations internally for RBC-ers. And I was doing that and doing all of the support work for running that event series with the co-organizers that we had.And at the end of the year, when they were starting up a new initiative to really focus on how do we start promoting cloud adoption rather than just people arrive at the platform and start using it and figure it out for themselves—you can only get so far with that—my boss sits me down. He says. “So, we really like all the things that you've been doing, all of these community things and things like that, so we're going to make that your job now.” And this is how I arrived at there. It's not like I applied to be a developer advocate. I was doing all of these things on the side and all of a sudden, 75% of my time was all of these side projects, and that became my job.So, it's not really the most replicable, like, career path, but it is one of those things where, like, getting involved in stuff is a great way to find a niche that is the things that you're passionate about. So, I changed my title. You can do that in some of our systems as long as your manager approves it, so I changed my title from the very generic ‘Senior Technical Systems Analyst—which, who knows what I actually do when that's my title—and I changed that to ‘Developer Advocate.' And that was when I started doing more research learning about what do actual developer advocates do because I want to be a developer advocate. I want to say I'm a developer advocate.For the longest time in the organization, I'm the only person in the company with that title, which is interesting because then nobody knows what to do with me because I'm not like—am I, like—I'm not a director, I'm not a VP. Like… but I'm not just a regular developer, either. Where—I don't fit in the hierarchy. Which is good because then people stop getting worried about what what are titles and things like that, and they just listen to what I say. So, I do, like, design consultations with dev teams, making sure that they knew what they were doing, or were aware of a bunch of the pitfalls when they started to get onto the cloud.I would build a lot of samples, a lot of docs, do a lot of the community engagement, so going to events internally that we'd have, doing a lot of those kinds of things. A lot of the innersource stuff I was already doing—the speaking series—but now it was my job formally, and it helped me cross a lot of those silos and work very horizontally. That's one of the different parts about my job versus a regular developer, is it's my job to cover anything to do with cloud—that at least, that I find interesting, or that my boss tells me I need to work at—and anything anywhere in the organization that touches. So, a dev team doing something with Kubernetes, I can go and talk to them. If they're building something in capital markets that might be useful, I can say, “Hey, can you share this into innersource so that other people can build on this work as well?”And that was really great because I develop all of these relationships with all of these other groups. And that was, to a degree, what the cloud program needed from me as well at that beginning. I explained that this was now my job to one of my friends. And they're like, “That sounds like the perfect job for you because you are technical, but you're really good with people.” I was like, “Am I? I guess I am now that I've been doing it for this amount of time.”And the other part of it as we've gone on more and more is because I talk to all of these development teams, I am not siloed in, I'm not as tunneled on the specific thing I'm working with, and now I can talk to the platform teams and really represent the application developer perspective. Because I'm not building the platform. And they have their priorities, and they have things that they have to worry about; I don't have to deal with that. My job is to bring the perspective of an application developer. That's my background.I'm not an operator; I don't care about the support rotation, I don't care about a bunch of the niggly things and toil of the platform. It's my job, sometimes, to say, hey, this documentation is well-intentioned. I understand how you arrived at this documentation from the perspective of being the platform team and the things that you prioritize and want to explain to people, but as an application developer, none of the information that I need to build something to run on your platform is presented in a manner that I am able to consume. So, I do, like, that side as well of providing customer feedback to the platform saying, “This thing is hard,” or, “This thing that you are asking the application teams to work on, they don't want to care about that. They shouldn't have to care about this thing.” And that sort of stuff.So, I ended up being this human router are sometimes where platform teams will say, “Do you know anybody who's doing this, who's using this thing?” Or finding one app team and say, “You should talk to that group over there because they are also doing the same thing, or they're struggling with the same thing, and you should collaborate.” Or, “They have solved this problem.” Because I don't know every single programming language we use, I don't know all of the frameworks, but I know who I asked for Python questions, and I will send teams to that person. And part of that, then, as I started doing this community work was actually building community.One of the great successes was, we have a Slack channel called ‘Cloud Adoption.' And that was the place where everybody goes to ask their questions about how do I do this thing to put something on Cloud Foundry, put it on Kubernetes? How do I do this? I don't understand. And that was sometimes my whole day was just going onto that Slack channel, answering questions, and being very helpful and trying to document things, trying to get a feel for what people were doing.It was my whole day, sometimes. It took a while to get used to that was actually, like, a successful day coming from a developer background. I'm used to building things, so I feel like success because I built something I can show you, that I did this today. And then I'd have days where I talked to a bunch of people and I don't have anything I can show you. That was, like, the hard part of taking on this role.But one of the big successes was we built this community where it wasn't just me. Other people who wanted to help people, who were just developers on different dev teams, they'd see me ask questions or answer questions, and they would then know the answers and they'd chime in. And as I started being tasked with more and more other activities, I would then get to go—I'd come back to Slack and see oh, there's a bunch of questions. Oh, it turns out, people are able to help themselves. And that was—like that's success from that standpoint of building community.And now that I've done that a couple times with Tech Talks, with some of the developer experience work, some of the cloud adoption work, I get asked internally how do you build community when we're starting up new communities around things like Site Reliability Engineering. How are we going to do that? So, I get—and that feels weird, but that's one of the things that I have been doing now. And as—like, this is a gigantic role because of all of the scope. I can touch anything with anyone in cloud.One of the scope things with the role, but also with the bank is not only do we have all these tech stacks, but we also have this really, really diverse set of technical acumen, where you have people who are experts already on Kubernetes. They will succeed no matter what I do. They'll figure it out because they're that type of personality, they're going to find all the information. If anything, some of the restrictions that we put in place to manage our environments and secure them because of the risk requirements and compliance requirements of being a regulated bank, those will get in the way. Sometimes I'm explaining why those things are there. Sometimes I'm agreeing with people. “Yeah, it sucks. I don't want to have to do this.”But at the same time, you'll have people who they just want to come in, write their code, go home. They don't want to think about technology other than that. They're not going to go and learn things on their own necessarily. And that's not the end of the world. As strange as that sounds to people who are the personality to be constantly learning and constantly getting into everything and tinkering, like, that's me too, but you still need people to keep the lights on, to do all of the other work as well. And people who are happy just doing that, that's also valuable.Because if I was in that role, I would not be happy. And someone who is happy, like, this is good for the overall organization. But the things that they need to learn, the things they need explained to them, the help they need for success is different. So, that's one of the challenges is figuring out how do you address all of those customers? And sometimes even the answer for those customers is—and this is one of the things about my role—it's like the definition is customer success.If the application you're trying to put on cloud should not go on cloud, it is my job to tell you not to put it on cloud. It is not my job to put you on cloud. I want you to succeed, not just to get there. I can get your thing on the cloud in an afternoon, probably, but if I then walk away and it breaks, like, you don't know what to do. So, a lot of the things around how do we teach people to self-serve, how do we make our internal systems more self-serve, those are kind of the things that I look at now.How do I manage my own time because the scope is so big? It's like, I need to figure out where I'm not moving a thousand things forward an inch, but I'm moving things to their completion. And I am learning to, while not managing people, still delegate and work with the community, work with the broader cloud platform group around how do I let go and help other people do things?Jason: So, you mentioned something in there that I think is really interesting, right, the goal of helping people get to completion, right? And I think that's such an interesting thing because I think as—in that advocacy role, there's often a notion of just, like, I'm going to help you get unstuck and then you can keep going, without a clear idea of where they're ultimately heading. And that kind of ties back into something that you said earlier about starting out as a developer where you build things and you kind of just, like, set it free, [laugh] and you don't think about, you know, that day two, sort of, operations, the maintenance, the ongoing kind of stuff. So, I'm curious, as you've progressed in your career, as you've gotten more wisdom from helping people out, what does that look like when you're helping people get to completion, also with the mindset of this is an application that's going to be running for quite some time. Even in the short term, you know, if it's a short-term thing, but I feel like with the bank, most things probably are somewhat long-lived. How do you balance that out? How do you approach that, helping people get to done but also keeping in mind that they have to—this app has to keep living and it has to be maintained?Aaron: Yeah, a lot of it is—like, the term we use is sustainable development. And part of that is kind of removing friction, trying to get the developers to a point where they can focus on, I guess, the term that's often used in the industry is their inner loop. And it should come as no surprise, the bank often has a lot of processes that are high in friction. There's a lot of open a ticket, wait for things. This is the part that I take my conversations with dev teams, and I ask them, “What are the things that are hard? What are the things you don't like? What are the things you wish you didn't have to do or care about?”And some of this is reading between the lines when you talk to them; it's not so much interviewing them. Like, any kind of requirements gathering, usually, it's not what they say, it's what they talk about that then you look at, oh, this is the problem; how do we unstuck that problem so that people can get to where they need to be going? And this kind of informs some of my feedback to the systems we put in place, the processes we put in place around the platform, some of the tooling we look at. I really, really love the philosophy from Docker and Solomon Hykes around, “Batteries included but removable.” I want developers to have a high baseline as a starting point.And this comes partly from my experience with Cloud Foundry. Cloud Foundry has a really great out-of-the-box dev experience for lots of things where, “I just have a web app. Just run it. It's Nginx; it's some HTML pages; I don't need to know all the details. Just make it go and give me the URL.”And I want more of that for app teams where they have a high baseline of things to work with as a starting point. And kind of every organization ends up building this, where they have—like, Netflix: Netflix OSS or Twitter with Finagle—where they have, “Here's the surrounding pieces that I want to plug in that everybody gets as a starting point. And how do we provide security? How do we provide all of these pieces that are major concerns for an app team, that they have to do, we know they have to do?” Some of these are things that only start coming up when they're on the cloud and trying to provide a lot more of that for app teams so they can focus on the business stuff and only get into the weeds when they need to.Jason: As you're talking about these frameworks that, you know, having this high quality or this high baseline of tools that people can just have, right, equipping them with a nice toolbox, I'm guessing that the innersource stuff that you're working on also helps contribute to that.Aaron: Oh, immensely. And as we've gone on and as we've matured, our innersource organization, a huge part of that is other groups as well, where they're finding things that—we need this. And they'll put—it originally it was, “We built this. We'll put it into innersource.” But what you get with that is something that is very targeted and specific to their group and maybe someone else can use it, but they can't use it without bending it a little bit.And I hate bending software to fit it. That's one of the things—it's a very common thing in the corporate environment where we have our existing processes and rather than adopting the standard approach that some tool uses, we need to take it and then bend it until it fits our existing process because we don't want to change our processes. And that gets hard because you run into weird edge cases where this is doing something strange because we bent it. And it's like, well, that's not its fault at that point. As we've started doing more innersource, a lot more things have really become innersource first, where groups realize we need to solve this together.Let's start working on it together and let's design the API as a group. And API design is really, really hard. And how do we do things with shared libraries or services. And working through that as a group, we're seeing more of that, and more commonly things where, “Well, this is a thing we're going to need. We're going to start it in innersource, we'll get some people to use it and they'll be our beta customers. And we'll inform it without really specifically targeting an application and an app team's needs.”Because they're all going to have specific needs. And that's where the, like, ‘included but removable' part comes in. How do we build things extensibly where we have the general solution and you can plug in your specifics? And we're still—like, this is not an easy problem. We're still solving it, we're still working through it, we're getting better at it.A lot of it's just how can we improve day-over-day, year-over-year, to make some of these things better? Even our, like, continuous integration and delivery pipelines to our to clouds, all of these things are in constant flux and constant evolution. We're supporting multiple languages; we're supporting multiple versions of different languages; we're talking about, hey, we need to get started adopting Java 17. None of our libraries or pipelines do that yet, but we should probably get on that since it's been out for—what—almost a year? And really working on kind of decomposing some of these things where we built it for what we needed at the time, but now it feels a bit rigid. How do we pull out the pieces?One of the big pushes in the organization after the log4j CVE and things like that broad impact on the industry is we need to do a much more thorough job around software supply chain, around knowing what we have, making sure we have scans happening and everything. And that's where, like, the pipeline work comes in. I'm consulting on the pipeline stuff where I provide a lot of customer feedback; we have a team that is working on that all full time. But doing a lot of those things and trying to build for what we need, but not cut ourselves off from the broader industry, as well. Like, my nightmare situation, from a tooling standpoint, is that we restrict things, we make decisions around security, or policy or something like that, and we cut ourselves off from the broader CNCF tooling ecosystem, we can't use any of those tools. It's like, well, now we have to build something ourselves, or—which we're never going to do it as well as the external community. Or we're going to just kind of have bad processes and no one's going to be happy so figuring out all of that.Jason: Yeah. One of the things that you mentioned about staying up to speed and having those standards reminds me of, you know, similar to that previous experience that I had was, basically, I was at an org where we said that we'd like to open-source and we used open-source and that basically meant that we forked things and then made our own weird modifications to it. And that meant, like, now, it wasn't really open-source; it was like this weird, hacked thing that you had to keep maintaining and trying to keep it up to date with the latest stuff. Sounds like you're in a better spot, but I am curious, in terms of keeping up with the latest stuff, how do you do that, right? Because you mentioned that the bank, obviously a bit slower, adopting more established software, but then there's you, right, where you're out there at the forefront and you're trying to gather best practices and new technologies that you can use at the bank, how do you do that as someone that's not building with the latest, greatest stuff? How do you keep that skills and that knowledge up to date?Aaron: I try to do reading, I try to set time aside to read things like The New Stack, listen to podcasts about technologies. It's a really broad industry; there's only so much I can keep up with. This was always one of the conversations going way back where I would have the conversation with my boss around the business proposition for me going to conferences, and explaining, like, what's the cost to acquire knowledge in an organization? And while we can bring in consultants, or we can hire people in, like, when you hire new people in, they bring in their pre-existing experiences. So, if someone comes in and they know Hadoop, they can provide information and ideas around is this a good problem to solve with Hadoop? Maybe, maybe not.I don't want to bet a project on that if I don't know anything about Hadoop or Kubernetes or… like, using something like Tilt or Skaffold with my tooling. That's one of the things I got from going to conferences, and I actually need to set more time aside to watch the videos now that everything's virtual. Like, not having that dedicated week is a problem where I'm just disconnected and I'm not dealing with anything. When you're at work, even if KubeCon's going on or Microsoft Build, I'm still doing my day-to-day, I'm getting Slack messages, and I'm not feeling like I can just ignore people. I should probably block out more time, but part of how I stay up to date with it.It's really doing a lot of that reading and research, doing conversations like this, like, the DX Buzz that we invited you to where… I explained that event—it's adjacent to internal speakers—I explained that as I was had a backlog of videos from conferences I was not watching, and secretly if I make everybody else come to lunch with me to watch these videos, I have to watch the video because I'm hosting the session to discuss it, and now I will at least watch one a month. And that's turned out to be a really successful thing internally within the organization to spread knowledge, to have conversations with people. And the other part I do, especially on the tooling side, is I still build stuff. As much as, like, I don't code nearly as much as I used to, I bring an application developer perspective, but I'm not writing code every day anymore.Which I always said was going to be the thing that would make me miserable. It's not. I still think about it, and when I do get to write code, I'm always looking for how can I improve this setup? How can I use this tool? Can I try it out? Is this better? Is this smoother for me so I'm not worrying about this thing?And then spreading that information more broadly within the developer experience group, our DevOps teams, our platform teams, talking to those teams about the things that they use. Like, we use Argo CD within one group and I haven't touched it much, but I know they've got lots of expertise, so talking to them. “How do you use this? How is this good for me? How do I make this work? How can I use it, too?”Jason: I think it's been an incredible, [laugh] as you've been chatting, there are so many different tools and technologies that you've mentioned having used or being used at the bank. Which is both—it's interesting as a, like, there's so much going on in the bank; how do you manage it all? But it's also super interesting, I think, because it shows that there's a lot of interest in just finding the right solutions and finding the right tools, and not really being super-strongly married to one particular tool or one set way to do things, which I think is pretty cool. We're coming up towards the end of our time here, so I did want to ask you, before we sign off, Aaron, do you have anything that you'd like to plug, anything you want to promote?Aaron: Yeah, the Cloud Program is hiring a ton. There's lots of job openings on all of our platform teams. There's probably job openings on my Cloud Adoption Team. So, if you think the bank sounds interesting—the bank is very stable; that's always one of the nice things—but the bank… the thing about the bank, I originally joined the bank saying, “Oh, I'll be here two years, and I'll get bored and I'll leave,” and now it's been 12 years and I'm still at the bank. Because I mentioned, like, that scope and scale of the organization, there's always something interesting happening somewhere.So, if you're interested in cloud platform stuff, we've got a huge cloud platform. If you're in—like, you want to do machine-learning, we've got an entire organization. It should come as no surprise, we have lots of data at a bank, and there's a whole organization for all sorts of different things with machine-learning, deep learning, data analytics, big data, stuff like that. Like, if you think that's interesting, and even if you're not specifically in Toronto, Canada, you can probably find an interesting role within the organization if that's something that turns your crank.Jason: Awesome. We'll post links to everything that we've mentioned, which is a ton. But go check us out, gremlin.com/podcast is where you can find the show note for this episode, and we'll have links to everything. Aaron, thank you so much for joining us. It's been a pleasure to have you.Aaron: Thanks so much for having me, Jason. I'm so happy that we got to do this.Jason: For links to all the information mentioned, visit our website at gremlin.com/podcast. If you liked this episode, subscribe to the Break Things on Purpose podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or your favorite podcast platform. Our theme song is called, “Battle of Pogs” by Komiku, and it's available on loyaltyfreakmusic.com.
A Goldilocks' balance challenges us to trade off prescriptive and flexible platforms. James Urquhart shares his experiences with Cloud Foundry, VMware, and Amazon about trying to find the right balance between building it yourself versus a prescriptive service approach. We've decided that there needs to be a middle zone with enough opportunity for customization, as well as enough pre-set, prescriptive methods to create sustainability. In this episode, we talk about that balance and how different processes have done it in industry. Transcript: https://otter.ai/u/OQBfCHldtYjUpqjKdkN3KjzLiR0 Image: https://www.pexels.com/photo/brown-teddy-bear-on-brown-wooden-bench-outside-207891/
While Kubernetes brings a great deal of flexibility to application management, the Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service (PaaS) software offers the best level of standardization, observed Julian Fischer, CEO, of cloud native services provider anynines.We chatted with Fischer for this latest episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, to learn about the company's experience in managing large-scale deployments of both Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry."A lot of the conversation today is about Kubernetes. But the Cloud Foundry ecosystem has been very strong," especially for enterprises, noted Fischer.
In this episode of Breaking Changes, Postman Chief Evangelist Kin Lane welcomes Dekel Tankel of VMware. Dekel, who has more than 20 years of engineering and product experience, will cover a wide spectrum of topics including API gateways, brownfield API infrastructure, tenets of API management, and how to convince leadership to invest in APIs.
In episode 78 of JAMstack Radio, Brian is joined by Shedrack Akintayo of Cloud Foundry Foundation. They discuss Shedrack's introduction to the JAMstack, how he engages his community as a Developer Advocate, and how Cloud Foundry is impacting JAMstack developers.
Today on the show we are very lucky to be joined by Chris Umbel and Shaun Anderson from Pivotal to talk about app transformation and modernization! Our guests help companies to update their systems and move into more up-to-date setups through the Swift methodology and our conversation focusses on this journey from legacy code to a more manageable solution. We lay the groundwork for the conversation, defining a few of the key terms and concerns that arise for typical clients and then Shaun and Chris share a bit about their approach to moving things forward. From there, we move into the Swift methodology and how it plays out on a project before considering the benefits of further modernization that can occur after the initial project. Chris and Shaun share their thoughts on measuring success, advantages of their system and how to avoid roll back towards legacy code. For all this and more, join us on The Podlets Podcast, today! Follow us: https://twitter.com/thepodlets Website: https://thepodlets.io Feeback: info@thepodlets.io https://github.com/vmware-tanzu/thepodlets/issues Hosts: Carlisia Campos Josh Rosso Duffie Cooley Olive Power Key Points From This Episode: A quick introduction to our two guests and their roles at Pivotal. Differentiating between application organization and application transformation. Defining legacy and the important characteristics of technical debt and pain. The two-pronged approach at Pivotal; focusing on apps and the platform. The process of helping companies through app transformation and what it looks like. Overlap between the Java and .NET worlds; lessons to be applied to both. Breaking down the Swift methodology and how it is being used in app transformation. Incremental releases and slow modernization to avoid roll back to legacy systems. The advantages that the Swift methodology offers a new team. Possibilities of further modernization and transformation after a successful implementation. Measuring success in modernization projects in an organization using initial objectives. Quotes: “App transformation, to me, is the bucket of things that you need to do to move your product down the line.” — Shaun Anderson [0:04:54] “The pioneering teams set a lot of the guidelines for how the following teams can be doing their modernization work and it just keeps rolling down the track that way.” — Shaun Anderson [0:17:26] “Swift is a series of exercises that we use to go from a business problem into what we call a notional architecture for an application.” — Chris Umbel [0:24:16] “I think what's interesting about a lot of large organizations is that they've been so used to doing big bang releases in general. This goes from software to even process changes in their organizations.” — Chris Umbel [0:30:58] Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode: Chris Umbel — https://github.com/chrisumbel Shaun Anderson — https://www.crunchbase.com/person/shaun-anderson Pivotal — https://pivotal.io/ VMware — https://www.vmware.com/ Michael Feathers — https://michaelfeathers.silvrback.com/ Steeltoe — https://steeltoe.io/ Alberto Brandolini — https://leanpub.com/u/ziobrando Swiftbird — https://www.swiftbird.us/ EventStorming — https://www.eventstorming.com/book/ Stephen Hawking — http://www.hawking.org.uk/ Istio — https://istio.io/ Stateful and Stateless Workload Episode — https://thepodlets.io/episodes/009-stateful-and-stateless/ Pivotal Presentation on Application Transformation: https://content.pivotal.io/slides/application-transformation-workshop Transcript: EPISODE 19 [INTRODUCTION] [0:00:08.7] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Podlets Podcast, a weekly show that explores Cloud Native one buzzword at a time. Each week, experts in the field will discuss and contrast distributed systems concepts, practices, tradeoffs and lessons learned to help you on your cloud native journey. This space moves fast and we shouldn’t reinvent the wheel. If you’re an engineer, operator or technically minded decision maker, this podcast is for you. [EPISODE] [0:00:41.0] CC: Hi, everybody. Welcome back to The Podlets. Today, we have an exciting show. It's myself on, Carlisia Campos. We have our usual guest hosts, Duffie Cooley, Olive Power and Josh Rosso. We also have two special guests, Chris Umbel. Did I say that right, Chris? [0:01:03.3] CU: Close enough. [0:01:03.9] CC: I should have checked before. [0:01:05.7] CU: Umbel is good. [0:01:07.1] CC: Umbel. Yeah. I'm not even the native English speaker, so you have to bear with me. Shaun Anderson. Hi. [0:01:15.6] SA: You said my name perfectly. Thank you. [0:01:18.5] CC: Yours is more standard American. Let's see, the topic of today is application modernization. Oh, I just found out word I cannot pronounce. That's my non-pronounceable words list. Also known as application transformation, I think those two terms correctly used alternatively? The experts in the house should say something. [0:01:43.8] CU: Yeah. I don't know that I would necessarily say that they're interchangeable. They're used interchangeably, I think by the general population though. [0:01:53.0] CC: Okay. We're going to definitely dig into that, how it does it not make sense to use them interchangeably, because just by the meaning, I would think so, but I'm also not in that world day-to-day and that Shaun and Chris are. By the way, please give us a brief introduction the two of you. Why don't you go first, Chris? [0:02:14.1] CU: Sure. I am Chris Umbel. I believe it was probably actually pronounced Umbel in Germany, but I go with Umbel. My title this week is the – I think .NET App Transformation Journey Lead. Even though I focus on .NET modernization, it doesn't end there. Touch a little bit of everything with Pivotal. [0:02:34.2] SA: I'm Shaun Anderson and I share the same title of the week as Chris, except for where you say .NET, I would say Java. In general, we play the same role and have slightly different focuses, but there's a lot of overlap. [0:02:48.5] CU: We get along, despite the .NET and Java thing. [0:02:50.9] SA: Usually. [0:02:51.8] CC: You both are coming from Pivotal, yeah? As most people should know, but I'm sure now everybody knows, Pivotal was just recently as of these date, which is what we are? End of January. This episode is going to be a while to release, but Pivotal was just acquired by VMware. Here we are. [0:03:10.2] SA: It's good to be here. [0:03:11.4] CC: All right. Somebody, one of you, may be let's say Chris, because you've brought this up, how this application organization differs from application transformation? Because I think we need to lay the ground and lay the definitions before we can go off and talk about things and sound experts and make sure that everybody can follow us. [0:03:33.9] CU: Sure. I think you might even get different definitions, even from within our own practice. I'll at least lay it out as I see it. I think it's probably consistent with how Shaun's going to see it as well, but it's what we tell customers anyway. At the end of the day, there are – app transformation is the larger [inaudible] bucket. That's going to include, say just the re-hosting of applications, taking applications from point A to some new point B, without necessarily improving the state of the application itself. We'd say that that's not necessarily an exercise in paying down technical debt, it's just making some change to an application or its environment. Then on the modernization side, that's when things start to get potentially a little more architectural. That's when the focus becomes paying down technical debt and really improving the application itself, usually from an architectural point of view and things start to look maybe a little bit more like rewrites at that point. [0:04:31.8] DC: Would you say that the transformation is more in-line with re-platforming, those of you that might think about it? [0:04:36.8] CU: We'd say that app transformation might include re-platforming and also the modernization. What do you think of that, Shaun? [0:04:43.0] SA: I would say transformation is not just the re-platforming, re-hosting and modernization, but also the practice to figure out which should happen as well. There's a little bit more meta in there. Typically, app transformation to me is the bucket of things that you need to do to move your product down the line. [0:05:04.2] CC: Very cool. I have two questions before we start really digging to the show, is still to lay the ground for everyone. My next question will be are we talking about modernizing and transforming apps, so they go to the clouds? Or is there a certain cut-off that we start thinking, “Oh, we need to – things get done differently for them to be called native.” Is there a differentiation, or is this one is the same as the other, like the process will be the same either way? [0:05:38.6] CU: Yeah, there's definitely a distinction. The re-platforming bucket, that re-hosting bucket of things is where your target state, at least for us coming out of Pivotal, we had definitely a product focus, where we're probably only going to be doing work if it intersects with our product, right? We're going to be doing both re-platforming targeted, say typically at a cloud environment, usually Cloud Foundry or something to that effect. Then modernization, while we're usually doing that with customers who have been running our platform, there's nothing to say that you necessarily need a cloud, or any cloud to do modernization. We tend to based on who we work for, but you could say that those disciplines and practices really are agnostic to where things run. [0:06:26.7] CC: Sorry, I was muted. I wanted to ask Shaun if you wanted to add to that. Do you have the same view? [0:06:33.1] SA: Yeah. I have the same view. I think part of what makes our process unique that way is we're not necessarily trying to target a platform for deployment, when we're going through the modernization part anyway. We're really looking at how can we design this application to be the best application it can be. It just so happens that that tends to be more 12-factor compliant that is very cloud compatible, but it's not necessarily the way that we start trying to aim for a particular platform. [0:07:02.8] CC: All right. If everybody allows me, after this next question, I'll let other hosts speak too. Sorry for monopolizing, but I'm so excited about this topic. Again, in the spirit of understanding what we're talking about, what do you define as legacy? Because that's what we're talking about, right? We’re definitely talking about a move up, move forwards. We're not talking about regression and we're not talking about scaling down. We're talking about moving up to a modern technology stack. That means, that implies we're talking about something that's legacy. What is legacy? Is it contextual? Do we have a hard definition? Is there a best practice to follow? Is there something public people can look at? Okay, if my app, or system fits this recipe then it’s considered legacy, like a diagnosis that has a consensus. [0:07:58.0] CU: I can certainly tell you how you can't necessarily define legacy. One of the ways is by the year that it was written. You can certainly say that there are certainly shops who are writing legacy code today. They're still writing legacy code. As soon as they're done with a project, it's instantly legacy. There's people that are trying to define, like another Michael Feathers definition, which is I think any application that doesn't have tests, I don't know that that fits what – our practice necessarily sees legacy as. Basically, anything that's occurred a significant amount of technical debt, regardless of when the application was written or conceived fits into that legacy bucket. Really, our work isn't necessarily as concerned about whether something's legacy or not as much as is there pain that we can solve with our practice? Like I said, we've modernized things that were in for all intents and purposes, quite modern in terms of the year they were written. [0:08:53.3] SA: Yeah. I would double down on the pain. Legacy to us often is something that was written as a prototype a year ago. Now it's ready to prove itself. It's going to be scaled up, but it wasn't built with scale in mind, or something like that. Even though it may be the latest technology, it just wasn't built for the load, for example. Sometimes legacy can be – the pain is we have applications on a mainframe and we can't find Cobol developers and we're leasing a giant mainframe and it's costing a lot of money, right? There's different flavors of pain. It also could be something as simple as a data center move. Something like that, where we've got all of our applications running on Iron and we need to go to a virtual data center somewhere, whether it's cloud or on-prem. Each one of those to us is legacy. It's all about the pain. [0:09:47.4] CU: I think is miserable as that might sound, that's really where it starts and is listening to that pain and hearing directly from customers what that pain is. Sounds terrible when you think about it that you're always in search of pain, but that isn't indeed what we do and try to alleviate that in some way. That pain is what dictates the solution that you come up with, because there are certain kinds of pain that aren't going to be solved with say, modernization approach, a more a platformed approach even. You have to listen and make sure that you're applying the right medicine to the right pain. [0:10:24.7] OP: Seems like an interesting thing bringing what you said, Chris, and then what you said earlier, Shaun. Shaun you had mentioned the target platform doesn't necessarily matter, at least upfront. Then Chris, you had implied bringing the right thing in to solve the pain, or to help remedy the pain to some degree. I think what's interesting may be about the perspectives for those on this call and you too is a lot of times our entry points are a lot more focused with infrastructure and platform teams, where they have these objectives to solve, like cost and ability to scale and so on and so forth. It seems like your entry point, at least historically is maybe a little bit more focused on finding pain points on more of the app side of the house. I'm wondering if that's a fair assessment, or if you could speak to how you find opportunities and what you're really targeting. [0:11:10.6] SA: I would say that's a fair assessment from the perspective of our services team. We're mainly app-focused, but it's almost there's a two-pronged approach, where there's platform pain and application pain. What we've seen is often solving one without the other is not a great solution, right? I think that's where it's challenging, because there's so much to know, right? It's hard to find one team or one person who can point out the pain on both sides. It just depends on often, how the customer approaches us. If they are saying something like, “We’re a credit card company and we're getting our butts kicked by this other company, because they can do biometrics and we can't yet, because of the limitations of our application.” Then we would approach it from the app-first perspective. If it's another pain point, where our operations, day two operations is really suffering, we can't scale, where we have issues that the platform is really good at solving, then we may start there. It always tends to merge together in the end. [0:12:16.4] CU: You might be surprised how much variety there is in terms of the drivers for people coming to us. There are a lot of cases where the work came to us by way of the platform work that we've done. It started with our sister team who focuses on the platform side of things. They solve the infrastructure problems ahead of us and then we close things out on the application side. We if our account teams and our organization is really listening to each individual customer that you'll find that there – that the pain is drastically different, right? There are some cases where the driver is cost and that's an easy one to understand. There are also drivers that are usually like a date, such as this data center goes dark on this date and I have to do something about it. If I'm not out of that data center, then my apps no longer run. The solution to that is very different than the solution you would have to, "Look, my application is difficult for me to maintain. It takes me forever to ship features. Help me with that." There's two very different solutions to those problems, but each of which are things that come our way. It's just that former probably comes in by way of our platform team. [0:13:31.1] DC: Yeah, that’s an interesting space to operate in in the application transformation and stuff. I've seen entities within some of the larger companies that represent this field as well. Sometimes that's called production engineering or there are a few other examples of this that I'm aware of. I'm curious how you see that happening within larger companies. Do you find that there is a particular size entity that is actually striving to do this work with the tools that they have internally, or do you find that typically, most companies are just need something like an application transformation so you can come in and help them figure out this part of it out? [0:14:09.9] SA: We've seen a wide variety, I think. One of them is maybe a company really has a commitment to get to the cloud and they get a platform and then they start putting some simple apps up, just to learn how to do it. Then they get stuck with, “Okay. Now how do we with trust get some workloads that are running our business on it?” They will often bring us in at that point, because they haven't done it before. Experimenting with something that valuable to them is — usually means that they slow down. There's other times where we've come in to modernize applications, whether it's a particular business unit for example, that may have been trying to get off the mainframe for the last two years. They’re smart people, but they get stuck again, because they haven't figured out how to do it. What often happens and Chris can talk about some examples of this is once we help them figure out how to modernize, or the recipes to follow to start getting their systems systematically on to the platform and modernize, that they tend to like forming a competency area around it, where they'll start to staff it with the people who are really interested and they take over where we started from. [0:15:27.9] CU: There might be a little bit of bias to that response, in that typically, in order to even get in the door with us, you're probably a Fortune 100, or at least a 500, or government, or something to that effect. We're going to be seeing people that one, have a mainframe to begin with. Two, would have say, capacity to fund say a dedicated transformation team, or to build a unit around that. You could say that the smaller an organization gets, maybe the easier it is to just have the entire organization just write software the modern way to begin with. At least at the large side, we do tend to see people try to build a – they'll use different names for it. Try to have a dedicated center of excellence or practice around modernization. Our hope is to help them build that and hopefully, put them in a position that that can eventually disappear, because eventually, you should no longer need that as a separate discipline. [0:16:26.0] JR: I think that's an interesting point. For me, I argue that you do need it going forward, because of the cognitive overhead between understanding how your application is going to thrive on today's complex infrastructure models and understanding how to write code that works. I think that one person that has all of that in their head all the time is a little too much, a little too far to go sometimes. [0:16:52.0] CU: That's probably true. When you consider the size the portfolios and the size of the backlog for modernization that people have, I mean, people are going to be busy on that for a very long time anyway. It's either — even if it is finite, it still has a very long life span at a minimum. [0:17:10.7] SA: At a certain point, it becomes like painting the Golden Gate Bridge. As soon as you finish, you have to start again, because of technology changes, or business needs and that thing. It's probably a very dynamic organization, but there's a lot of overlap. The pioneering teams set a lot of the guidelines for how the following teams can be doing their modernization work and it just keeps rolling down the track that way. It may be that people are busy modernizing applications off of WebLogic, or WebSphere, and it takes a two years or more to get that completed for this enterprise. It was 20, 50 different projects. To them, it was brand-new each time, which is cool actually to come into that. [0:17:56.3] JR: I'm curious, I definitely love hear it from Olive. I have one more question before I pass it out and I think we’d love to hear your thoughts on all of this. The question I have is when you're going through your day-to-day working on .NET and Java applications and helping people figure out how to go about modernizing them, what we've talked about so far is that represents some of the deeper architectural issues and stuff. You've already mentioned 12 factor after and being able to move, or thinking about the way that you frame the application as far as inputs of those things that it takes to configure, or to think with the lifecycle of those things. Are there some other common patterns that you see across the two practices, Java and .NET, that you think are just concrete examples of stuff that people should take away maybe from this episode, that they could look at their app – and they’re trying to get ahead of the game a little bit? [0:18:46.3] SA: I would say a big part of the commonality that Chris and I both work on a lot is we have a methodology called the SWIFT methodology that we use to help discover how the applications really want to behave, define a notional architecture that is again, agnostic of the implementation details. We’ll often come in with a the same process and I don't need to be a .NET expert and a .NET shop to figure out how the system really wants to be designed, how you want to break things into microservices and then the implementation becomes where those details are. Chris and I both collaborate on a lot of that work. It makes you feel a little bit better about the output when you know that the technology isn't as important. You get to actually pick which technology fits the solution best, as opposed to starting with the technology and letting a solution form around it, if that makes sense. [0:19:42.4] CU: Yeah. I'd say that interesting thing is just how difficult it is while we're going through the SWIFT process with customers, to get them to not get terribly attached to the nouns of the technology and the solution. They've usually gone in where it's not just a matter of the language, but they have something picked in their head already for data storage, for messaging, etc., and they're deeply attached to some of these decisions, deeply and emotionally attached to them. Fundamentally, when we're designing a notional architecture as we call it, really you should be making decisions on what nouns you're going to pick based on that architecture to use the tools that fit that. That's generally a bit of a process the customers have to go through. It's difficult for them to do that, because the more technical their stakeholders tend to be, often the more attached they are to the individual technology choices and breaking that is the principal role for us. [0:20:37.4] OP: Is there any help, or any investment, or any coordination with those vendors, or the purveyors of the technologies that perhaps legacy applications are, or indeed the platforms they're running on, is there any help on that side from those vendors to help with application transformation, or making those applications better? Or do organizations have to rely on a completely independent, so the team like you guys to come in and help them with that? Do you understand my point? Is there any internal – like you mentioned WebLogic, WebSphere, do the purveyors of those platforms try and drive the transformation from within there? Or is it organizations who are running those apps have to rely on independent companies like you, or like us to help them with that? [0:21:26.2] SA: I think some of it depends on what the goal of the modernization is. If it's something like, we no longer want to pay Oracle licensing fees, then of course, obviously they – WebLogic teams aren't going to be happy to help. That's not always the case. Sometimes it's a case where we may have a lot of WebLogic. It's working fine, but we just don't like where it's deployed and we'd like to containerize it, move it to Kubernetes or something like that. In that case, they're more willing to help. At least in my experience, I've found that the technology vendors are rightfully focused just on upgrading things from their perspective and they want to own the world, right? WebLogic will say, “Hey, we can do everything. We have clustering. We have messaging. We've got good access to data stores.” It's hard to find a technology vendor that has that broader vision, or the discipline to not try to fit their solutions into the problem, when maybe they're not the best fit. [0:22:30.8] CU: I think it's a broad generalization, but specifically on the Java side it seems that at least with app server vendors, the status quo is usually serving them quite well. Quite often, we’re adversary – a bit of an adversarial relationship with them on occasion. I could certainly say that within the .NET space, we've worked a relatively collaboratively with Microsoft on things like Steeltoe, which is a I wouldn't say it's a springboot analog, but at least a microservice library that helps people achieve 12-factor cloud nativeness. That's something where I guess Microsoft represents both the legacy side, but also the future side and were part of a solution together there. [0:23:19.4] SA: Actually, that's a good point because the other way that we're seeing vendors be involved is in creating operators on Kubernetes side, or Cloud Foundry tiles, something that makes it easy for their system to still be used in the new world. That's definitely helpful as well. [0:23:38.1] CC: Yeah, that's interesting. [0:23:39.7] JR: Recently, myself me people on my team went through a training from both Shaun and Chris, interestingly enough in Colorado about this thing called the SWIFT methodology. I know it's a really important methodology to how you approach some of the application transformation-like engagements. Could you two give us a high-level overview of what that methodology is? [0:24:02.3] SA: I want to hear Chris go through it, since I always answer that question first. [0:24:09.0] CU: Sure. I figured since you were the inventor, you might want to go with it Shaun, but I'll give it a stab anyway. Swift is a series of exercises that we use to go from a business problem into what we call a notional architecture for an application. The one thing that you'll hear Shaun say all the time that I think is pretty apt, which is we're trying to understand how the application wants to behave. This is a very analog process, especially at the beginning. It's one where we get people who can speak about the business problem behind an application and the business processes behind an application. We get them into a room, a relatively large room typically with a bunch of wall space and we go through a series of exercises with them, where we tease that business process apart. We start with a relatively lightweight version of Alberto Brandolini’s event storing method, where we map out with the subject matter experts, what all of the business events that occur in a system are. That is a non-technical exercise, a completely non-technical exercise. As a matter of fact, all of this uses sticky notes and arts and crafts. After we've gone through that process, we transition into Boris diagram, which is an exercise of Shaun's design that we take the domains that we've, or at least service candidates that we've extrapolated from that event storming and start to draw out a notional architecture. Like an 80% idea of what we think the architecture is going to look like. We're going to do this for slices of – thin slices of that business problem. At that point, it starts to become something that a software developer might be interested in. We have an exercise called Snappy that generally occurs concurrently, which translates that message flow, Boris diagram thing into something that's at least a little bit closer to what a developer could act upon. Again, these are sticky note and analog exercises that generally go on for about a week or so, things that we do interactively with customers to try to get a purely non-technical way, at least at first, so that we can understand that problem and tell you what an architecture is that you can then act on. We try to position this as a customer. You already have all of the answers here. What we're going to do as facilitators of these is try to pull those out of your head. You just don't know how to get to the truth, but you already know that truth and we're going to design this architecture together. How did I do, Shaun? [0:26:44.7] SA: I couldn't have said it better myself. I would say one of the interest things about this process is the reason why it was developed the way it was is because in the world of technology and especially engineers, I definitely seen that you have two modes of thought when you come from the business world to the to the technical world. Often, engineers will approach a problem in a very different way and a very focused, blindered way than business folks. Ultimately, what we try to think of is that the purpose for the software is to enable the business to run well. In order to do that, you really need to understand at least at a high-level, what the heck is the business doing? Surprisingly and almost consistently, the engineering team doing the work is separated from the business team enough that it's like playing the telephone game, right? Where the business folks say, “Well, I told them to do this.” The technical team is like, “Oh, awesome. Well then, we're going to use all this amazing technology and build something that really doesn't support you.” This process really brings everybody together to discover how the system really wants to behave. Also as a side effect, you get everybody agreeing that yes, that is the way it's supposed to be. It's exciting to see teams come together that actually never even work together. You see the light bulbs go on and say, “Oh, that's why you do that.” The end result is in a week, we can go from nobody really knows each other, or quite understands the system as a whole, to we have a backlog of work that we can prioritize based on the learnings that we have, and feel pretty comfortable that the end result is going to be pretty close to how we want to get there. Then the biggest challenge is defining how do we get from point A to point B. That's part of that layering of the Swift method is knowing when to ask those questions. [0:28:43.0] JR: A micro follow-up and then I'll keep my mouth shut for a little bit. Is there a place that people could go online to read about this methodology, or just get some ideas of what you just described? [0:28:52.7] SA: Yeah. You can go to swiftbird.us. That has a high-level overview of more the public facing of how the methodology works. Then there's also internal resources that are constantly being developed as well. That's where I would start. [0:29:10.9] CC: That sounds really neat. As always, we are going to have links on the show notes for all of this. I checked out the website for the EventStorming book. There is a resources page there and has a list of a bunch of presentations. Sounds very interesting. I wanted to ask Chris and Shaun, have you ever seen, or heard of a case where a company went through the transformation, or modernization process and then they roll back to their legacy system for any reason? [0:29:49.2] SA: That's actually a really good question. It implies that often, the way people think about modernization would be more of a big bang approach, right? Where at a certain point in time, we switch to the new system. If it doesn't work, then we roll back. Part of what we try to do is have incremental releases, where we're actually putting small slices into production where you're not rolling back a whole – from modern back to legacy. It's more of you have a week's worth of work that's going into production that's for one of the thin slices, like Chris mentioned. If that doesn't work where there's something that is unexpected about it, then you're rolling back just a small chunk. You're not really jumping off a cliff for modernization. You're really taking baby steps. If it's a two step forward and one step back, you're still making a lot of really good progress. You're also gaining confidence as you go that in the end in two years, you're going to have a completely shiny new modern system and you're comfortable with it, because you're getting there an inch of the time, as opposed to taking a big leap. [0:30:58.8] CU: I think what's interesting about a lot of large organizations is that they've been so used to doing big bang releases in general. This goes from software to even process changes in their organizations. They’ve become so used to that that it often doesn't even cross their mind that it's possible to do something incrementally. We really do often times have to get spend time getting buy-in from them on that approach. You'd be surprised that even in industries that you’d think would be fantastic with managing risk, when you look at how they actually deal with deployment of software and the rolling out of software, they’re oftentimes taking approaches that maximize their risk. There's no way to make something riskier by doing a big bang. Yeah, as Shaun mentioned, the specifics of the swift are to find a way, so that you can understand where and get a roadmap for how to carve out incremental slices, so that you can strangle a large monolithic system slowly over time. That's something that's pretty powerful. Once someone gets bought in on that, they absolutely see the value, because they're minimizing risk. They're making small changes. They're easy to roll back one at a time. You might see people who would stop somewhere along the way, and we wouldn't necessarily say that that's a problem, right? Just like not every app needs to be modernized, maybe there's portions of systems that could stay where they are. Is that a bad thing? I wouldn't necessarily say that it is. Maybe that's the way that – the best way for that organization. [0:32:35.9] DC: We've bumped into this idea now a couple of different times and I think that both Chris and Shaun have brought this up. It's a little prelude to a show that we are planning on doing. One of the operable quotes from that show is the greatest enemy of knowledge is not the ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge. It's a quote by Stephen Hawking. It speaks exactly to that, right? When you come to a problem with a solution in your mind that is frequently difficult to understand the problem on its merit, right? It’s really interesting seeing that crop up again in this show. [0:33:08.6] CU: I think even oftentimes, the advantage of a very discovery-oriented method, such as Swift is that it allows you to start from scratch with a problem set with people maybe that you aren't familiar with and don't have some of that baggage and can ask the dumb questions to get to some of the real answers. It's another phrase that I know Shaun likes to use is that our roles is facilitator to this method are to ask dumb questions. I mean, you just can't put enough value on that, right? The only way that you're going to break that established thinking is by asking questions at the root. [0:33:43.7] OP: One question, actually there was something recently that happened in the Kubernetes community, which I thought was pretty interesting and I'd like to get your thoughts on it, which is that Istio, which is a project that operates as a service mesh, I’m sure you all are familiar with it, has recently decided to unmodernize itself in a way. It was originally developed as a set of microservices. They have had no end of difficulty in getting in optimizing the different interactions between those services and the nodes. Then recently, they decided this might be a good example of when to monolith, versus when to microservice. I'm curious what your thoughts are on that, or if you have familiarity with it. [0:34:23.0] CU: What's actually quite – I'm not going to necessarily speak too much to this. Time will tell as to if the monolithing that they're doing at the moment is appropriate or not. Quite often, the starting point for us isn't necessarily a monolith. What it is is a proposed architecture coming from a customer that they're proud of, that this is my microservice design. You'll see a simple system with maybe hundreds of nano-services. The surprise that they have is that the recommendation from us coming out of our Swift sessions is that actually, you're overthinking this. We're going to take that idea that you have any way and maybe shrink that down and to save tens of services, or just a handful of services. I think one of the mistakes that people make within enterprises, or on microservices at the moment is to say, “Well, that's not a microcservice. It’s too big.” Well, how big or how small dictates a microservice, right? Oftentimes, we at least conceptually are taking and combining services based on the customers architecture very common. [0:35:28.3] SA: Monoliths aren't necessarily bad. I mean, people use them almost as a pejorative, “Oh, you have a monolith.” In our world it's like, well monoliths are bad when they're bad. If they're not bad, then that's great. The corollary to that is micro-servicing for the sake of micro-servicing isn't necessarily a good thing either. When we go through the Boris exercise, really what we're doing is we're showing how domain-based, or capabilities relate to each other. That happens to map really well in our opinion to first, cut microservices, right? You may have an order service, or a customer service that manages some of that. Just because we map capabilities and how they relate to each other, it doesn't mean the implementation can't even be as a single monolith, but componentized inside it, right? That's part of what we try really hard to do is avoid the religion of monolith versus microservices, or even having to spend a lot of time trying to define what a microservice is to you. It's really more of well, a system wants to behave this way. Now, surprise, you just did domain-driven design and mapped out some good 12-factor compliant microservices should you choose to build it that way, but there's other constraints that always apply at that point. [0:36:47.1] OP: Is there more traction in organizations implementing this methodology on a net new business, rather than current running businesses or applications? Is there are situations more so that you have seen where a new project, or a new functionality within a business starts to drive and implement this methodology and then it creeps through the other lines of business within the organization, because that first one was successful? [0:37:14.8] CU: I'd say that based on the nature of who our customers are as an app transformation practice, based on who those customers are and what their problems are, we're generally used to having a starting point of a process, or software that exists already. There's nothing at all to mandate that it has to be that way. As a matter of fact, with folks from our labs organization, we've used these methods in what you could probably call greener fields. At the end of the day when you have a process, or even a candidate process, something that doesn't exist yet, as long as you can get those ideas onto sticky notes and onto a wall, this is a very valid way of getting – turning ideas into an architecture and an architecture into software. [0:37:59.4] SA: We've seen that happen in practice a couple times, where maybe a piece of the methodology was used, like EventStorming just to get a feel for how the business wants to behave. Then to rapidly try something out in maybe more of a evolutionary architecture approach, MVP approach to let's just build something from a user perspective just to solve this problem and then try it out. If it starts to catch hold, then iterate back and now drill into it a little bit more and say, “All right. Now we know this is going to work.” We're modernizing something that may be two weeks old just because hooray, we proved it's valuable. We didn't necessarily have to spend as much upfront time on designing that as we would in this system that's already proven itself to be of business value. [0:38:49.2] OP: This might be a bit of a broad question, but what defines success of projects like this? I mean, we mentioned earlier about cost and maybe some of the drivers are to move off certain mainframes and things like that. If you're undergoing an application transformation, it seems to me like it's an ongoing thing. How do enterprises try to evaluate that return on investment? How does it relate to success criteria? I mean, faster release times, etc., potentially might be one, but how was that typically evaluated and somebody internally saying, “Look, we are running a successful project.” [0:39:24.4] SA: I think part of what we tried to do upfront is identify what the objectives are for a particular engagement. Often, those objectives start out with one thing, right? It's too costly to keep paying IBM or Oracle for WebLogic, or WebSphere. As we go through and talk through what types of things that we can solve, those objectives get added to, right? It may be the first thing, our primary objective is we need to start moving workloads off of the mainframe, or workloads off of WebLogic, or WebSphere, or something like that. There's other objectives that are part of this too, which can include things as interesting as developer happiness, right? They have a large team of a 150 developers that are really just getting sick of doing the same old thing and having new technology. That's actually a success criteria maybe down the road a little bit, but it's more of a nice to have. In a long-winded answer of saying, when we start these and when we incept these projects, we usually start out with let's talk through what our objectives are and how we measure success, those key results for those objectives. As we're iterating through, we keep measuring ourselves against those. Sometimes the objectives change over time, which is fine because you learn more as you're going through it. Part of that incremental iterative process is measuring yourself along the way, as opposed to waiting until the end. [0:40:52.0] CC: Yeah, makes sense. I guess these projects are as you say, are continuous and constantly self-adjusting and self-analyzing to re-evaluate success criteria to go along. Yeah, so that's interesting. [0:41:05.1] SA: One other interesting note though that personally we like to measure ourselves when we see one project is moving along and if the customers start to form other projects that are similar, then we know, “Okay, great. It's taking hold.” Now other teams are starting to do the same thing. We've become the cool kids and people want to be like us. The only reason it happens for that is when you're able to show success, right? Then other teams want to be able to replicate that. [0:41:32.9] CU: The customers OKRs, oftentimes they can be a little bit easier to understand. Sometimes they're not. Typically, they involve time or money, where I'm trying to take release times from X to Y, or decrease my spend on X to Y. The way that we I think measure ourselves as a team is around how clean do we leave the campsite when we're done. We want the customers to be able to run with this and to continue to do this work and to be experts. As much as we'd love to take money from someone forever, we have a lot of people to help, right? Our goal is to help to build that practice and center of excellence and expertise within an organization, so that as their goals or ideas change, they have a team to help them with that, so we can ride off into the sunset and go help other customers. [0:42:21.1] CC: We are coming up to the end of the episode, unfortunately, because this has been such a great conversation. It turned out to be a more of an interview style, which was great. It was great getting the chance to pick your brains, Chris and Shaun. Going along with the interview format, I like to ask you, is there any question that wasn't asked, but you wish was asked? The intent here is to illuminates what this process for us and for people who are listening, especially people who they might be in pain, but they might be thinking this is just normal. [0:42:58.4] CU: That's an interesting one. I guess to some degree, that pain is unfortunately normal. That's just unfortunate. Our role is to help solve that. I think the complacency is the absolute worst thing in an organization. If there is pain, rather than saying that the solution won't work here, let’s start to talk about solutions to that. We've seen customers of all shapes and sizes. No matter how large, or cumbersome they might be, we've seen a lot of big organizations make great progress. If your organization's in pain, you can use them as an example. There is light at the end of the tunnel. [0:43:34.3] SA: It's usually not a train. [0:43:35.8] CU: Right. Usually not. [0:43:39.2] SA: Other than that, I think you asked all the questions that we always try to convey to customers of how we do things, what is modernization. There's probably a little bit about re-platforming, doing the bare minimum to get something onto to the cloud. We didn't talk a lot about that, but it's a little bit less meta, anyway. It's more technical and more recipe-driven as you discover what the workload looks like. It's more about, is it something we can easily do a CF push, or just create a container and move it up to the cloud with minimal changes? There's not conceptually not a lot of complexity. Implementation-wise, there's still a lot of challenges there too. They're not as fun to talk about for me anyway. [0:44:27.7] CC: Maybe that's a good excuse to have some of our colleagues back on here with you. [0:44:30.7] SA: Absolutely. [0:44:32.0] DC: Yeah, in a previous episode we talked about persistence and state of those sorts of things and how they relate to your applications and how when you're thinking about re-platforming and even just where you're planning on putting those applications. For us, that question comes up quite a lot. That's almost zero trying to figure out the state model and those sort of things. [0:44:48.3] CC: That episode was named States in Stateless Apps, I think. We are at the end, unfortunately. It was so great having you both here. Thank you Duffie, Shaun, Chris and I'm going by the order I'm seeing people on my video. Josh and Olive. Until next time. Make sure please to let us know your feedback. Subscribe. Give us a thumbs up. Give us a like. You know the drill. Thank you so much. Glad to be here. Bye, everybody. [0:45:16.0] JR: Bye all. [0:45:16.5] CU: Bye. [END OF EPISODE] [0:45:17.8] ANNOUNCER: Thank you for listening to The Podlets Cloud Native Podcast. Find us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/ThePodlets and on the http://thepodlets.io/ website, where you'll find transcripts and show notes. We'll be back next week. Stay tuned by subscribing. [END]See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
In episode 23 of EnterpriseReady, Grant is joined by Abby Kearns, executive director of Cloud Foundry. They discuss enterprise infrastructure, the future of the cloud, technological ecosystems in China, and open source business models.
At CF Summit 2019 in Philadelphia, I sat down with Jon Ravenscraft (@Jon_Ravenscraft) and Nick Kuhn (@tehkuhnz ) from Kroger to see what was interesting to them from the event and what was on their list to play around with once they got back home. What ensued was a survey of the many ways that Cloud Foundry is evolving. From Eirini, to Buildpacks, to ISM, to Knative.. they all come back to making developers productive. See the complete show notes and links to Jon and Nick's favorite talks from CF Summit at: Article URL: https://content.pivotal.io/podcasts/making-the-right-thing-easy-with-jon-ravenscraft-and-nick-kuhn-of-kroger
In this episode, Sean McKenna shows Scott Hanselman the Open Service Broker for Azure, an easy way to connect applications running in platforms like Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry to some of the most popular Azure services, using a standard, multi-cloud API.For more information, see:Open Service Broker API (org site)Open Service Broker for Azure project (GitHub)Kubernetes Service Catalog project (GitHub)Custom Services Overview (Cloud Foundry docs)Create a Free Account (Azure)Follow @SHanselman Follow @AzureFriday Follow @seanmckmsft
In this episode, Sean McKenna shows Scott Hanselman the Open Service Broker for Azure, an easy way to connect applications running in platforms like Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry to some of the most popular Azure services, using a standard, multi-cloud API.For more information, see:Open Service Broker API (org site)Open Service Broker for Azure project (GitHub)Kubernetes Service Catalog project (GitHub)Custom Services Overview (Cloud Foundry docs)Create a Free Account (Azure)Follow @SHanselman Follow @AzureFriday Follow @seanmckmsft
In the latest episode of The Secure Developer, Guy is joined by Molly Crowther from Pivotal. Molly discusses her role in managing security at Cloud Foundry, an open source cloud platform on which developers can build, deploy and run applications. She explains their security triage and CVE process and reveals some of the challenges of working within the large ecosystem of diverse companies that make up the Cloud Foundry Foundation. Molly also talks about how she fulfills her role of wearing many hats as a representative of both Pivotal and the open source foundation. The post Ep. #12, Keeping Cloud Foundry Secure appeared first on Heavybit.
Sean McKenna drops by Azure Friday to discuss and demo Cloud Foundry, an open-source cloud application platform following the recent announcement that Microsoft has joined the Cloud Foundry Foundation. Pivotal Cloud Foundry is available in the Azure Marketplace for ease of deployment on Azure. Create a Free Account (Azure) Follow @SHanselman Follow @AzureFriday Follow @seanmckmsft
Sean McKenna drops by Azure Friday to discuss and demo Cloud Foundry, an open-source cloud application platform following the recent announcement that Microsoft has joined the Cloud Foundry Foundation. Pivotal Cloud Foundry is available in the Azure Marketplace for ease of deployment on Azure. Create a Free Account (Azure) Follow @SHanselman Follow @AzureFriday Follow @seanmckmsft
Kubernetes Joe Beda @jbeda | Heptio | eightypercent.net Show Notes: 00:51 - What is Kubernetes? Why does it exist? 07:32 - Kubernetes Cluster; Cluster Autoscaling 11:43 - Application Abstraction 14:44 - Services That Implement Kubernetes 16:08 - Starting Heptio 17:58 - Kubernetes vs Services Like Cloud Foundry and OpenShift 22:39 - Getting Started with Kubernetes 27:37 - Working on the Original Internet Explorer Team Resources: Google Compute Engine Google Container Engine Minikube Kubernetes: Up and Running: Dive into the Future of Infrastructure by Kelsey Hightower, Brendan Burns, and Joe Beda Joe Beda: Kubecon Berlin Keynote: Scaling Kubernetes: How do we grow the Kubernetes user base by 10x? Wordpress with Helm Sock Shop: A Microservices Demo Application Kelsey Hightower Keynote: Kubernetes Federation Joe Beda: Kubernetes 101 AWS Quick Start for Kubernetes by Heptio Open Source Bridge: Enter the coupon code PODCAST to get $50 off a ticket! The conference will be held June 20-23, 2017 at The Eliot Center in downtown Portland, Oregon. Transcript: CHARLES: Hello everybody and welcome to The Frontside Podcast, Episode 70. With me is Elrick Ryan. ELRICK: Hey, what's going on? CHARLES: We're going to get started with our guest here who many of you may have heard of before. You probably heard of the technology that he created or was a key part of creating, a self-described medium deal. [Laughter] JOE: Thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it. CHARLES: Joe, here at The Frontside most of what we do is UI-related, completely frontend but obviously, the frontend is built on backend technology and we need to be running things that serve our clients. Kubernetes is something that I think I started hearing about, I don't know maybe a year ago. All of a sudden, it just started popping up in my Twitter feed and I was like, "Hmm, that's a weird word," and then people started talking more and more about it and move from something that was behind me into something that was to the side and now it's edging into our peripheral vision more and more as I think more and more people adopt it, to build things on top of it. I'm really excited to have you here on the show to just talk about it. I guess we should start by saying what is the reason for its existence? What are the unique set of problems that you were encountering or noticed that everybody was encountering that caused you to want to create this? JOE: That's a really good set up, I think just for way of context, I spent about 10 years at Google. I learned how to do software on the server at Google. Before that, I was at Microsoft working on Internet Explorer and Windows Presentation Foundation, which maybe some of your listeners had to actually go ahead and use that. I learned how to write software for the server at Google so my experience in terms of what it takes to build and deploy software was really warped by that. It really doesn't much what pretty much anybody else in the industry does or at least did. As my career progressed, I ended up starting this project called Google Compute Engine which is Google's virtual machine as a service, analogous to say, EC2. Then as that became more and more of a priority for the company. There was this idea that we wanted internal Google developers to have a shared experience with external users. Internally, Google didn't do anything with virtual machines hardly. Everything was with containers and Google had built up some really sophisticated systems to be able to manage containers across very large clusters of computers. For Google developers, the interface to the world of production and how you actually launched off and monitor and maintain it was through this toolset, Borg and all these fellow travelers that come along with it inside of Google. Nobody really actually managed machines using traditional configuration management tools like Puppet or Chef or anything like that. It's a completely different experience. We built a compute engine, GCE and then I had a new boss because of executive shuffle and he spun up a VM and he'd been at Google for a while. His reaction to the thing was like, "Now, what?" I was like I'm sitting there at the root prompt go and like, "I don't know what to do now." It turns out that inside of Google that was actually a common thing. It just felt incredibly primitive to actually have a raw VM that you could have SSH into because there's so much to be done above that to get to something that you're comfortable with building a production grade service on top of. The choice as Google got more and more serious about cloud was to either have everybody inside of Google start using raw VMs and live the life that everybody outside of Google's living or try and bring the experience around Borg and this idea of very dynamic, container-centric, scheduled-cluster thinking bring that outside of Google. Borg was entangled enough with the rest of Google systems that sort of porting that directly and externalizing that directly wasn't super practical. Me and couple of other folks, Brendan Burns and Craig McLuckie pitched this crazy idea of starting a new open source project that borrowed from a lot of the ideas from Borg but really melded it with a lot of the needs for folks outside of Google because again, Google is a bit of a special case in so many ways. The core problem that we're solving here is how do you move the idea of deploying software from being something that's based on these physical concepts like virtual machines, where the amount of problems that you have to solve, to actually get that thing up and running is actually pretty great. How do we move that such that you have a higher, more logical set of abstractions that you're dealing with? Instead of worrying about what kernel you're running on, instead of worrying about individual nodes and what happens if a node goes down, you can instead just say, "Make sure this thing is running," and the system will just do its best to make sure that things are running and then you can also do interesting things like make sure 10 of these things are running, which is at Google scale that ends up being important. CHARLES: When you say like a thing, you're talking about like a database server or API server or --? JOE: Yeah, any process that you could want to be running. Exactly. The abstraction that you think about when you're deploying stuff into the cloud moves from a virtual machine to a process. When I say process, I mean like a process plus all the things that it needs so that ends up being a container or a Docker image or something along those lines. Now the way that Google does it internally slightly different than how it's done with Docker but you can squint at these things and you can see a lot of parallels there. When Docker first came out, it was really good. I think at Docker and containers people look for three things out of it. The first one is that they want a packaged artifact, something that I can create, run on my laptop, run in a data center and it's mostly the same thing running in both places and that's an incredibly useful thing, like on your Mac you have a .app and it's really a directory but the finder treats it as you can just drag it around and the thing runs. Containers are that for the server. They just have this thing that you can just say, run this thing on the server and you're pretty sure that it's going to run. That's a huge step forward and I think that's what most folks really see in the value with respect to Docker. Other things that folks look at with containerized technology is a level of efficiency of being able to pack a lot of stuff onto a little bit of hardware. That was the main driver for Google. Google has so many computers that if you improve utilization by 1%, that ends up being real money. Then the last thing is, I think a lot of folks look at this as a security boundary and I think there's some real nuance conversations to have around that. The goal is to take that logical infrastructure and make it such that, instead of talking about raw VMs, you're actually talking about containers and processes and how these things relate to each other. Yet, you still have the flexibility of a tool box that you get with an infrastructure level system versus if you look at something like Heroku or App Engine or these other platform as a service. Those things are relatively fixed function in terms of their architectures that you can build. I think the container cluster stuff that you see with things like Kubernetes is a nice middle ground between raw VMs and a very, very opinionated platform as a service type of thing. It ends up being a building block for building their more specialized experiences. There's a lot to digest there so I apologize. CHARLES: Yeah, there's a lot to digest there but we can jump right into digesting it. You were talking about the different abstractions where you have your hardware, your virtual machine and the containers that are running on top of that virtual machine and then you mentioned, I think I'm all the way up there but then you said Kubernetes cluster. What is the anatomy of a Kubernetes cluster and what does that entail? And what can you do with it? JOE: When folks talk about Kubernetes, I think there's two different audiences and it's important to talk about the experience from each audience. There's the audience from the point of view of what it takes to actually run a cluster -- this is a cluster operator audience -- then there's the audience in terms of what it takes to use a cluster. Assuming that somebody else is running a cluster for me, what does it look like for me to go ahead and use this thing? This is really different from a lot of different dev app tools which really makes these things together. We've tried to create a clean split here. I'm going to skip past what it means to launch and run a Kubernetes cluster because it turns out that over time, this is going to be something that you can just have somebody else do for you. It's like running your own MySQL database versus using RDS in Amazon. At some point, you're going to be like, "You know what, that's a pain in the butt. I want to make that somebody else's problem." When it comes to using the cluster, pretty much what it comes down to is that you can tell a cluster. There's an API to a cluster and that API is sort of a spiritual cousin to something like the EC2 API. You can talk to this API -- it's a RESTful API -- and you can say, "Make sure that you have 10 of these container images running," and then Kubernetes will make sure that ten of those things are running. If a node goes down, it'll start another one up and it will maintain that. That's the first piece of the puzzle. That creates a very dynamic environment where you can actually program these things coming and going, scaling up and down. The next piece of the puzzle that really, really starts to be necessary then is that if you have things moving around, you need a way to find them. There is built in ideas of defining what a service is and then doing service discovery. Service discovery is a fancy name for naming. It's like I have a name for something, I want to look that up to an IP address so that I can talk to it. Traditionally we use DNS. DNS is problematic in the super dynamic environments so a lot of folks, as they build backend systems within the data center, they really start moving past DNS to something that's a lot more dynamic and purpose-built for that. But you can think about it in your mind as a fancy super-fast DNS. CHARLES: The customer is itself something that's abstract so I can change it state and configure it and say, "I want 10 instances of Postgres running," or, "I want between five and 15 and it will handle all of that for you." How do you then make it smart so that you can react to load, for example like all of the sudden, this thing is handling more load so I need to say... What's the word I'm looking for, I need to handle -- JOE: Autoscale? CHARLES: Yeah, autoscale. Are there primitives for that? JOE: Exactly. Kubernetes itself was meant to be a tool box that you can build on top of. There are some common community-built primitives for doing it's called -- excuse the nomenclature here because there's a lot of it in Kubernetes and I can define it -- Horizontal Pod Autoscaling. It's this idea that you can have a set of pods and you want to tune the number of replicas to that pod based on load. That's something that's built in. But now maybe you're cluster, you don't have enough nodes in your cluster as you go up and down so there's this idea of cluster autoscaling where I want to add more capacity that I'm actually launching these things into. Fundamentally, Kubernetes is built on top of virtual machines so at the base, there's a bunch of virtual or physical machines hardware that's running and then it's the idea of how do I schedule stuff into that and then I can pack things into that cluster. There's this idea of scaling the cluster but then also scaling workloads running on top of the cluster. If you find that some of these algorithms or methods for how you want to scale things when you want to launch things, how you want to hook them up, if those things don't work for you, the Kubernetes system itself is programmable so you can build your own algorithms for how you want to launch and control things. It's really built from the get go to be an extensible system. CHARLES: One question that's keeps coming up is as I hear you describing these things is the Kubernetes cluster then, it's not application-oriented so you could have multiple applications running on a single cluster? JOE: Very much so. CHARLES: How do you then layer on your application abstraction on top of this cluster abstraction? JOE: An application is made up of a bunch of running bits, whether it'd be a database. I think as we move towards microservices, it's not just going to be one set of code. It can be a bunch of sets of codes that are working together or bunch of servers that are working together. There are these ideas are like I want to run 10 of these things, I want to run five of these things, I want to run three of these things and then I want them to be able to find each other and then I want to take this thing and I want to expose it out to the internet through a load balancer on Amazon, for example. Kubernetes can help to set up all those pieces. It turns out that Kubernetes doesn't have an idea of an application. There is no actually object inside a Kubernetes called application. There is this idea of running services and exposing services and if you bring a bunch of services together, that ends up being an application. But in a modern world, you actually have services that can play double duty across applications. One of the things that I think is exciting about Kubernetes is that it can grow with you as you move from a single application to something that really becomes a service mesh, as your application, your company grows. Imagine that you have some sort of app and then you have your customer service portal for your internal employees. You can have those both being frontend applications, both running on a Kubernetes cluster, talking to a common backend with a hidden API that you don't expose to customers but it's something that's exposed to both of those frontends and then that API may talk to a database. Then as you understand your problems, you can actually spawn off different microservices that can be managed separately by different teams. Kubernetes becomes a platform where you can actually start with something relatively simple and then grow with that and have it stretch from single application to multiple service microservice-base application to a larger cluster that can actually stretch across multiple teams and there's a bunch of facilities for folks not stepping on each other's toes as they do this stuff. Just to be clear, this is what Kubernetes is as it's based. I think one of the powerful things that you can do is that there's a whole host to folks that are building more platform as a service like abstractions on top of Kubernetes. I'm not going to say it's a trivial thing but it's a relatively straightforward thing to build a Heroku-like experience on top of Kubernetes. But the great thing is that if you find that that Heroku experience, if some of the opinions that were made as part of that don't work for you, you can actually drop down to a level that's more useful than going all the way down to raw VM because right now, if you're running on Heroku and something doesn't work for you, it's like, "Here's a raw VM. Good luck with that." There's a huge cliff as you actually want to start coloring outside the lines for, as I mix my metaphors here for these platform services. ELRICK: What services that are out there that you can use that would implement Kubernetes? JOE: That's a great question. There are a whole host there. One of the folks in the community has pulled together a spreadsheet of all the different ways to install and run Kubernetes and I think there were something like 60 entries on it. It's an open source system. It's credibly adaptable in terms of running in all sorts of different mechanisms for places and there are really active startups that are helping folks to run that stuff. In terms of the easiest turnkey things, I would probably start with Google Container Engine, which is honestly one click. It fits within a Free Tier. It can get you up and running so that you can actually play with Kubernetes super easy. There's this thing from the folks at CoreOS called minikube that lets you run it on your laptop as a development environment. That's a great way to kick the tires. If you're on Amazon, my company Heptio has a quick start that we did with some of the Amazon community folks. It's a cloud formation template that launches a Kubernetes stack that you can get up and running and really understand what's happening. I think as users, understand what value it brings at the user level then they'll figure out whether they want to invest in terms of figuring out what the best place to run and the best way to run it for them is. I think my advice to folks would be find some way to start getting familiar with it and then decide if you have to go deep in terms of how to be a cluster operator and how to run the thing. ELRICK: Yup. That was going to be my next question. You just brought up your company, Heptio. What was the reason for starting that startup? JOE: Heptio was founded by Craig McLuckie, one of the other Kubernetes founders and me. We started about six months or seven months ago now. The goal here is to bring Kubernetes to enterprises and how do we bridge the gap of bringing some of this technology forward company thinking to think about companies like Google and Twitter and Facebook. They have a certain way of thinking about building a deployment software. How do we bring those ideas into more mainstream enterprise? How do we bridge that gap and we're really using doing Kubernetes as the tool to do that? We're doing a bunch of things to make that happen. The first being that we're offering training, support and services so right now, if companies want to get started today, they can engage with us and we can help them understand what makes sense there. Over time, we want to make that be more self-service, easier to do so that you actually don't have to hire someone like us to get started and to be successful there. We want to invest in the community in terms of making Kubernetes easier to approach, easier to run and then more applicable to a more diverse set of audiences. This conversation that we're having here, I'm hoping that at some point, we won't have to have this because Kubernetes will be easy enough and self-describing enough that folks won't feel like they have to dig deep to get started. Then the last thing that we're going to be doing is offering commercial services and software that really helps teach Kubernetes into the fabric of how large companies work. I think there's a set of tools that you need as you move from being a startup or a small team to actually dealing within the structure of a large enterprise and that's really where we're going to be looking to create and sell product. ELRICK: Gotcha. CHARLES: How does Kubernetes then compare in contrast to other technologies that we hear when we talk about integrating with the enterprise and having enterprise clients managing their own infrastructure things like Cloud Foundry, for example. From someone who's kind of ignorant of both, how do you discriminate between the two? JOE: Cloud Foundry is a more of a traditional platform as a service. There's a lot to like there and there are some places where the Kubernetes community and the Cloud Foundry community are starting to cooperate. There is a common way for provisioning and creating external services so you can say, "I want MySQL database." We're trying to make that idea of, "Give me MySQL database. I don't care who and where it's running." We're trying to make those mechanisms common across Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes so there is some effort going in there. But Cloud Foundry is more of a traditional platform as a service. It's opinionated in terms of the right way to create, launch, roll out, hooks services together. Whereas, Kubernetes is more of a building block type of thing. Kubernetes is, at least raw Kubernetes in some ways a more of a lower levels building block technology than something like Cloud Foundry. The most applicable competitor in this world to Cloud Foundry, I would say would be OpenShift from Red Hat. Open Shift is a set of extensions built on top of it. Right now, it's a little bit of a modified version of Kubernetes but over time that teams working to make it be a set of pure extensions on top of Kubernetes that adds a platform as a service layer on top of the container cluster layer. The experience for Open Shift will be comparable to the experience for Cloud Foundry. There's other folks like Microsoft just bought the small company called Deis. They offer a thing called Workflow which gives you a little bit of the flavor of a platform as a service also. There's multiple flavors of platforms built on top of Kubernetes that would be more apples to apples comparable to something like Cloud Foundry. Now the interesting thing with thing Deis' Workflow or Open Shift or some of the other platforms built on top of Kubernetes is that, again if you find yourself where that platform doesn't work for you for some reason, you don't have to throw out everything. You can actually start picking and choosing what primitives you want to drop down to in the Kubernetes world without having to go down to raw VMs. Whereas, Cloud Foundry really doesn't have a widely supported, sort of more raw interface to run in containers and services. It's kind of subtle. CHARLES: Yeah, it's kind of subtle. This is an analogy that just popped into my head while I was listening to you and I don't know if this is way off base. But when you were describing having... What was the word you used? You said a container clast --? It was a container clustered... JOE: Container orchestrator, container cluster. These are all -- CHARLES: Right and then kind of hearkening back to the beginning of our conversation where you were talking about being able to specify, "I want 10 of these processes," or an elastic amount of these processes that reminded me of Erlang VM and how kind of baked into that thing is the concept of these lightweight processes and be able to manage communication between these lightweight processes and also supervise these processes and have layers of supervisors supervising other supervisors to be able to declare a configuration for a set of processes to always be running. Then also propagate failure of those processes and escalate and stuff like that. Would you say that there is an analogy there? I know there are completely separate beast but is there a co-evolution there? JOE: I've never used Erlang in Anger so it's hard for me to speak super knowledgeably about it. For what I understand, I think there is a lot in common there. I think Erlang was originally built by Nokia for telecoms switches, I believe which you have these strong availability guarantees so any time when you're aiming for high availability, you need to decouple things with outside control loops and ways to actually coordinate across pieces of hardware and software so that when things fail, you can isolate that and have a blast radius for a failure and then have higher level mechanisms that can help recover. That's very much what happens with something like Kubernetes and container orchestrator. I think there's a ton of parallels there. CHARLES: I'm just trying to grasp at analogies of things that might be -- ELRICK: I think they call that the OTP, Open Telecom Platform or something like that in Erlang. CHARLES: Yeah, but it just got a lot of these things -- ELRICK: Very similar. CHARLES: Yeah, it seems very similar. ELRICK: Interestingly enough, for someone that's starting from the bottom, an initiated person to Kubernetes containers, Docker images, Docker, where would they start to ramp up themselves? I know you mentioned that you are writing a book --? JOE: Yes. ELRICK: -- 'Kubernetes: Up and Running'. Would that be a good place to start when it comes out or is there like another place they should start before they get there. What is your thoughts on that? JOE: Definitely, check out the book. This is a book that I'm writing with Kelsey Hightower who's one of the developer evangelists for Google. He is the most dynamic speaker I've ever seen so if you ever have a chance to see him live, it's pretty great. But Kelsey started this and he's a busy guy so he brought in Brendan Burns, one of the other Kubernetes co-founders and me to help finish that book off and that should be coming out soon. It's Kubernetes: Up and Running. Definitely check that out. There's a bunch of good tutorials out there also that start introducing you to a lot of the concepts in Kubernetes. I'm not going to go through all of those concepts right now. There's probably like half a dozen different concepts and terminology, things that you have to learn to really get going with it and I think that's a problem right now. There's a lot to import before you can get started. I gave a talk at the Kubernetes Conference in Berlin, a month or two ago and it was essentially like, yeah we got our work cut out for us to actually make the stuff applicable to wider audience. But if you want to see the power, I think one of the things that you can do is there's the system built on top of Kubernetes called Helm, H-E-L-M, like a ship's helm because we love our nautical analogies here. Helm is a package manager for Kubernetes and just like you can login to say, in Ubuntu machine and do apps get install MySQL and you have a database up and running. With Helm you can say, create and install 'WordPress install' on my Kubernetes cluster and it'll just make that happen. It takes this idea of package management of describing applications up to the next level. When you're doing regular sysadmin stuff, you can actually go through and do the system to [Inaudible] files or to [Inaudible] files and copy stuff out and use Puppet and Chef to orchestrate all of that stuff. Or you can take the stuff that sort of package maintainers for the operating system have done and actually just go ahead and say, "Get that installed." We want to be able to offer a similar experience at the cluster level. I think that's a great way to start seeing the power. After you understand all these concepts here is how easy you can make it to bring up and run these distributed systems that are real applications. The Weaveworks folks, there are company that do container networking and introspection stuff based out of London. They have this example application called Sock Shop. It's like the pet shop example but distributed and built to show off how you can build an application on top of Kubernetes that pulls a lot of moving pieces together. Then there's some other applications out there like that that give you a little bit of an idea of what things look like as you start using this stuff to its fullest extent. I would say start with something that feels concrete where you can start poking around and seeing how things work before you commit. I know some people are sort of depth first learners and some are breadth first learners. If you're depth first, go and read the book, go to Kubernetes documentation site. If you're breadth first, just start with an application and go from there. ELRICK: Okay. CHARLES: I think I definitely fall into that breadth first. I want to build something with it first before trying to manage my own cluster. ELRICK: Yeah. True. I think I watched your talk and I did watch one of Kelsey's talks: container management. There was stuff about replicators and schedulers and I was like, "The ocean just getting deeper and deeper," as I listened to his talk. JOE: Actually, I think this is one of the cultural gaps to bridge between frontend and backend thinking. I think a lot of backend folks end up being these depths first types of folks, where when they want to use a technology, they want to read all the source code before they first apply it. I'm sure everybody has met those type of developers. Then I think there's folks that are breadth first where they really just want to understand enough to be effective, they want to get something up and running, they want to like if they hit a problem, then they'll go ahead and fix that problem but other than that, they're very goal-oriented towards, I want to get this thing running. Kubernetes right now is kind of built by systems engineers for systems engineers and it shows so we have our work cut out for us, I think to bridge that gap. It's going to be an ongoing thing. ELRICK: Yeah, I'm like a depth first but I have to keep myself in check because I have to get work done as a developer. [Laughter] JOE: That sounds about right, yeah. Yeah, so you're held accountable for writing code. CHARLES: Yeah. That's where real learning happens when you're depth first but you've got deadlines. ELRICK: Yes. CHARLES: I think that's a very effective combination. Before we go, I wanted to switch topic away from Kubernetes for just a little bit because you mentioned something when we were emailing that, I guess in a different lifetime you were actually on the original IE team or at the very beginning of the Internet Explorer team at Microsoft? JOE: Yes, that's where I started my career. Back in '97, I've done a couple of internships at Microsoft and then went to join full time, moved up here to Seattle and I had a choice between joining the NT kernel team or the Internet Explorer team. This was after IE3 before IE4. I don't know if this whole internet thing is going to pan out but it looks like that gives you a lot of interesting stuff. You got to understand the internet, it wasn't an assumed thing back then, right? ELRICK: Yeah, that's true. JOE: I don't know, this internet thing. CHARLES: I know. I was there and I know that like old school IE sometimes gets a bad rap. It does get a bad rap for being a little bit of an albatross but if you were there for the early days of IE, it really was the thing that blew it wide open like people do not give credit. It was extraordinarily ahead of its time. That was [Inaudible] team that coin DHTML back to when it was called DHTML. I remember, actually using it for the first time, I think about '97 is about what I was writing raw HTML for everything. CSS wasn't even a thing hardly. When I realized, all these static things when we render them, they're etched in stone. The idea that every one of these properties which I already knew is now dynamic and completely reflected, just moment to moment. It was just eye-opening. It was mind blowing and it was kind of the beginning of the next 20 years. I want to just talk a little bit about that, about where those ideas came from and what was the impetus for that? JOE: Oh, man. There's so much history here. First of all, thank you for calling out. I think we did a lot of really interesting groundbreaking work then. I think the sin was not in IE6 as it was but in [inaudible]. I think the fact that -- CHARLES: IE6 was actually an amazing browser. Absolutely an amazing browser. JOE: And then the world moved past it, right? It didn't catch up. That was the problem. For its time when it was released, I was proud of that release. But four years on, things get a little bit long in the tooth. I think IE3 was based on rendering engine that was very static, very similar to Netscape at the time. The thing to keep in mind is that Netscape at that time, it would download a webpage, parse it and display it. There was no idea of a DOM at Netscape at that point so it would throw away a lot of the information and actually only store stuff that was very specific to the display context. Literally, when you resize the window for Netscape back then, it would actually reparse the original HTML to regenerate things. It wasn't even able to actually resize the window without going through and reparsing. What we did with IE4 -- and I joined sort of close to the tail on IE4 so I can't claim too much credit here -- is bringing some of the ideas from something like Visual Basic and merge those into the idea of the browser where you actually have this programming model which became the DOM of where your controls are, how they fit together, being able to live modify these things. This was all part and parcel of how people built Windows applications. It turns out that IE4 was the combination of the old IE3 rendering engine, sort of stealing stuff from there but then this project that was built as a bunch of Active X controls for Office called [inaudible]. As you smash that stuff together and turn it into a browser rendering engine, that browser rendering engine ended up being called Trident. That's the thing that got a nautical theme. I don't think it's connected and that's the thing that that I joined and started working on at the time. This whole idea that you have actually have this DOM, that you can modify a programmable representation of DHTML and have it be live updated on screen, that was only with IE4. I don't think anybody had done it at that point. The competing scheme from Netscape was this thing called layers where it was essentially multiple HTML documents where you could replace one of the HTML documents and they would be rendered on top of each other. It was awful and it lost to the mist of time. CHARLES: I remember marketing material about layers and hearing how layers was just going to be this wonderful thing but I don't ever remember actually, did they ever even ship it? JOE: I don't know if they did or not. The thing that you got to understand is that anybody who spent any significant amount of time at Microsoft, you just really internalize the idea of a platform like no place else. Microsoft lives and breathes platforms. I think sometimes it does them a disservice. I've been out of Microsoft for like 13 years now so maybe some of my knowledge is a little outdated here but I still have friends over there. But Microsoft is like the poor schmuck that goes to Vegas and pulls the slot machine and wins the jackpot on the first pull. I'm not saying that there wasn't a lot of hard work that went behind Windows but like they hit the goldmine with that from a platform point of view and then they essentially did it again with Office. You have these two incredibly powerful platforms that ended up being an enormous growth engine for the company over time so that fundamentally changed the world view of Microsoft where they really viewed everything as a platform. I think there were some forward thinking people at Netscape and other companies but I think, Microsoft early on really understood what it meant to be a platform and we saw back then what the web could be. One of the original IE team members, I'm going to give a shout out to him, Chris Wilson who's now on the Chrome team, I think. I don't know where he is these days. Chris was on the original IE team. He's still heavily involved in web standards. None of this stuff is a surprise to us. I look at some of the original so after we finished IE6, a lot of the IE team rolled off to doing Avalon which became Windows Presentation Foundation, which was really looking to sort of reinvent Windows UI, importing a bunch of the ideas from web and modern programming there. That's where we came up with XAML and eventually begat Silverlight for good or ill. But some of our original demos for Avalon, if you go back in time and look at that, that was probably... I don't know, 2000 or something like that. They're exactly the type of stuff that people are building with the web platform today. Back then, they'll flex with the thing. We're reinventing this stuff over and over again. I like where it's going. I think we're in a good spot right now but we see things like the Shadow DOM come up and I look at that and I'm like, "We had HTC controls which did a lot of Shadow DOM stuff like stuff in IE early on." These things get reinvented and refined over time and I think it's great but it's fascinating to be in the industry long enough that you can see these patterns repeat. CHARLES: It is actually interesting. I remember doing UI in C++ and in Java. We did a lot of Java and it was a long time. I felt like I was wandering in the wilderness of the web where I was like, "Oh, man. I just wish we had these capabilities of things that we could do in swing, 10 or 15 years ago," but the happy ending is that I really actually do feel we are in a place now, finally where you have options for it really is truly competitive as a developer experience to the way it was, these many years ago and it's also a testament just how compelling the deployment model of the web is, that people were willing to forgo all of that so they could distribute their applications really easily. JOE: Never underestimate the power of view source. CHARLES: Yeah. [Laughter] ELRICK: I think that's why this sort of conversations are very powerful, like going back in time and looking at the development up until now because like they say that people that don't know their history, they're doomed to repeat it. I think this is a beautiful conversation. JOE: Yeah. Because I've done that developer focused frontend type of stuff. I've done the backend stuff. One of the things that I noticed is that you see patterns repeat over and over again. Let's be honest, it probably more like a week, I was going to say a weekend and learn the React the other day and the way that it encapsulate state up and down, model view, it's like these things are like there's different twists on them that you see in different places but you see the same patterns repeat again and again. I look at the way that we do scheduling in Kubernetes. Scheduling is this idea that you have a bunch of workloads that have a certain amount of CPU and RAM that they require like you want to play this Tetris game of being able to fit these things in, you look at scheduling like that and there are echoes for how layout happens in a browser. There is a deeper game coming on here and as you go through your career and if you're like me and you always are interested in trying new things, you never leave it all behind. You always see things that influence your thinking moving forward. CHARLES: Absolutely. I kind of did the opposite. I started out on the backend and then moved over into the frontend but there's never been any concept that I was familiar with working on server side code that did not come to my aid at some point working on the frontend. I can appreciate that fully. ELRICK: Yup. I can agree with the same thing. I jump all around the board, learning things that I have no use currently but somehow, they come back to help me. CHARLES: That will come back to help you. You thread them together at some point. ELRICK: Yup. CHARLES: As they said in one of my favorite video games in high school, Mortal Kombat there is no knowledge that is not power. JOE: I was all Street Fighter. CHARLES: Really? [Laughter] JOE: I cut class in high school and went to play Street Fighter at the mall. CHARLES: There is no knowledge that isn't power except for... I'm not sure that the knowledge of all these little mashy key buttons combinations, really, I don't think there's much power in that. JOE: Well, the Konami code still shows up all the time, right? [Laughter] CHARLES: I'm surprised how that's been passed down from generation to generation. JOE: You still see it show up in places that you wouldn't expect. One of the sad things that early on in IE, we had all these Internet Explorer Easter eggs where if you type this right combination into the address bar, do this thing and you clicked and turn around three times and face west, you actually got this cool DHTML thing and those things are largely disappearing. People don't make Easter eggs like they used to. I think there's probably legal reasons for making sure that every feature is as spec. But I kind of missed those old Easter eggs that we used to find. CHARLES: Yeah, me too. I guess everybody save their Easter eggs for April 1st but -- JOE: For the release notes, [inaudible]. CHARLES: All right. Well, thank you so much for coming by JOE. I know I'm personally excited. I'm going to go find one of those Kubernetes as a services that you mentioned and try and do a little breadth first learning but whether you're depth first or breadth first, I say go to it and thank you so much for coming on the show. JOE: Well, thank you so much for having me on. It's been great. CHARLES: Before we go, there is actually one other special item that I wanted to mention. This is the Open Source Bridge which is a conference being held in Portland, Oregon on the 20th to 23rd of June this year. The tracks are activism, culture hacks, practice and theory and podcast listeners may be offered a discount code for $50 off of the ticket by entering in the code 'podcast' on the Event Brite page, which we will link to in the show notes. Thank you, Elrick. Thank you, Joe. Thank you everybody and we will see you next week.
What is DevOps? How does it relate to Operations and Software Development? Bridget Kromhout, Principal Technologist for Cloud Foundry at Pivotal answers these questions. Bridget explained what Operations Engineering is and what she used to work on when she was focused in this area. We then talked about how DevOps emerged and how it differs from Operations. At the end we talked about VoiceOps and ChatOps and the future of DevOps.
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