Tanzu Talk

How executives can kick-start their enterprise AI strategies, also, what is "agentic AI," with Adib Saikali

Tue, 26 Nov 2024 10:54:01 +0000

In this episode, Adib and Michael discuss the concept of 'Agentic AI' and its historical context within technology evolution. They talk about how new UX patterns and capabilities have defined different technological eras and examine where AI agents fit in this narrative. They explore the role of executives in integrating AI into their businesses, emphasizing the importance of experimenting, learning constraints, and understanding UX-driven applications. The conversation spans practical insights, user-centric experimentation, and the future impacts of AI in enterprise environments

Links mentioned:

Adib on agentic AI.
Another write-up of what executives can do to help AI at their organization, from Camille Crowell-Lee.
Adib in LinkedIn.
Adib's blog.

Data Gravity, Ecosystem Gravity, and Control - Private Cloud is Still the Best Choice for Many

Fri, 15 Nov 2024 09:53:27 +0000

In this episode of Tanzu Talk, Coté and Purnima Padmanabhan discuss the evolving landscape of private vs. public cloud infrastructure and the crucial role of developer platforms. Purnima elaborates on the need for a seamless developer experience, focusing on the advantages of Tanzu Platform 10 and its new features. They wrap up with insights on upcoming announcements for the Tanzu product suite at the Explore Barcelona conference.

Check out the Tanzu Platform for our recommended private cloud platform.

Code to Production: From Cloud to DevOps to Platform Engineering, with Purnima Padmanabhan, VMware Tanzu by Broadcom

Wed, 18 Sep 2024 12:23:55 +0000

In this episode, Purnima Padmanabhan, the general manager of Tanzu at Broadcom, talks with Coté about the evolution of DevOps and platform engineering. Purnima has worked at many interesting over the years LoudCloud, BMC Software, and VMware. That experience gives her a great perspective on the industry's ongoing journey to empower developers to deploy code into production quickly and reliably. The discussion follows the industry innovations and trends from early infrastructure automation to the rise of cloud computing and the emergence of platform engineering.

Purnima highlights the enduring challenge of bridging the gap between development and operations, emphasizing that the core objective remains consistent: accelerating the time it takes to move code into production. She underscores the importance of continuous improvement, noting that the industry is still striving for perfection. The conversation also delves into the nuances of platform engineering and DevOps, exploring the balance between standardization and flexibility, the role of automation in fostering trust, and the enduring need for both development and operations roles.

Purnima also discusses her experiences at various companies and the lessons she's learned throughout her career. Listen in to this 20+ year journey from LoudCloud's early foray into cloud computing to BMC's focus on process automation and VMware's cloud management solutions, all the way up the Tanzu's focus on cloud native development and platforms.

Find Purnima in LinkedIn.

And check in on Tanzu.

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction

00:23 DevOps Evolution

01:30 Platform Engineering and Automation

02:24 LoudCloud and Early Cloud Innovations

03:10 BMC Software and Process Automation

04:30 Pivotal and Tanzu Division

09:06 The pull to on-premises

12:12 What ever happened to ITIL?

12:57 ITIL and Service Management

14:41 Remediation and Repaving

19:02 Moka5

21:03 Security Startups

21:40 VMware

22:49 Startup Experience in Large Organizations

26:51 Future of DevOps and Platform Engineering

30:15 Wrap up

Using AI in Healthcare: Diagnostics, Patient Records, Research, Revenue Management, with JT Perry

Thu, 30 May 2024 16:00:22 +0000

JT Perry is back to talk about enterprise AI in healthcare. They also talk about the status of new business models like "doc in a box" and Amazon Health.

See the full show notes in the video version of this episode.

Developer Platforms and Productivity, with Serdar Badem

Tue, 23 Jan 2024 12:46:21 +0000

Fresh from working on developer platforms at Uber, Serdar Badem tells us his experience working on improving developer productivity. He's working at Tanzu now and so he also discusses the work we're doing to help improve developer productivity.

What is ”waste” in software development? With Steve Pereira

Mon, 18 Dec 2023 08:38:00 +0000

The phrase "value stream" is used so often in software development that it's easy to forget exactly what it means. "Waste" is another word like that. In this episode, Coté talks with Steve Pereira about value stream mappings, what waste is, exactly, and why it's so difficult to do what seems like an obviously good idea, like value stream mapping.

- Steve in LinkedIn. - Steve's book. - Flow community. - Awesome waste/countermeasure handout, including definitions of waste.

Re-thinking tech debt, developer productivity, & better meetings, with Laura Tacho

Fri, 08 Dec 2023 09:38:07 +0000

In this episode Coté talks with Laura Tacho, the CTO of DX on several topics, starting with tech debt. Laura shares her viewpoint on how the concept and use of 'tech debt' changes based on perspective, and the need for better quantification of these concepts for businesses. They also discuss developer productivity metrics and three types of meetings.

Read all of Laura's great articles here.

Keep it small to make big changes, with Betty Junod

Fri, 20 Oct 2023 14:01:57 +0000

You always hear that making a series of small changes is better than BIG BANG change. How does this really play out though? Doesn't that seem a little...naive when it comes to large organizations doing the BIG and MISSION CRITICAL work?

In this episode, Coté talks with Betty Junod on this topic. She draws from many sources like her first hand experience as an executive and working with the DevOps and cloud native community. They also discuss making culture changes in organizations and how recent work to figure out how to determine "business value."

Watch the video of this recording if you prefer that kind of thing.

Mentions:

- Betty in LinkedIn. - Betty in Twitter. - The Developer Platform paper. - The Role of a Platform paper. - No Developer Left behind paper.

What is Backstage? What does Backstage do? What does Backstage not do? Why would you use Backstage?

Fri, 22 Sep 2023 14:41:17 +0000

Ben educates Coté on what Backstage is. Coté is always thinking that new tech does more than it actually does, and he eagerly de-scopes his inflated expectations with Ben's wiseness. This is the most detailed explanation of the core of Backstage you're likely to see, and the two only about third of the Backstage ecosystem overall.

See Ben at BackStageCon, Nov 6th, 2023 in Chicago.

What is a Service Mesh? And Why Would You Want One?

Fri, 15 Sep 2023 14:45:58 +0000

The three of us are back to discuss what a service mesh is and why it exists as a stand-alone thing. The result we come to is that you want this kind of network control and management as its own layer, not something that’s built into the stack.

Check out the video if you prefer that.

Come see us at:

VMware Explore EU, Nov, 2023.
SpringOne Tour Amsterdam, Oct 9th, 2023.
SpringOne Tour London, Oct 12th.

Links:

Gartner’s overview: Market Guide for Service Mesh.
GigaOm’s Service mesh radar.

Lessons from 5 years of agile transformation at Jaguar Land Rover

Tue, 15 Aug 2023 15:27:11 +0000

What does a car manufacture need to do to speed up their software delivery cycle? Manufacturing is often finely tuned following lean and other principles, but the software development and delivery process, oddly, is not. In this episode, we talk about he last five years of software transformation at Jaguar Land Rover (JLR).

We discuss the type of software JLR creates for itself, the need to change to transform (driven by quality and speed of delivery), putting CI/CD in place, challenges to change management (mostly about people), and the mismatch between finance and software.

Check out Mike in LinkedIn.

Also, you can watch the video of this episode here, if you like that kind of thing.

The Business Doesn’t Care About Kubernetes as a Kost Center. They Care About This, with Bryan Ross.

Fri, 04 Aug 2023 08:05:00 +0000

Coté talks with Bryan Ross about fitting Kubernetes (and it's use) into the business strategy.

Check out Bryan's YouTube channel for more Bryan.

A Developer Perspective on Developer Experience, also, COBOL, with Paul Kelly

Fri, 28 Jul 2023 11:37:46 +0000

"75% of IT and business executives say that their companies’ ability to compete is directly related to their ability to release quality software quickly" reads a recent Forrester Consulting report. If that’s the case, why are so many developer in large organizations have a bad developer experience? Paul Kelly wrote up the case for good DevEx and what it looks like for developers on the VMware Tanzu blog recently. In this episode, Cora and Coté talk with him about the blog. Paul also wrote two books on Visual COBOL so, naturally, we open up by talking about COBOL. Why did we ever need more?

You can watch the original, streamed video if you like that kind of thing.

Links:

A Developer Perspective on Developer Experience, the blog in question.
Paul on CI/CD.
More article from Paul.
Paul’s books: Visual COBOL: A Developer's Guide to Modern COBOL and Visual COBOL: New Application Modernization Tools for the Java Developer.
Paul in LinkedIn.

Manage Kubernetes Clusters Anywhere, From Anywhere with Tanzu Mission Control, with Corey Dinkens

Fri, 21 Jul 2023 07:30:00 +0000

In this episode, Coté talks with Corey Dinkens about Tanzu Mission Control. The most recent version can now run on-premises, meaning those who can't run it as a public SaaS now can run Tanzu Mission Control where ever they like, on or off the Internet. We also discuss Tanzu Mission Control in general and some other new features.

Learn more about Tanzu Mission Control:

- More about the new release here. - Corey's quick demo of Tanzu Mission Control. - More about all of Tanzu Mission Control here.

Platform marketing, advocacy, DevEx, documentation, and Backstage

Fri, 14 Jul 2023 16:11:41 +0000

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).

Changes in the RHEL Streams, and, what is Crossplane?

Fri, 30 Jun 2023 14:27:09 +0000

This week, Ben and Ed try to help Coté understand what the changes in RHEL open source development mean. We don't figure it out completely, but get close enough. Also, Ed tells us what Crossplane is. Finally, we briefly discuss two new reports from Gartner and Forrester that seek to define the cloud native application stack.

Cloud Foundry Day 2023

Fri, 23 Jun 2023 16:50:32 +0000

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: Community, Developer Experience, Kubernetes, and more, with Ram Iyengar

Tue, 13 Jun 2023 16:05:44 +0000

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.

Also, check out VMware's Cloud Foundry distro, the Tanzu Application Service (formally Pivotal Cloud Foundry).

What’s a ”Platform Maturity Model”?

Wed, 07 Jun 2023 16:31:49 +0000

In this episode, Cora and Coté talk with Abby Bangser about the platform maturity model draft that the platform working group at the CNCF has been working on. While the draft is a work in progress, the model the team is developed is extremely useful for thinking about how you build and run your platform team. Check out the interview, and if you’re interested in more, take a look at the draft paper. If you’re really full of beans, you can also contribute.

You can also watch the video of this episode if you prefer.

As Abby mentioned, you can find her by searching for Abby Bangser in most social and web places. She’s @a_bangser in Twitter, @abangser.bsky.social in Bluesky, @abangser in Mastodon, and, of course, in LinkedIn.

Cloud Native Security & Compliance, with David Zendzian

Fri, 02 Jun 2023 09:59:50 +0000

We talk about getting PCI compliance into Kubernetes, and other security think in the cloud native world. Securing Tanzu Application Service and Tanzu Application Platform. David Zendzian talks with Cora and Coté about what exactly “security” means in the cloud native context. They use his upcoming paper on PCI compliance as an example throughout.

See David in LinkedIn, Twitter, and charming home page.

Watch the video of this interview if you prefer that format.

Sausages and Cycling - Coding with AI/LLMs, microservices vs. monoliths, kubernetes vs. application developers

Fri, 26 May 2023 15:03:32 +0000

This week, Coté and Ben talk about using AI for software development, and general text use. They check in on Kubernetes usability for application developers, and give their takes on the recent microservices vs. monoliths dust-up. There’s a bonus discussions about cycling in London and regional sausage taxonomies, right at the beginning to whet your appetite.

You can also watch the video of our recording as well.

Mentioned items:

The Smells of the Kubernetes Community

Fri, 05 May 2023 13:56:33 +0000

We discuss what we did at KubeCon, the recent VMware State of Kubernetes 2023 survey, and the smells of platform engineering maturity. Also, some tips on daily logging and to do list management.

Here is the original video recording if you're into that kind of thing.

As ever, with your three friends: @egrigson, @benbravo73, & @cote.

Links and Notes

- The 2023 State of Kubernetes Survey is fully out. The new component is looking at the benefits of Kubernetes.
  - Distro/service marketshare - VMware is steadily climbing up, yay!
  - Coté's multi-cloud usage take. Including a great chart from IDC on where workloads are living. More: we need to start thinking of "multi-cloud" as just meaning "all the computers and stuff we run." Putting the word "cloud" in there makes it seem like magic cloud stuff, when all we are/should be talking about is the entire, heterogeneous IT estate.
  - Something like 60% of people say it makes developer more productive, even more say there are operational benefits (64%). The developer productive part is confusing given the middling "shorten developer release cycle" figures over the years. But, whatever!
  - 10% drop in developers owning and managing Kubernetes.
  - Related, from McKinsey engineers: "As a rule of thumb, if developers spend more than, say, 10 to 20 percent of their coding time on container configuration, failover, security, or other infrastructure issues, it makes more sense to tackle these issues via CSP services instead, so that valuable time and skills can be reserved for functionality that serves the business."
- An idea for how many apps are running in Kubernetes, finally! While writing blog posts for the survey, I found this: Gartner estimates that "by 2027, 25% of all enterprise applications will run in containers, an increase from fewer than 10% in 2021." We're somewhere in between there in 2021, likely closer to 10% than 25%.

KubeCon EU 2023

- What's Ed's take - Edward Grigson actually did some work (unlike social loafers, like Coté)! E.g.: "FinOps for Platform Engineering – I spoke to their CEO at KubeconEU and got a demo. Looks good – very flexible and easy to use." Found three new vendors: Palantir Apollo, Mia.Platform, Port / Cortex.
- Jon Collins @ GigaOm: lines still being drawn around the components, WebAssembly. Best of breed vs. integrated platform. Robot: "The cloud-native world is maturing, and a multi-platform architecture will help build better manageability and governance in the future." And, Robot summarizing his platform engineering take: "Platforms are important, but the author argues for the need for multi-platform engineering (MPE) to understand and manage multiple clouds, stacks, and toolchains.The MPE group should be focused on empowering and enabling its users, acting as a product group for the entire organization."
- Daniel Bryant on dev stuff, full blog post.
- VMware schwag review: people love metal water bottles, not so much bottle openers. There are a lot of gambling service people in EU crowds.
- Software Defined Talk at/on KubeCon. Though I was one of the three people (t)here, I don't really remember what we talked about except the Dirk bread claw. So it goes with me and podcasts.
- Ben was not at KubeCon EU (sadface) but his YouTube picks are:
  - Evolution of WASM: Past, Present, and Future - Bailey Hayes, Cosmonic
  - The State of Backstage in 2023 - Ben Lambert & Patrik Oldsberg, Spotify
  - Choose Your Own Adventure: The Treacherous Trek to Development - Whitney Lee & Viktor Farcic
  - How to Blow up a Kubernetes Cluster - Felix Hoffmann, iteratec
Platform Engineering Strategy stuff: Platform Maturity Model paper, draft here.

How to change mainframe apps into microservices, modernizing mainframe applications with Fouad Hamdi

Fri, 28 Apr 2023 14:10:34 +0000

In this episode, Coté is joined by Fouad Hamdi, to discuss a project he worked on to modernize of a 30-year-old mainframe app. Fouad provides a comprehensive breakdown of how he and his team at VMware Tanzu Labs approached this task, migrating a system relied on by over 3 million users from a mainframe infrastructure to a microservices architecture.

Read the original blog post they discuss here.

Details

Fouad and Coté delve into the initial goals for mainframe modernization, the constraints, and past attempts at modernization that shaped the path they took. Fouad shares how they managed to migrate safely and at a rapid pace, all while maintaining the existing system's functionality.

Listen as Fouad walks us through how the team leveraged the power of event storming workshops and Domain Driven Design (DDD) to understand the business domain and identify key areas for modernization. They discuss the challenges of working with older technologies like COBOL, and the strategies they used to bring business knowledge to a new generation of developers.

They also explore how the team navigated complex issues such as coexistence between the old and new systems, and how they incrementally built the new system to avoid any disruption of service. Fouad shares invaluable insights into the importance of context in these modernization efforts, and the lessons they learned along the way.

Whether you're a software engineer, an architect, or a business leader looking to modernize your own systems, this episode is filled with practical advice and lessons learned from modernizing a mainframe application. Tune in to learn from Fouad's experience and to understand how you can apply these lessons to your own mainframe modernization journey.

Creating the business case for platform engineering, Kerry Schaffer

Mon, 10 Apr 2023 07:30:00 +0000

A lot goes into getting a platform up and running. Before you even get to that point, though, you’ll need to put together a business case and the plans for your platform. In this episode, Coté talks with Kerry Schaffer about that business case, but also about the role of developer happiness and platform marketing. We also discuss getting more women into IT and Kerry’s work with the Women’s Security Alliance.

Find Kerry in LinkedIn and Twitter.

What’s in the Tanzu Application Service 4.0? With Nick Kuhn

Tue, 04 Apr 2023 16:36:02 +0000

With Backstage, more Windows support, support for MySQL 8.0, and numerous other improvements, the new release of the Tanzu Application Service is packed. In this episode, Nick Kuhn walks us through the highlights of the Tanzu Application Service 4.0.

Find Nick in Twitter and LinkedIn.

The 3 Types of Kubernetes, and, Better Developer Productivity Improves Everything

Fri, 31 Mar 2023 13:25:17 +0000

We should start distinguishing between on-premises kubernetes and public cloud kubernetes. Also, it looks like improving developer productivity improves everything.

That’s what Ben and Coté conclude after look over a recent analyst report ranking kubernetes distros/services and a survey on developer experience efforts in organizations.

The two reports:

Here's the video of the recording if prefer that kind of thing.

orly? ops people actually talking with developers. Also: Spring talk.

Mon, 27 Mar 2023 16:54:22 +0000

In the DevOps, cloud, platform world we're told that operations people starting working closely with developers. This week @thecote been asked "does that really happen?" several times. We discuss the orly on that. Also, Ben and Coté talk about the Spring Framework community.

Here is the video recording this episode if you prefer that kind of thing.

DevSecOps in Practice with VMware Tanzu - A Discussion with the Authors

Fri, 17 Mar 2023 12:26:55 +0000

What is VMware Tanzu? I get asked this question a lot and, you know, I try to explain it. If you want a really good explanation, you should check out a new book on the topic, DevSecOps in Practice with VMware Tanzu. It’s expansive and in-depth, not only on the parts of Tanzu, but also the theory, ideas, and ways of working that Tanzu embodies.

Cora Iberkleid joins me (Coté) to interview the authors of the book, Parth Pandit and Rob Hardt.

Here’s the book from Packt, in O’Reilly Safari, and in Amazon.

Here’s a longer description of the book from the publisher:

As Kubernetes (or K8s) becomes more prolific, managing large clusters at scale in a multi-cloud environment becomes more challenging – especially from a developer productivity and operational efficiency point of view. DevSecOps in Practice with VMware Tanzu addresses these challenges by automating the delivery of containerized workloads and controlling multi-cloud Kubernetes operations using Tanzu tools.

This comprehensive guide begins with an overview of the VMWare Tanzu platform and discusses its tools for building useful and secure applications using the App Accelerator, Build Service, Catalog service, and API portal. Next, you’ll delve into running those applications efficiently at scale with Tanzu Kubernetes Grid and Tanzu Application Platform. As you advance, you’ll find out how to manage these applications, and control, observe, and connect them using Tanzu Mission Control, Tanzu Observability, and Tanzu Service Mesh. Finally, you’ll explore the architecture, capabilities, features, installation, configuration, implementation, and benefits of these services with the help of examples.

By the end of this VMware book, you’ll have gained a thorough understanding of the VMWare Tanzu platform and be able to efficiently articulate and solve real-world business problems.

What you will learn

Build apps to run as containers using predefined templates
Generate secure container images from application source code
Build secure open source backend services container images
Deploy and manage a Kubernetes-based private container registry
Manage a multi-cloud deployable Kubernetes platform
Define a secure path to production for Kubernetes-based applications
Streamline multi-cloud Kubernetes operations and observability
Connect containerized apps securely using service mesh

Who this book is for

This book is for cloud platform engineers and DevOps engineers who want to learn about the operations of tools under the VMware Tanzu umbrella. The book also serves as a useful reference for application developers and solutions architects as well as IT leaders who want to understand how business and security outcomes can be achieved using the tools covered in this book. Prior knowledge of containers and Kubernetes will help you get the most out of this book.

Cloud Repatriation and Low CI/CD Usage

Wed, 08 Mar 2023 13:27:02 +0000

There's been a lot of talk about controlling cloud costs by bringing workloads back to the datacenter, you know, private cloud. The three of us discuss what's going on here. Also, surveys consistently show that only about half of developers are doing continuous integration (CI), and fewer are doing continuous delivery (CD). Can that be real? Ben doesn't think so. We also discuss how secure software supply chain thinking might change the tight coupling between CI/CD, making that slash back into a wall between the two: CI|CD. Also, Ben reveals his cartography background.

If subscribe to our show, you'll definitely be interested in the golden path series of talks this year. Check them out, for free, at SpringOne.io. Also, the CFP for SpringOne 2023 is open now, apply!

As ever, with your three friends: @egrigson, @benbravo73, & @cote.

Here's the original video with some bonus content on listening while jogging.

Links discussed:

Ben's kid's YouTube Channel: Wibbles Wobbly Life!

You were told to install kubernetes, now what? A talk with Robert Kloosterhuis of ITQ

Tue, 14 Feb 2023 07:30:00 +0000

You've been asked to build a cloud native cloud platform. The developers need some containers, probably some orchestration. So, what do you now? In this episode, Coté talks with ITQ's Robert Kloosterhuis about just this topic. Drawing on Robert's background as a virtualization admin and now, the Tanzu portfolio of stuff, they go through the type of thinking and work ITQ does with customers. Also, some tips on getting around Amsterdam for the people coming in for KubeCon EU.

Check out the live recording in video form, if you prefer that kind of thing.

Link & Notes

The more kubernetes you use, the more frequently you release software

Thu, 09 Feb 2023 14:20:00 +0000

The CNCF has a new kubernetes survey out and it has some interesting findings. We discuss several of them and our takes on them. Also, fresh back from cfmgmtcamp in Ghent, Coté talks about a new entrant in the configuration and release management space, System Initiative.

As ever, with your three friends: @egrigson, @benbravo73, & @cote.

Here's the original video we streamed live if you're into that kind of thing.

State of Spring 2022 Survey, Kubernetes in the Wild

Tue, 07 Feb 2023 13:01:23 +0000

In this episode, we check in on the Spring community by looking at the most recent State of Spring survey. While in survey land, we look at the Dynatrace Kubernetes in the Wild study: what are the top languages used in kubernetes, and how is on-premises use shaping up> Also, SpringOne was great, and now there's so much more of it each week until the next SpringOne this fall. And, check out how smooth Ben is at picking up MC duties when Coté's internet stops working.

Here is the original, unedited video stream if you're into that kind of thing.

Apologies that this episode is a week late posting. Coté got busy.

As ever, with your three friends: @egrigson, @benbravo73, & @cote.

Links & Notes

SpringOne Essentials 2023 - watch it all now.
More SpringOne every week with the Golden Path to Spring One - Every Tuesday & Thursday at 2pm Eastern Time. Beginning January 31 and leading up to SpringOne at VMware Explore in Las Vegas, August 2023. Watch it here!
The State Of Spring Survey 2022
Dynatrace Kubernetes study
What is Shipa?

When low code is good, when it’s dangerous, and $4.5 trillion worth of computer stuff

Thu, 19 Jan 2023 14:36:56 +0000

What's the deal with low code? After discussing current IT spending forecasts, Ed, Ben, and Coté discuss some recent thinking on how low code seems to fit into your business. We also discuss the organization structures needed for doing platform engineering and all that.

As ever, with your three friends: @egrigson, @benbravo73, & @cote.

Discussed:

IT forecast Worldwide IT spending is projected to total $4.5 trillion in 2023, an increase of 2.4% from 2022, according to the latest forecast by Gartner, Inc. This is down from the previous quarter’s forecast of 5.1% growth. While that’s declined, software and IT Services still have a lot of growth, hardware is pulling growth down: “The software and IT services segments are projected to grow 9.3% and 5.5% in 2023, respectively. The devices segment is forecast to decline 5.1% this year as both consumers and enterprises lengthen device refresh cycles.” Summary from Coté's newsletter.
What's up with "low-code" - what is Ed seeing, what does Ben think?
On Organizational Structures and the Developer Experience - If you’re working on developer tools, you need a different org structure than working on public cloud services. // “The reality is that org structures that have been designed to iterate and produce services at scale are not likely to satisfactorily address gaps between the services that negatively impact developer experiences without at least some change. If there’s no appetite for that, progress is likely to be limited.”

2023 Predictions and Hopes

Tue, 13 Dec 2022 14:05:52 +0000

It’s the last episode of the year so the three of us go over not only predictions in the cloud native space, but also our hopes for what happens. Also, there’s special guest ChatGPT on its predictions and a surprise piece of advice for New Year’s Day.

In the original video of this recording, at the end you get a bonus overview of GNOME from Ben.

A bit of a spoiler for you: platform engineering, more edge, consolidation of the app and kubernetes stack and platforms. Also, a shocking hope about GNOME (Linux desktops)!

Developer templates and secure software supply chains for kubernetes with the Tanzu Application platform. Also: developer tools at AWS re:Invent and using ChatGPT to eliminate needless work.

Wed, 07 Dec 2022 16:15:57 +0000

In this episode, we discuss the use of accelerators in the Tanzu Application Platform to help developers start programming quickly and efficiently. We also touch on some of the developer-focused announcements made at the recent AWS re:Invent conference. Finally, we have a discussion about ChatGPT experiments and their potential to reduce the amount of tedious work for office workers. Ben expresses some concerns about the technology, but Coté offers a compelling argument for its usefulness.†

Be sure to check out Ben’s new talk about Backstage in the Tanzu Application Platform GUI including: Accelerators (code templates), secure software supply chain visualization, API documentation, and more!

If you prefer video, here is the original recording, it has some bonus monster truck material:

Links discussed in the show:

We talk about Ben’s recent video on templates (“accelerators”) in the Tanzu Application Platform. Also, we discuss the supply chain demo he does in that same video.
AWS Re:Invent news. Another 2 hr keynote with plenty of new services, many on the data side of things, plus the usual new EC2 instances. We talk about CodeCatalyst and AppComposer. Check out last week’s Software Defined Talk overview for more.
ChatGPT - an AI powered bot that’s been in my timeline a few times this week. From the same people that provide Dall-E, AI assisted drawing from natural language. SpectroCloud gave it a Kubernetes focused interview and it did pretty well. This feels like Boston Dynamics showcasing their robot inventions, in that it simultaneously amazes the public at large and scares them in equal measure. Unfortunately it doesn’t respond to ‘Shall we play a game?’ (for those that remember War Games and WOPR) - that would have been a cool Easter egg! See Coté’s experiments and take on it too.

† This week’s description written by ChatGPT with the prompt: “Can you write a podcast episode summary for me? We talked about some developer tools that help start programming (called accelerators) in our own product (the Tanzu Application Platform), then about a few developer things at AWS re:Invent. And then Coté talked a long time about ChatGPT experiments and his theory about how it can help reduce office worker toil. Ben was a bit scared.”

What is GraalVM? What is Spring Native? And why do you need native Java?

Fri, 02 Dec 2022 11:42:58 +0000

Ben educates Coté on what exactly native Java is and goes over GraalVM. They also discuss what Spring Native is and why it exists.

You can also watch the video version of this episode.

Links

Highlights from #VMwareExplore; Backstage/DX/platform engineering checkin; new IaaS+PaaS MQ; learning from Twitter

Tue, 15 Nov 2022 13:35:12 +0000

There was a lot going on at VMware Explore Europe last week, so we focus in on the Tanzu related stuff. Then: we do our usual check-in on platform engineering; a brief magic quadrant tour; see if there's any lessons to learn from Twitter the company; and close out discussing VMware's recent open source supply chain survey.

VMware Explore EU:
- Cindy's round-up.
- Tanzu Kubernetes Grid 2.1 - including support for Oracle Cloud.
- Tanzu Mission Control - getting air gap stuff working (not out yet?).
- Tanzu Service Mesh Advanced - roadmap announcements about: auto-discovering kubernetes and VM things; integrating with TAP to do security policy stuff; adding in running config stuff out of git (for, you know, GitOps).
- Aria Graph, GA (previewed/announced in US): "Today at VMware Explore Europe, VMware is announcing the availability of a new freemium offering of VMware Aria Hub powered by VMware Aria Graph. This new free tier offering enables customers to inventory, map, filter, and search resources from up to two of their native public cloud accounts in either Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure."
- More stuff: Bitnami updates, sovereign cloud stuff (working with partners to stand-up Tanzu in regional clouds).
- Hear Ben’s talk from Explore EU - “Tutorial: Introduction to VMware Tanzu Application Platform
Big Backstage Feels:
- RedHat joins.
- Coté's interview with The Frontside.
- Our always good Gartner paper on internal developer platforms, free to read.
- Also, more hammering away at "platform engineering."
- The CNCF’s Platforms Working Group are trying to define what a platform would include - details here.
- We're past the "DevOps is Dead" phase, which is nice.
- I think we can say "Developer Experience" without feeling dorky too. Even "DX."
New public cloud MQ, for IaaS+PaaS. Rank (first to last): AWS, Microsoft, Google, Alibaba, Oracle, IBM, Tencent, Huawei.
Transforming Twitter:
- Finally, an example of the "pathological" column in the Westerum table.
- Clearly Elon’s not a fan of Microservice Architectures - some weird monolith/microservices/de-platform stuff to observe.
- In the context of the DevOps/cloud native community - planning for a potential loss of the place to talk.
- Mastodon growing:
  - Coté in Mastodon: @cote@hachyderm.io.
- Interesting thoughts from David Heinemeier on the layoffs
State Of Supply Chain Survey
- Devs go faster and are more productive with supply chains
- New tools: Tanzu Image Builder - for packaging your OSS for enterprise use (amongst other things)

Coté did a little video on the study. Check out that Sam Elliott 'stach!

The Vibe at Cloud Foundry Day

Mon, 14 Nov 2022 16:56:35 +0000

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 is Backstage? How are people using backstage to improve developer productivity

Fri, 11 Nov 2022 16:36:25 +0000

Coté talks with Charles Lowell and Taras Mankovski about the Backstage work they've been doing with clients. First, they talk about what Backstage is in the first place. Obviously, it's an internal developer portal...thing...but what does that mean beyond, like, a wiki? Check out The Frontside, and also, Taras' talk at BackstageCon.

Watch the video of this recording if you prefer that kind of thing.

The people side of platform engineering, and, what is platform engineering?

Wed, 02 Nov 2022 15:13:28 +0000

Coté talks with Darran Rice about his experience and other's with building and sustaining platform engineering teams.

If you haven’t already, check out our conference SpringOne, Dec 6th to 8th. We’ll be talking a lot about platform engineering and you can hear from people like Darran who’ve actually done it. Get the chance to talk with them directly, ask questions, and learn in the hallway track. When you register, use the code COTE200 to get $200.

Links mentioned:

Also, watch the original video if you prefer that format.

Platform Engineering is something like”DevOps4k8s,” maybe (idk?), and, Google Next and Microsoft Ignite News

Wed, 26 Oct 2022 12:31:30 +0000

We check-in on "platform engineering," and ponder the theory that it's "DevOps for kubernetes." Also, Coté gives his theory on the rise of platform engineering. In the news section, we cover some of the announcements from Google Next and Microsoft Ignite.

Before we start: VMware Explore EU is about a week away. There's lots of Tanzu-land talks there, including this one with Coté and Mercedes going over their seven years of platform engineering, from back when it was called "platform as a product."

Also, if you're not registered already, check out the great developers, operations, and management talks at SpringOne. It's December 6th to 8th in San Francisco and will be a great event. As Ben mentions, there'll be a lot of great Spring Framework talk. When you register, use the code COTE200 to get $200 off.

As always, your hosts are: @egrigson, @benbravo73, & @cote.

News and Links

We'll cover KubeCon US next week (hopefully!). In the meantime, check out what our VMware pals are doing there.
VMware State of Software Supply Chain: Open Source survey.
Platform Engineering checkin:
- Coté declares it "DevOps4k8s."
- We have that Gartner paper about internal developer platforms that the platform engineering crew talks about here, for free: "Innovation Insight for Internal Developer Portals."
- Platform Engineering Watch: there's a platform engineering working group at CNCF.
- Our platform as a product white paper.
Google Cloud Next announcements, all 123.
Microsoft Ignite: Azure Deployment Environments.
Service Mesh survey (of KubeCon attendees?) shows that security is the top reason to use it, followed by monitoring/observability. Perhaps Service Mesh will, indeed, be primarily about security - or maybe that's just the concern now, since it's top of the list for kubernetes, usually - table stakes type of stuff for future desires.
Unmentioned, but fun: Forest Brazeal deserves a callout for his "Re-org Rag"!

Networking in Kubernetes, and, The SpringOne Missing Track

Tue, 18 Oct 2022 12:02:25 +0000

Conferences are a great chance, sometimes the only change, to discuss your peculiar problems with peers and experts. In the case of SpringOne, the topics range from programming, operations, and even management. It's the hallway track! Ben and Coté discuss two talks where you can maximize the hallway track and get your questions answered. And, then, stay to listen to and interview with Duffie Cooley about eBPF, networking on kubernetes, and more, from Explore US 2022.

The two talks from SpringOne: A Study on Soldier-led Software Development to Reduce Security Vulnerabilities and Tanzu Vanguard: Priceless Insights. When you register, use the code COTE200 to get $200 off. Just think of how many hot dogs you could buy with that!

Here is the video version of Ben and Coté talking, and the video of the full presentation and interview with Duffie.

The Best Developer Conference, Platform Engineering, FinOps

Tue, 11 Oct 2022 13:21:52 +0000

This week we give a little previous of what will be at the SpringOne conference, then cover some recent conferences. We then discuss the sudden emergence of "platform engineering" as a thing, and finish out by discussing what the kids are calling "FinOps," getting a handle on how much you're spending on cloud stuff.

As always, with your pals @egrigson, @benbravo73, & @cote.

Check out the livestream video if you like that kind of thing.

Show Notes

SpringOne Dec 6th and 8th.
- Check out the workshops and sessions.
- Escaping the Legacy Trap - Coté's talk with Marc. You can get the legacy trap booklet when you register for the webinar we did on the topic - also, watch the recording!
- Use the code COTE200 to get $200 off registration.
News
- Conferences:
  - Hashiconf announcements - RedMonk round-up.
  - eBPF summit sessions are now online (it was 28th/29th Sept).
  - Kong Summit.
- Platform Engineering Corner: boy, that's a thing now! Charity Major's piece. There was a whole conference. Paula has a good updated overview.
- Istio has joined the CNCF as incubating.
- Google published their 2022 Accelerate State of DevOps Report with lots of focus on security and platform-think.
- Surveys:

Ben’s new video “Deploy Your Python Apps To Production In Seconds”

Tanzu Application Service 3.0 Overview, with Nick Kuhn

Fri, 07 Oct 2022 08:40:09 +0000

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:

As you may recall, dear listeners, the Tanzu Application Service was previously called Pivotal Cloud Foundry.

Ambient Mesh, the 90% of IT and the 2% of sysadmins, and an uninformed look at GitLabs

Thu, 29 Sep 2022 12:41:21 +0000

How much on-premises IT is there? Is it 25% of all IT, or more like 90%. We try to figure that out at the start, and then move onto our selected news items since last time: a new take on services meshes known as "ambient mesh," a look at GitLabs, and two surveys going over cloud security and management/observability. And, check out Ben's video on getting kubernetes setup for developers with the Tanzu Application Platform.

Check out SpringOne which is coming up Dec 6th to 8th in San Francisco. You can get $200 off if you register with the code COTE200.

If you prefer visuals, check out the livestream recording of this episode which includes some bonus after show content where we dream about the alternative reality where Amiga still excited and hear about Coté's stroopwafel/coffee incident.

Topics:

How much on-premises vs. public cloud IT is out there? Is it, like, 50/50, or more like 90/10? AWS CEO throws out feels that 90% of IT is still on-premises. A lot of words that go nowhere, from Coté, on this topic.

News:

In service mesh land, there's a new idea: Ambient Mesh. Related, check out this talk from Duffie Cooley of Isovalent.
What does GitLabs do, exactly, cause they seem to be doing it very well.
New Relic Observability report
Snyk State of Cloud Security Report. Organizations of varying sizes and industries reported being impacted by major cloud security events over the last 12 months, with startups (89%) and public sector organizations (88%) the most affected

Davanum ”dims” Srinivas on the CNCF and kubernetes SIGs at VMware Explore 2022

Mon, 19 Sep 2022 16:28:26 +0000

This week it's another interview from VMware Explore, this time about the kubernetes community and governance. Alex Williams and Coté talk with Davanum "dims" Srinivas. We cover lessons learned from other foundations, especially OpenStack; how new ideas are introduced into the CNCF; and otherwise talk about how the CNCF operates.

You can also see the video of the talk dims gave before the interview.

This interview was recorded at VMware Explore 2022.

Dagger.io, programable pipelines, platform engineering, and more with Solomon Hykes at VMware Explore 2022

Wed, 14 Sep 2022 22:19:04 +0000

There's a lot going on in the build, pipeline, CI/CD, supply chain space - so much so that there's all these phrases for the concept. Dagger.io is taking stab (hahahahah...) at builds and pipelines.

In this episode, Alex Willians of The New Stack and Coté talk with Solomon Hykes to answer the question "what is Dagger?" We also discuss platform engineering, the concept of programable pipelines, and how Dagger wants you to think.

You can also see the video of the demo Solomon gave before this interview and the interview here.

This interview was recorded at VMware Explore 2022.

VMware Explore, k8s 1.25, Heroku’s free tier EoL’ed, NGINIX talks open source, Serverless

Wed, 07 Sep 2022 15:33:10 +0000

This week's news: VMware Explore, k8s 1.25, Heroku's free tier EoL'ed, NGINIX talks open source, Serverless

But, first: Candy Corn!

After the news, you'll hear an interview from VMware Explore with Jen Kelly all about Backstage. Check out her presentation and the original interview, in video format, as well.

Check out SpringOne which is coming up Dec 6th to 8th in San Francisco. You can get $200 off if you register with the code COTE200.

News:

VMware Explore 2022: watch the videos.
Explore Tanzu Application Platform roundup.
Kubernetes version 1.25 – everything you should know
Heroku no more free announcement and Minecraft buildpack.
NGINX and open source.
AWS Serverless Code Snippets.

Operations new customers: developers

Mon, 29 Aug 2022 18:14:17 +0000

How does operations change when you’re supporting developers? That’s what Barton George and I discuss in this episode. We recorded this at DevOpsDays Dallas 2022. Check out the video of this discussion if you’re into that.

Also, check out our upcoming conference on this topic and app dev, SpringOne. It’s December 6th to 8th. When you register, use the code COTE200 to get $200 off.

Platform as a Product with Bryan Ross

Tue, 16 Aug 2022 07:03:00 +0000

What is Platform as a Product? As Bryan Ross and Coté discuss, it's how operations people shift their mindset to be more customer-centric as they help developers out. It involves building a platform to automate as many tasks as possible to shift to self-service, but also changing expectations and interactions between development and operations. They also discuss issues with finance, the need for marketing, and realistic expectations of moving support from helpdesks to Slack (or whatever).

Bryan in Twitter: @bryanrossuk.

Read more about platform as a product here in our free report.

What is a ”Service Mesh”? with Oren Penso

Tue, 09 Aug 2022 13:08:00 +0000

Istio! Service Mesh! Netflix OSS! The technologies and concepts for doing API-driven architectures have existed for longer than most of us have been alive, at least, able to program. In our kubernetes world, a "service mesh" is the all-in concept for managing and doing microservices at the application layer, but it also brings in all sorts of operational security capabilities that can be overlooked at first. In this episode, Ben and Coté talk with Oren Penso about the evolution of the service mesh idea, how it's evolved over recent years, and a little overview of the VMware Tanzu Service Mesh.

Links:

Command lines and Kernels, Tanzu Application Platform 1.2

Mon, 01 Aug 2022 13:57:56 +0000

Tanzu Talk is back! Your new hosts are Coté, Ed, and Ben. In this episode we cover recent news in the cloud native world, plus highlights from the recent Tanzu Application Release. Plus, light discussion of the political climate in Star Trek versus Star Wars as it represents programming philosophy. Watch the original live-streamed video if you're into that kind of thing.

People: @cote, @egrigson, and @benbravo73.

Links:

Ed's Most Thrilling News from Last Week™
Tanzu Application Platform 1.2 highlights, video overview, release notes.
- Supply chain integrations, like Snyk scanning (beta).
- Full IDE lifecycle - create, update, delete (video)

Securing Cloud Applications, the book, with Adib Saikali

Wed, 08 Dec 2021 14:00:00 +0000

Security for developers has always been…complex. When you re-design for and move your application to the cloud, there’s a new set of security concerns to work with. Adib Saikali’s working on a book on this topic, and he discusses it with Coté in this episode. It all starts with the basics of security, and goes from there. Check out the book and read along as Adib finishes it over at Manning (https://www.manning.com/books/securing-cloud-applications), and, find him in Twitter: @asaikali (https://twitter.com/asaikali).

Outrunning the Bear - a tale of Digital Transformation in Government IT

Thu, 02 Dec 2021 13:00:00 +0000

Governments run on just as much software as the private sector, sometimes it can seem like even more! Government agencies feel the need to run their processes on software like any other organization and are starting to prioritize custom written software. Like everyone else, people in government feel the need to get better at software. In this episode, Jeremiah Sanders and Igor Steinberg talk with Coté about the motivations for getting better at software, common barriers, and a little bit of how people get over those barriers. Some selected topics discussed: Getting comfortable with “uncertainty” rather than certainty… accepting “failure,” the need to explore. People are stymied by the interpretation of the rules, not the rules themselves. Empowering people to be more cross functional. What compromises do the people on that small team make? Risks.

Making developer’s lives easier and securing the software supply chain with The VMware Marketplace, with Ramya Sarangarajan

Tue, 16 Nov 2021 10:00:00 +0000

Developers rely on all sorts of 3rd party frameworks, packages, and projects for their applications. Ensuring that those components are available, secure, and fit into an organizations overall enterprise architecture can be a challenge. Ramya Sarangarajan joins us in this episode to cover how the VMware Marketplace helps out. Check out the VMware Marketplace yourself (https://marketplace.cloud.vmware.com). Also, follow the marketplace in Twitter (https://twitter.com/vmwmarketplace), if you're into that.

Application Aware Platforms, Kubernetes, and Spring, with Ben Hale

Wed, 03 Nov 2021 10:00:00 +0000

Ben Hale talks about one the foundational concepts in the VMware Tanzu Application Platform, application aware platforms.

How to Get Started Securing Your Internal Software Supply Chain

Tue, 19 Oct 2021 15:00:00 +0000

Hear Alex Barbato and John Kjell of the VMware Tanzu team discuss why it's important, but still challenging, to secure your software supply chain. Importantly, they focus on the process of building secure software rather than buying it, and explain how new offerings such as Tanzu Application Platform can help automate some of the tedium for developers, operators, and security teams. Learn more: VMware Tanzu (https://tanzu.vmware.com/) VMware Tanzu Labs (https://tanzu.vmware.com/labs) Tanzu Application Platform (https://tanzu.vmware.com/application-platform) Improve Your Cybersecurity with a Secure Software Development Supply Chain (https://tanzu.vmware.com/content/blog/improve-your-cybersecurity-secure-software-development-supply-chain) Implementing DevSecOps in a Federal Agency with VMware Tanzu (https://tanzu.vmware.com/content/blog/implementing-devsecops-federal-agency-vmware-tanzu) Modern Least Privilege and DevSecOps (https://octo.vmware.com/modern-least-privilege-and-devsecops/) What Is DevSecOps? (https://tanzu.vmware.com/devsecops) Secure Supply Chain, with Henri van den Bulk (https://www.tanzutalk.com/222) Follow everyone: VMware Tanzu (https://twitter.com/VMwareTanzu) VMware Tanzu Labs (https://twitter.com/VMwareTanzuLabs) Alex Barbato (https://twitter.com/alexbarbato) John Kjell (https://twitter.com/J0hnKjell) Danielle Burrow (https://twitter.com/dburrow11) Derrick Harris (https://twitter.com/derrickharris)

The Best of Cloud & Culture

Tue, 05 Oct 2021 17:00:00 +0000

This episode features highlights from every episode so far, including a mix of VMware Tanzu Labs experts and clients. Because of the show's focus, the topics here range from building your first product as a startup to scaling Kubernetes inside a large organization, and cover industries including retail, financial services, and health care.

Kubernetes: When You Need It and How to Scale It (from Sept. 14, 2020)

Wed, 15 Sep 2021 22:30:00 +0000

In this episode, which first aired in September 2020, VMware's Josh Rosso explains when organizations and teams should look at adopting Kubernetes (hint: it's much more accessible than even a couple years ago), as well as some of the tricks to doing it successfully. Rosso spends his days helping large organizations scale Kubernetes environments, so he knows from whence he speaks. Since this episode aired, VMware Tanzu has updated its product lineup and roadmap to improve the developer experience on Kubernetes, while continuing its investment in alternative cloud native platforms for situations where Kubernetes is not the ideal choice. Learn more: * Announcing VMware Tanzu Application Platform: A Better Developer Experience on any Kubernetes (https://tanzu.vmware.com/content/blog/announcing-vmware-tanzu-application-platform) * Introducing Tanzu Application Platform at SpringOne (https://youtu.be/9kD7wa407K4) [video] * VMware Tanzu Application Service: The Best Destination for Mission-Critical Business Apps (https://tanzu.vmware.com/content/blog/vmware-tanzu-application-service-best-mission-critical-business-apps) * VMware Tanzu (https://tanzu.vmware.com/) * VMware Pivotal Labs (https://tanzu.vmware.com/labs) * The Podlets (https://thepodlets.io/) [podcast] * TGIK (https://tgik.io/) [podcast] Follow everyone on Twitter: * VMware Tanzu (https://twitter.com/VMwareTanzu) * VMware Pivotal Labs (https://twitter.com/pivotallabs) * Josh Rosso (https://twitter.com/joshrosso) * Danielle Burrow (https://twitter.com/DBurrow11) * Derrick Harris (https://twitter.com/derrickharris/)

Reinventing Finance with Customer Experience, with Henri van den Bulk

Tue, 17 Aug 2021 13:00:00 +0000

Among other things, the banking world is looking for new revenue and ways to retain customers. Focusing on customer experience is one way to get there. Shifting to a product-centric way of thinking results in dreaming up new types of “features” and even products to offer existing customers and help retain them - maybe even garnering new customers above the humming churn rate. In this episode, Coté talks with Henri van den Bulk about these drivers and some examples of that product-centric thinking in action. Find Henri in Twitter and LinkedIn: https://twitter.com/hmvandenb https://www.linkedin.com/in/hvandenbulk/

Modernizing Retail Apps: Deceptively Complex and Incredibly Valuable

Wed, 21 Jul 2021 15:00:00 +0000

In this episode of Cloud & Culture, Shaun Anderson and Brandon Blincoe of VMware Tanzu Labs share lessons they've learned while helping large retail clients modernize their online and in-store operations. Among other things, they discuss the nuances of inventory management, the best strategies for integrating systems after acquisitions, and the potential benefits of running Kubernetes clusters inside stores.

Find Customer Friction, with Bernard Golden and Jesse Bean

Mon, 19 Jul 2021 12:00:00 +0000

Coté is joined by Bernard Golden and Jesse Bean to talk about how companies they’re talking with are thinking through and approaching digital transformation and modernizing their software strategy. Get Coté's new book for free: https://tanzu.vmware.com/content/ebooks/changing-mindsets-the-missing-ingredient-to-digital-transformation?utmsource=cote&utmmedium=video&utmcampaign=TanzuTalk&utmcontent=bernard

Opening up healthcare with FHIR & other healthcare innovations

Mon, 12 Jul 2021 12:00:00 +0000

Right now there’s no end of possibilities for technology-driven innovation in healthcare. Coté and JT Perry discussed this state in part one of the conversation, and it part two they go over examples of those innovations. First, they discuss what FHIR (in the US) is and how it creates new opportunities for better patient care. Also, discussed: the software development tool-chain for more innovation in healthcare, at-home devices to reduce hospital stays, and API implementation and management. See part one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dpac46N5qM&list=PLAdzTaneSPRNuA52_34wh5VTBC-0Rz7U JT in Twitter: https://twitter.com/circlejtp

Now is the time for innovation in healthcare, with JT Perry

Mon, 05 Jul 2021 12:00:00 +0000

The US healthcare industry will likely see a lot of changes in the next five years - there's already a lot going on with mergers and new services forced by the pandemic. In this episode, fresh from working in the healthcare industry, JT Perry talks with Coté about all that horizon 2 and 3 stuff. The recent introduction of APIs and data interoperability is one of the more interesting topics. This is part one - in part two, we'll discuss the tools and practices companies can use to be part of this innovation. Mentiond: JT Perry in Twitter: https://twitter.com/circlejtp JT Perry in LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jtperry/

Mainframes, Microservices, and Money: Modernizing Apps in Financial Services

Mon, 28 Jun 2021 15:00:00 +0000

In this episode of Cloud & Culture, Shaun Anderson and Felicia Schwartz of VMware Tanzu Labs explain the state of application modernization among financial services firms. They draw from firsthand knowledge working with large customers to explain the threats these firms face, the opportunities they're trying to capture, and how using processes like the Swift methodology helps them maximize their efforts and even evolve their IT culture.

Moving from project to product at Yapı Kredi Bank, with Taylan Güney

Mon, 28 Jun 2021 12:45:00 +0000

We discuss how Yapı Kredi Bank has been moving their approach to software from a project mindset to a product mindset. Part of this re-organizing around product lines. To do this, the team analyzed their portfolio of 300+ apps and to define the products. As IT has been evolving, they're now working on transforming their relationship with the business side as well. We also discuss building up bi-directional trust between management and staff, banking security and regulations, and so much more. Enjoy! Mentioned: Taylan in Twitter: https://twitter.com/taylanguney Free books, archives, and help bootstrapping your own transformation: http://TanzuTalk.com

Secure Supply Chain, with Henri van den Bulk

Thu, 24 Jun 2021 12:00:00 +0000

DevSecOps alert! Container security alert! Coté talks with Henri van den Bulk about the ideas of a “secure software supply chain.” When you’re building, running, and managing your own software, how you secure your software goes all the way back to development - it shifts left! Henri goes what it means do security governance needed in the development phase through deploying to production. We also discuss thinking about “risk management” in security, a sort of obtuse topic for those of us who aren’t security-heads. Mentioned: Henri in Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hvandenbulk/ Henri in Twitter: https://twitter.com/hmvandenb Get my books for free: https://tanzu.vmware.com/content/cote?utmsource=cote&utmmedium=video&utmcampaign=TanzuTalk&utmcontent=henridevsecops Book some time with Tanzu Labs who specializes in bootstrapping your culture change: https://tanzu.vmware.com/office-hours?utmsource=cote&utmmedium=video&utmcampaign=TanzuTalk&utmcontent=henridevsecops

App Modernization 101: Intro to the Swift Method

Thu, 10 Jun 2021 15:00:00 +0000

In this episode of Cloud & Culture, Shaun Anderson of VMware Tanzu Labs walks us through the Swift method—a successful approach to application modernization that he helped create. Through a series of exercises, Swift helps teams identify the target behaviors and goals for their applications, and the optimal approach for delivering them.

Find Customer Friction, with Bernard Golden and Jesse Bean

Wed, 09 Jun 2021 16:00:00 +0000

Coté is joined by Bernard Golden and Jesse Bean to talk about how companies they’re talking with are thinking through and approaching digital transformation and modernizing their software strategy. Get Coté's new book for free (https://tanzu.vmware.com/content/ebooks/changing-mindsets-the-missing-ingredient-to-digital-transformation?utm_source=cote&utm_medium=video&utm_campaign=TanzuTalk&utm_content=bernard).

Spring Cloud Gateway, Services Mesh uses with Chris Sterling

Mon, 31 May 2021 17:00:00 +0000

What’s the difference between an API Gateway and a Service Mesh? How do they work together? Why would you use either? Christ Sterling joins Rita and Coté to discuss all that. Mentioned: Spring Cloud Gateway: https://tanzu.vmware.com/developer/guides/spring/scg-what-is/ Chris’ Ttech debt book: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9277805-managing-software-debt RedMonk videos with Chris: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAMpjc3lSqw Chris in Twitter: https://twitter.com/csterwa GitOps for APIs: https://tanzu.vmware.com/developer/tv/tanzu-tuesdays/0052/

Shopify VP on Innovation, Culture, and Remote Work

Wed, 26 May 2021 17:00:00 +0000

Shopify VP of Engineering Farhan Thawar shares his thoughts on a variety of topics related to managing software teams. He discusses fully remote software teams, pair programming, how to innovate within a company of Shopify's scale, and the benefits of engaging with a team like VMware Tanzu Labs (Thawar was at Pivotal Labs until 2015). He's joined by guest hosts Saad Ahmed and Joe Moore of VMware Tanzu Labs, who also offer their perspectives on what they're seeing in the field.

It’s always been about developer productivity, SOA to DevSecOps, with Ajay Patel

Tue, 18 May 2021 16:00:00 +0000

VMware Tanzu’s Ajay Patel talks with Rita and Coté about the history of app servers, SOA, and how we got there to our current cloud native stacks. And, Ajay also lays out the what enterprises are asking for in their app and kubernetes stack and the product strategy Tanzu is putting in place to solve those problems. Plus, we walk down BPE Lane. Mentioned: Ajay in Twitter: https://twitter.com/PatelAjayp

How State Farm Teaches Developers New Tricks

Tue, 20 Apr 2021 15:00:00 +0000

Learn more:

Follow everyone:

Data transformation: Systems matters, but don’t ignore business value

Wed, 24 Mar 2021 14:00:00 +0000

Learn more:

Follow everyone:

To Cloud or to Multi-Cloud, That Is the Question

Wed, 10 Mar 2021 15:00:00 +0000

Episode Notes

Learn more:

Follow everyone:

Chaos engineering, explained

Mon, 08 Feb 2021 15:00:00 +0000

Learn more:

Follow everyone on Twitter:

DevSecOps for US Federal agencies (FIPs, STIGs, auditors, AOs, and all that)

Wed, 27 Jan 2021 01:00:00 +0000

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

Refactor or lift-and-shift: How to prioritize modernization efforts

Tue, 26 Jan 2021 15:00:00 +0000

Episode Notes

Learn more:

Follow everyone on Twitter:

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

Wed, 06 Jan 2021 18:00:00 +0000

What's different about the day in the life of a DevOps Platform pro from an infrastructure pro? In speaking with Joe Hoh of Great American Insurance Company it's all about delivering capabilities instead of objects. The work isn't measured by the number of VMs delivered and tickets fulfilled. It's about adding new capabilities to developers and their business use cases. And that is much more rewarding work. What helps? Embracing the reality of change and making rework easier with a platform. With so much base capability automated, the platform team gets more return on spending time with developers, helping them be successful. "A lot of what DevOps is is educating each other." What did Joe bring to his platform role from infrastructure days? Read the full show notes at: https://tanzu.vmware.com/content/podcasts/from-objects-to-capabilities-joe-hoh-on-infrastructure-team-to-platform-team

(Almost) everything you need to know about SRE

Fri, 18 Dec 2020 15:00:00 +0000

Learn more:

Follow everyone on Twitter:

Bringing Software to the Fight Against Human Trafficking

Thu, 03 Dec 2020 15:00:00 +0000

Learn more:

Follow everyone on Twitter:

Managing remote working, strategy & people

Tue, 01 Dec 2020 01:00:00 +0000

In this episode, Coté is joined by Rick Clark and Sophie Seiwald to discuss management challenges of remote working. You know the drill: everyone has been working from home since the spring, taking away all the advantages and habits of working face-to-face. What’s new in this conversation is some advice for doing strategy communication, something that’s especially important when you’re relying on autonomous developer teams. We also discuss keeping people’s spirits up and making casual conversations with the boss more like running into each other in the hallway instead of an ominous “we need to talk” meeting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJsnVTLqTM&list=PLAdzTaneSPRNuA52_34wh5VTBC-0Rz7U&index=8&t=425s

The Business Case For Cloud Computing with Kevin Jackson

Wed, 18 Nov 2020 22:16:00 +0000

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

Everything I know about platform operations, platform as a product

Tue, 10 Nov 2020 01:00:00 +0000

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

What It’s Like Helping Nonprofits Develop Software—and What We All Can Learn

Fri, 30 Oct 2020 14:00:00 +0000

Episode Notes

Learn more:

Follow everyone on Twitter:

Sympathy for the Platform Team with Adam Furtado of Kessel Run

Tue, 27 Oct 2020 21:24:00 +0000

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

The kubernetes community for developers, with Jorge Castro

Fri, 23 Oct 2020 14:53:00 +0000

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

The Good, Bad, and Ugly of Remote Software Development

Fri, 16 Oct 2020 15:00:00 +0000

Learn more:

Follow everyone on Twitter:

State of Spring 2020, survey

Fri, 09 Oct 2020 02:00:00 +0000

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

Why Communication Is Critical for Agile Development

Fri, 02 Oct 2020 22:00:00 +0000

Learn more:

Follow everyone on Twitter:

Finding business value, with Robbie Clutton

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 02:00:00 +0000

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

Kubernetes: When You Need It and How to Scale It

Fri, 18 Sep 2020 15:00:00 +0000

Learn more:

Follow everyone on Twitter:

Kubernetes as enterprise architecture, with Rick Clark

Thu, 17 Sep 2020 02:00:00 +0000

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

Responsible Microservices, with Nate Schutta

Thu, 10 Sep 2020 02:00:00 +0000

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

Turning a Passion Project Into a Venture-Backed Business

Fri, 04 Sep 2020 15:00:00 +0000

Learn more:

Follow everyone on Twitter:

SpringOne 2020 Talk Picks

Wed, 02 Sep 2020 02:00:00 +0000

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

You can’t do everything at once, large scale app modernizing, part two, with Rohit Kelapure

Fri, 28 Aug 2020 02:00:00 +0000

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

From Idea to Product in Months: The Alluceo Story

Fri, 21 Aug 2020 20:00:00 +0000

Learn more:

Follow everyone on Twitter:

Learning product management by managing Nancy Drew & The Hardy Boys

Fri, 21 Aug 2020 02:00:00 +0000

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

Eating elephants one bite at a time, large scale application modernization with Rohit Kelapure

Fri, 31 Jul 2020 02:00:00 +0000

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

DataOps and home haircuts, with Bob Glithero

Wed, 15 Jul 2020 02:00:00 +0000

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

Making Time To Fail In Order To Learn: John Paice on the Journey from vSphere pro to DevOps pro

Tue, 30 Jun 2020 16:00:00 +0000

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

Event-driven integration and architecture (with James Urquhart)

Tue, 23 Jun 2020 14:00:00 +0000

Learn more:

Follow everyone on Twitter:

It’s all about containers now

Tue, 23 Jun 2020 02:00:00 +0000

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

Business transformation after COVID-19 (with Gautham Pallapa)

Tue, 09 Jun 2020 14:00:00 +0000

Learn more:

Follow everyone on Twitter:

Process, Automation, and Continuous Everything: Analyst Report Insights

Fri, 29 May 2020 21:03:00 +0000

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

There Is No Team Without Tea - Neville George On the Path from vSphere Admin to Platform Engineer

Thu, 07 May 2020 18:19:00 +0000

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

Tour De Tanzu Milestones

Thu, 16 Apr 2020 16:00:00 +0000

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

A Tale of Two Digital Transformations

Wed, 01 Apr 2020 16:00:00 +0000

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

VMware Tanzu and the evolution to cloud-native (with James Watters)

Wed, 25 Mar 2020 13:00:00 +0000

Learn more:

Follow everyone on Twitter:

Accidental universal control plane, with Joe Beda

Wed, 25 Mar 2020 01:00:00 +0000

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

It’s Tanzu!, a look at the VMware Tanzu portfolio with Jared Ruckle

Tue, 17 Mar 2020 19:06:00 +0000

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

Developer Experience is a Team Effort at Liberty Mutual

Wed, 11 Mar 2020 15:00:00 +0000

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

Facilitating digital transformation from the C-suite (audio blog posts)

Wed, 26 Feb 2020 14:00:00 +0000

Learn more:

Follow everyone on Twitter:

The kubernetes community, being a good corporate citizen in open source, with Dawn Foster

Tue, 11 Feb 2020 01:00:00 +0000

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

Spring and Spring Cloud (with Spencer Gibb)

Thu, 06 Feb 2020 14:00:00 +0000

Learn more:

Follow everyone on Twitter:

Where kubernetes starts and app development begins, kubernetes potpourri with Paul Czarkowski

Mon, 27 Jan 2020 01:00:00 +0000

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

A Checklist for API Security with Wim Remes

Tue, 31 Dec 2019 16:00:00 +0000

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

Highlights episode No. 2 (strategies for adopting modern IT practices and technologies)

Thu, 26 Dec 2019 18:45:00 +0000

Original episodes and blog posts:

Follow everyone on Twitter:

Platform as a product, cloud native education, and 2020 predictions, with Paula Kennedy

Thu, 19 Dec 2019 08:06:00 +0000

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

Highlights episode No. 1 (cloud-native architecture and technologies)

Thu, 12 Dec 2019 14:00:00 +0000

Original episodes and blog posts:

Follow everyone on Twitter:

Developer services and platform operations at AirFrance-KLM

Wed, 11 Dec 2019 01:00:00 +0000

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

Solving the Last Mile to the Cloud at Intrado

Tue, 03 Dec 2019 16:00:00 +0000

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

Working with startups (with Jessica Lin and Jonathan Lehr)

Tue, 26 Nov 2019 14:00:00 +0000

Learn more:

Follow everyone on Twitter:

Demetrious Robinson, Labs, and Learning Tech

Tue, 26 Nov 2019 01:00:00 +0000

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

Modernizing from Mainframe to .NET Core at Travelers Insurance

Thu, 21 Nov 2019 18:34:00 +0000

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

Platform Automation and Kubernetes with T-Mobile and Altoros

Fri, 15 Nov 2019 22:43:00 +0000

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

Entrepreneurial thinking (with Zachary Klima)

Tue, 12 Nov 2019 14:00:00 +0000

Learn more:

Follow everyone on Twitter:

Enterprise open source (with Stephen O’Grady)

Tue, 29 Oct 2019 13:00:00 +0000

Learn more:

Follow everyone on Twitter:

Candy corn teeth, or, SpringOne Platform re-cap

Tue, 15 Oct 2019 02:00:00 +0000

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

Pack to the Future: Cloud-Native Buildpacks on k8s with Emily Casey

Tue, 01 Oct 2019 16:00:00 +0000

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

Next-generation SQL (with Peter Mattis)

Tue, 01 Oct 2019 14:00:00 +0000

Learn more:

Follow everyone on Twitter:

Richard & Coté’s SpringOne Platform Pre-Romp

Mon, 30 Sep 2019 02:00:00 +0000

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

Leading Product: The Sparks, the Challenges, and the Victories, with Alexandra Lung

Fri, 27 Sep 2019 16:30:00 +0000

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

Unwinding Folklore to Modernize at Northern Trust with Len Hardy

Tue, 24 Sep 2019 18:26:00 +0000

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

Using Micrometer to Understand Application Behavior, a SpringOne Platform preview

Wed, 18 Sep 2019 14:30:00 +0000

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

Application security (with Guy Podjarny)

Tue, 17 Sep 2019 14:00:00 +0000

Learn more:

Follow everyone on Twitter:

A preview of two talks on CI/CD and Reactive, Cora Iberkleid

Wed, 11 Sep 2019 14:30:00 +0000

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

SpringOne Platform preview: RabbitMQ and Kafka, and, Building Reliable Services on Kubernetes

Thu, 05 Sep 2019 13:49:00 +0000

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

How to Get Productive with Spring Boot, Madhura Bhave

Thu, 05 Sep 2019 11:00:00 +0000

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

Hello, Spring Security 5.2 with Ria Stein

Tue, 03 Sep 2019 17:30:00 +0000

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

Site Reliability Engineering (with Dave Rensin)

Tue, 03 Sep 2019 14:00:00 +0000

Learn more:

Follow everyone on Twitter:

Fully Reactive: Spring, Kotlin, and JavaFX Playing Together with Trisha Gee

Wed, 28 Aug 2019 20:27:00 +0000

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

Analysts relations, kubernetes for konservative konsumers, and pig brains

Tue, 27 Aug 2019 02:00:00 +0000

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

PaaS and CaaS (with Cornelia Davis)

Tue, 20 Aug 2019 14:00:00 +0000

Learn more:

Follow everyone on Twitter:

How to Live in a Post–Spring Cloud Netflix World with Olga Maciaszek-Sharma

Fri, 16 Aug 2019 02:00:00 +0000

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

Using New Tech Foundries for large digital transformation, with Regis Allegre

Fri, 09 Aug 2019 02:00:00 +0000

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

Making Chaos Engineering Real for PCF at T-Mobile

Thu, 08 Aug 2019 16:00:00 +0000

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

Artificial Intelligence (with Andrew Ng)

Tue, 06 Aug 2019 14:00:00 +0000

Learn more:

Follow everyone on Twitter:

PAS, PKS,and RabbitMQ on kubernetes

Thu, 01 Aug 2019 05:00:00 +0000

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

Mick Pollard Explains How (and Why) Platform Teams Track Developer NPS

Thu, 25 Jul 2019 16:00:00 +0000

We've all seen those Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys ("On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this product or service...") in our consumer lives. But what if platform teams collected NPS as a metric for developer satisfaction? In this episode, Mick Pollard (@aussielunix, which I totally mispronounced as "aussie linux"... think UNIX!) shares how using NPS shifted the mindset of a platform team. Instead of measuring on velocity, the team ran a simple NPS survey and was shocked at what they found. Mick shares what the NPS represents, as well as how to go about running the survey. He also shares what needs to happen before and after the survey to build trust with developers and turn the metric into impact. Tune in to hear his recipe for success. For complete show notes, go here: https://content.pivotal.io/podcasts/the-art-and-science-of-developer-net-promoter-scores-for-platform-teams

MongoDB (with Eliot Horowitz)

Tue, 23 Jul 2019 14:00:00 +0000

Learn more:

Follow everyone on Twitter:

Design Thinking with Wipro’s Nate Clinton and Pivotal’s Tim McCoy

Tue, 09 Jul 2019 20:21:00 +0000

Designers play a critical role in software development. They impact not just what users see on the screen, but impact important decisions about product direction. In this episode of Pivotal Conversations, Nate Clinton, managing director at Designit, a unit of Wipro, and Tim McCoy, Senior Director of Design at Pivotal, talk about the evolution of design thinking in software development and share best practices for designing modern software.

Kubernetes (with Joe Beda)

Tue, 09 Jul 2019 14:00:00 +0000

Learn more:

Follow everyone on Twitter:

Intersect (@IntersectIT)
Pivotal (@pivotal)
Joe Beda (@jbeda)
Derrick Harris (@derrickharris)
Kubernetes (@apachekafka)
VMware (@VMware)

Product design, with Alex Tran

Wed, 03 Jul 2019 02:00:00 +0000

Validating your assumptions about app features is one of the core benefits of proper product thinking. This means testing out your design theories, but also testing out higher level, strategic questions. Pivotal's Alex Tran walks us through it all. He also goes over a few examples, mapping metrics to design, discover and framing (D&F), and discusses the idea of product vs. project.

Continuous Refinancing of Your Tech Debt with Rachel Stephens of Redmonk

Tue, 25 Jun 2019 16:00:00 +0000

In 2017, Rachel Stephens of Redmonk wrote a great piece about how technical debt is an incomplete analogy. But she agrees that it shouldn't be abandoned. In this episode, she and I expound on the analogy to its breaking points, including liquidity, derivatives, and the perpetual state of refinancing we're all in. See full show notes at: https://content.pivotal.io/podcasts/continuous-refinancing-of-your-tech-debt-with-rachel-stephens-of-redmonk Register for SpringOne Platform today and save an extra $200 with S1P200_DDREWITZ.

Apache Kafka (with Neha Narkhede)

Sat, 22 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Learn more:

Follow everyone on Twitter:

Intersect (@IntersectIT)
Neha Narkhede (@nehanarkhede)
Derrick Harris (@derrickharris)
Apache Kafka (@apachekafka)
Confluent (@confluentinc)
Pivotal (@pivotal)

Running the platform at The Home Depot, with Tony McCulley

Thu, 20 Jun 2019 02:00:00 +0000

The platform team at The Home Depot has many years of experience running Pivotal Cloud Foundry. Returning guest Tony McCully tells us how it's being used and managed now, plus some compliance automation and process tuning the team has been working on. We also discuss how the team is thinking about using kubernetes. Also, egg salad, carrots, and mustard.

Making the Right Thing Easy with Jon Ravenscraft and Nick Kuhn of Kroger

Tue, 11 Jun 2019 16:00:00 +0000

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

Why Every Team Should Embrace Chaos Engineering with Gremlin’s Tammy Butow

Wed, 05 Jun 2019 21:30:00 +0000

What's life without a little chaos? And why not a little chaos impacting your production systems? Sounds scary, but turns out intentionally introducing random errors into production systems helps identify vulnerabilities so you can do something about them before they result in major disruptions. In this episode of Pivotal Conversations, Gremlin's Tammy Butow, one of the leading practitioners of chaos engineering (as the practice is known), talks about the benefits of and shares best practices for introducing chaos to your production systems.

Speedback and The Recommit with Bryon Kroger

Tue, 21 May 2019 16:00:00 +0000

In this episode, Captain Bryon Kroger of the U.S. Air Force's Kessel Run dispells myths about the so-called "frozen middle," and finding resistance—and support—from all levels in an organization. He also shares some of the practices he's used to retain support for ongoing change, including growth boards and collecting feedback quickly.

Putting the Ops back into DevOps, SpringOne Tour Istanbul with Nate Schutta & Paul Czarkowski

Mon, 20 May 2019 02:00:00 +0000

This week I've got a discussion about DevOps I had with Nate and Paul. I've been curious about the changing nature of DevOps as SRE and platform operations comes into vogue. It seems like the idea of "full stack" DevOps is being dimension...and maybe DevOps itself? Maybe now it's just OpsOps. We also talk about enterprise architecture and governance in the age of decoupled, event-driven, microservices. And somewhere in there, we talk about how culture gets changed and who needs to do it.

One Key to Transformation Success? Being Comfortable with Being Uncomfortable, with TD Ameritrade

Fri, 10 May 2019 17:50:00 +0000

Nobody likes to be uncomfortable, by definition. And experienced software developers and architects, like all of us, want all the answers. "But if you are really trying to achieve the agility that transformation promises, you have to let go of some of that," says Bob Cunningham, Senior Manager, Enterprise Application Architecture at TD Ameritrade. In this episode of Pivotal Conversations, recorded on the floor of Cloud Foundry Summit 2019 in Philadelphia, Bob chats about his experience leading digital transformation efforts at the online brokerage, including the importance of being comfortable with being uncomfortable.

The intersection of kubernetes, Edge, AI, and tuna pizzas, with Derrick Harris

Thu, 09 May 2019 17:27:00 +0000

Microsoft Build brought a bevy of Windows news this week, plus, there's some more Windows support in Pivotal land and an overview of Pivotal Cloud Foundry's road-map. Our guest is Derrick Harris who's recently joined Pivotal and runs the CIO crib-notes news site Intersect. Additional topics: Coté might have a tape-worm. In Europe, pizzas are sandwiches. Images in RT's. Coffee and chicken AI/ML. "Will robots come for our jobs, Derrick?" GoGrid, Joyent. "Application first." Boring AI. Edge computing.

Grappling with Data and Application Modernization with Redis Labs’ Adi Foulger and Cassie Zimmerman

Thu, 02 May 2019 21:19:00 +0000

Enterprises across industries are modernizing legacy applications to improve performance and provide great customer experiences. But it doesn't how snappy your application is or how pretty the user interface if the data supporting the application can't keep up. In this episode of Pivotal Conversations, Redis Labs' Adi Foulger and Cassie Zimmerman talk about the challenges of modernizing your data architecture.

Not standing still in Secure DevOps with Jai Schniepp of Liberty Mutual

Tue, 30 Apr 2019 16:00:00 +0000

Five years into their journey with Pivotal Cloud Foundry, Liberty Mutual is not standing still. Talking with Jai Schniepp, Senior Product Owner of Secure DevOps Platforms at Liberty Mutual, Dormain learns how the team keeps iterating. Not resting on their laurels from their initial foray into pipeline generators, Jai's team have iterated to solve more of the developer experience in a secure way.

Melting the Retail IT Ice-Tray at Dick’s Sporting Goods with Jay Piskorik

Tue, 23 Apr 2019 16:00:00 +0000

Dick's Sporting Goods has been on an accelerated journey to "own their own destiny" when it comes to digital. But this isn't just e-commerce: this transformation includes melting the barriers between brick-and-mortar and e-commerce teams, as well as literally bringing down the walls between groups working on digital at DSG.

The Clever Task of Product Managing Backing Services, with Laurel Gray

Thu, 18 Apr 2019 09:54:00 +0000

There's a lot of "backing services" in Cloud Foundry: not only middleware like databases, but also operations services like auto-scaling. This week, Richard & Coté talk with Laurel Gray, the product manager for those services at Pivotal. We discuss the services themselves, the open service broker, how to product manage APIs and services, and product management in general. Also, we hop-scotch through the news: a new version of Pivotal Cloud Foundry, Google's recently cloud announcements, and a new version of kubernetes.

What is Your Platform GTM strategy with James Urquhart

Thu, 11 Apr 2019 17:00:00 +0000

We've touched on the mindset shift of treating your internal application platform as a product (or offering) for your developers. In this episode, Dormain talks to James Urquhart about defining the go-to-market strategy of that offering. Have you built the right service? What does my MVP look like? How do we educate, broadcast, and onboard developers? This conversation builds upon previous episodes on the topic of "platform as product." We refer to the episode with Paula Kennedy, as well as Dormain's post on "How to Get Developers to Start Using Your Application Platform." https://content.pivotal.io/podcasts/for-platform-teams-the-developers-are-the-customer-with-pivotals-paula-kennedy https://content.pivotal.io/blog/how-to-get-developers-to-start-using-your-application-platform

Overcoming the Cloud-Native Skills Shortage, with HCL’s Alan Flower

Wed, 10 Apr 2019 23:02:00 +0000

Most enterprises start their cloud-native journeys with lots of enthusiasm and big plans. But reality often sets in when they try to scale transformations by modernizing hundreds, sometimes thousands of legacy apps. The biggest digital transformation roadblock? It's a lack of cloud-native skills, says HCL's Alan Flower. In this episode of Pivotal Conversations, Alan shares tips and strategies for overcoming the cloud-native skills gap.

Beyond the Sea of No’s, with Jon Osborn

Thu, 04 Apr 2019 09:00:00 +0000

Demonstrating the value of software, how it contributes to revenue, is no easy feat. Staffing can be difficult, especially with an eye to sustaining teams over the years. Jon Osborn returns as a guest to discuss these and other transformation hurdles, plus successes they've had at the Great American Insurance Group.

Why You Need a Dedicated Platform Team, with Pivotal’s Paula Kennedy

Wed, 27 Mar 2019 17:04:00 +0000

There are a number of changes to process and culture needed to be good at software development, and one of the most challenging for many enterprises is creating a team dedicated to the platform and treating it as a product. But that, says Pivotal's Paula Kennedy, is a major predictor of success. "The [Pivotal] customers that are the most successful are those that have their own dedicated team with its own dedicated product manager," says Kennedy. "Those are the ones that are able to prioritize, able to meet users needs, able to release features quickly." Listen on for this and other insights from Paula, a member of Pivotal's PCF Solutions team, on best practices for platform teams to successfully adopt platform-as-product.

A Preview of CF Summit 2019, with Dormain Drewitz

Thu, 21 Mar 2019 08:00:00 +0000

Each year, the CF Summit brings together users, customers, and other community members. Dormain gives us a tour of the conference with some highlights. Plus, we cover some recent news and talk about open source foundations.

Change Your Mindset with Platform-as-Product, with Stark & Wayne’s Dr. Nic

Fri, 15 Mar 2019 16:57:00 +0000

In this episode of Pivotal Insights, Stark & Wayne's Dr. Nic Williams discusses why it's important to treat your platform-as-product. The short answer: It results in a more customer-oriented mindset. Listen to the full episode to learn more, including how putting some constraints on developers plays an important role.

The Enterprise Event Loop, Multi-cloud, & more, with James Urquhart

Tue, 05 Mar 2019 01:00:00 +0000

We talk with James Urquhart who joined Pivotal recently in the CTO group. We talk about some architectural ideas for converting the enterprise over to an event-driven flow, discuss the reasons for doing multi-cloud, and also what kinds of conversations "executives" find helpful. Coté does a great job mangling Pivotal product names. Also, hot takes on "on-premises" vs. "on-premise."

The Benefits of Boring Infrastructure with Helpful.com’s Farhan Thawar

Wed, 27 Feb 2019 20:47:00 +0000

In this episode of Pivotal Insights, Helpful.com's Farhan Thawar* talks about the challenges of building a company from scratch, why it's important to apply smart architectural principals to empower development teams, and why he strives for boring infrastructure. *Editor's note: Helpful.com was acquired by Shopify following the recording of this episode but before its publication. Farhan and the entire Helpful.com team joined Shopify where they continue to pursue their mission of making communication and collaboration more seamless and effective.

Modernizing the Mainframe with Michael Minella

Tue, 12 Feb 2019 21:53:00 +0000

While they are both big and hulking, unlike the dinosaurs the mainframe still walks among us. In this episode of Pivotal Insights, our own Michael Minella makes the case for mainframe modernization and shares lessons learned from the field.

Running Spring Boot Apps on Kubernetes, and Burgers, with Paul Czarkowski

Tue, 05 Feb 2019 01:00:00 +0000

Getting the blinking cursor of kubernetes up and running is only half the job: the other is actually running software in it. While at SpringOne Tour Charlotte, Paul Czarkowski walks Coté through how that's done using the classic Spring Music and Pet store applications. We also discuss burger innovation in Charlotte and the thumb method.

Optimistic about innovation, with John Mitchell

Wed, 30 Jan 2019 01:00:00 +0000

Duke Energy has been working on their software capabilities for some time now. They've recently reached a milestone by opening a brand new innovation center in Charlotte. Coté took a tour of it recently checking out the numerous product teams and their approach to exploring and building strategy, all the way from corporate strategy down to writing code. John also shares a couple of new examples of how lean product management and design in action. Also: gingham.

Using Software to Improve Medication Adherence with Shields Health Solutions

Tue, 29 Jan 2019 19:55:00 +0000

This week our guests are Dan Stevenson and Brandon Zaharoff from Shields Health Solutions, a maker of software solutions for the specialty pharmacy industry. Dan and Brandon talk about the challenges of developing and running a specialty pharmacy, how Shields' software helps ensure patients are taking their medications as directed, and how and why Shields adopted cloud-native software development to build and evolve its flagship product, TelemetryRX.

Pumping the Digital Transformation Bunny at the US Air Force, with Bryon Kroger

Wed, 16 Jan 2019 15:33:00 +0000

Few organizations have or rely on as much software the US Air Force. There's plenty of it around and, thus, plenty to be improved. In recent years, one of the more spectacular digital transformation stories has come from the USAF's work modernizing their Air Operations Control software. In this episode, USAF's Bryon Kroger goes over how they've moved multi-year release cycles to just weeks in the Kessel Run projects. Much of the work is in the "fuzzy front" end of planning and procurement, but as Bryon says, an equally, hearty serving has to do with building up people's skills, moral, and the overall culture.

Scaling Digital Transformation in the Enterprise with Pivotal and Accenture

Wed, 09 Jan 2019 20:26:00 +0000

This week, Pivotal's Mik Freedman and Joey Sabani, both members of the Agile Practice Leadership Enablement team, join Jeff and Dormain to talk about Pivotal's joint work with Accenture, the global consulting firm. This includes collaboration in Accenture's Innovation Hub in Columbus, Ohio, where Pivotal and Accenture work side-by-side with clients to help them scale their digital transformations.

Knate-ive

Wed, 02 Jan 2019 11:11:00 +0000

Knate-ive by Pivotal Software

Predictions past and predictions future, 2018/2019 edition

Sun, 23 Dec 2018 10:02:00 +0000

How's your year go? Pretty good? Well, regardless, it's almost over, so that means it's time for some predictions! Before Richard and Coté go over some hopes and dreams for 2019, they review some 2018 predictions. Some didn't work out at all, some were exactly correct, but, as always, most of them were in the ballpark. Also, the mystery of why we have a flat-head screw driver when the phillips is so clearly superior.

Improving Healthcare Data Interoperability with Cerner’s Greg Meyer

Tue, 11 Dec 2018 19:16:00 +0000

In this week's episode of Pivotal Conversations, Dormain and Jeff chat with Greg Meyer, a distinguished engineer at Cerner, a maker of healthcare software. Greg talks about a new specification he helped develop to achieve interoperability and easier data movement between healthcare systems. He also explains how the company is modernizing its development practices to increase the pace of innovation.

Domain-Driven Design & Event Storming, with Jakub Pilimon

Wed, 05 Dec 2018 01:00:00 +0000

Flexible software usually means well modularized software. Instead of one big ball of code, you want to create components that work together. Dividing up your application into those components has always been a bugbear of design and it's what domain-driven design (DDD) is trying to solve. In this episode, Coté talks with Jakub Pilimon to figure out what DDD is, plus how event storming is used to find domains. Also, outside of Poland, is it "evangelist" or "advocate"?

The Middle-management Bind

Mon, 19 Nov 2018 23:46:00 +0000

There's few tasks harder than refactoring a large organization, but that's exactly what we're asking management to do in all this digital transformation hoopla. Existing organizations are tremendously conflicted and tied up in competing incentives already, and then when you try to shift to a product team driven approach, things go even more haywire. Here, Richard & Coté talk with Pivotal's Carl Coryell-Martin who's been pulling apart that bureaucratic bowl of spaghetti for many years now.

Everyone’s Getting Better at Software, Highlights from SpringOne Platform 2018

Fri, 05 Oct 2018 13:46:00 +0000

From all the stories at SpringOne Platform you get the feeling that every organization out there is doing a real bang-up job with improving their software capabilities. Of course, it's not actually everyone out there, but each year we hear about more enterprises and government agencies that are using their own, custom written software to improve their business and operations. In this episode, Richard and Coté go over some of their highlights from SpringOne Platform 2018, cover some of the news (PCF 2.3 and PKS 1.2), and a few other news items in the infrastructure and cloud world.

Focusing on Product, Not Just Operations, and Growing Customer-focused Staff, with Thomas Squeo

Tue, 25 Sep 2018 02:00:00 +0000

Perhaps the phrase "business transformation" is what we should say instead of "digital transformation." If the goal of IT transformation is to switch over your organization from an operations, service provider to a product-centric approach, it fits better. While at SpringOne Platform 2018, I talked with West's Thomas Squeo about how West has been making this shift from an IT-as-operators and project gnomes to end-to-end product people. We also discuss the other side of the transformation, how the product people and the executive team learn about technologies like containers and microservices and start thinking about how those innovations let them change the core business. Thomas also gives advice on the career path to becoming a CTO: build up a diverse career path instead of sticking in just one lane.

Changing Culture with Habits & the Un-toasted Panini Quandary, with Kyle Campos

Sun, 23 Sep 2018 02:00:00 +0000

It's easy to understand what kind of IT culture you need if you're going to improve how you do software, but how do you actually change such a squishy thing? While at SpringOne Platform 2018, I talked with Kyle Campose about how he's done it. We also talk about the phrase "digital transformation" and some sandwich ontology.

Product Management, with Jonathan Sirlin

Sat, 08 Sep 2018 02:00:00 +0000

You often hear about the "product manager," but rarely about what they actually do day-to-day. This episode we talk with Pivotal's Jonathan Sirlin about product management using several examples of applications and organizations he's worked with. He talks in-depth about one application he and team worked on, covering the process they used to find, prioritize, and then create features and software.

Serverless, Knative, & Project riff, with Mark Fisher

Sun, 19 Aug 2018 02:00:00 +0000

"More and more, we see that more traditional, enterprise-y use cases start to fall into these categories," Mark Fisher, Pivotal. Few topics are driving more interest than "serverless." Pivotal has been working on a function framework called Project Riff for awhile. At its core, it's an event driven model for building applications. Recently, the team announced that riff works on knative. We discuss riff, knative, and serverless in general. There's also a little bit of news this week, and some herring history.

Design, with Salomé Mortazavi

Tue, 14 Aug 2018 02:00:00 +0000

"As designers, we think about the why and understanding the human experience, empathizing, and observing, and being curious, and trying to understand what are those important touch-points between a person and technology." We finally talk about design in this episode with Salomé Mortazavi. She goes in-depth into what design is for software, how it operates in a very user centric way, what it's like to pair in designing, tools Pivotal design people use, and modeling how to track the success and quality of design. Also, we talk about umbrella and rain-jacket style in Seattle. No one uses umbrellas, and you just need one rain-jacket, unless you want to match with your shoes. Full show notes: https://content.pivotal.io/podcasts

Magic Little Scripts & Favorite SpringOne Platform Talks

Sun, 05 Aug 2018 02:00:00 +0000

SpringOne platform is coming up quick - next month! - so Richard and Coté do their annual favorite talks review. There's talk on agile, pipelines, Pivotal Cloud Foundry, Spring, case studies, and so many more they don't have time to discuss. In recent news, Knative was recently announced which is wangling to be "the building blocks for running serverless workloads on kubernetes," as Google's DeWitt Clinton put it. Richard and Coté discuss knative, Istio, and how "serverless" seems to now mean just any old type of programming, but with containers and all that cloud native stuff. They also discuss container registries. Also, European toilet paper and beds.

Pivotal Cloud Foundry 2.2 and Potpourri, with Jared Ruckle

Sun, 15 Jul 2018 02:00:00 +0000

There's a lot of new features in Pivotal Cloud Foundry 2.2 from kubernetes updates to security. This week, we talk with Jared Ruckle about those features, plus a new white paper on the Open Service Broker API. As always, we also talk about recent infrastructure software news and manage to throw in some house packing tips as well.

Databasing with Greenplum, with Ivan Novick

Sun, 08 Jul 2018 02:00:00 +0000

We talk databases in this episode. First, with the history of databases and why the relational database become king, for awhile at least, and then about how databases evolved, ending up talking about Greenplum. Greenplum is the world’s first fully-featured, multi-cloud, massively parallel processing (MPP) data platform based on the open source. With Ivan Novick, we go over all that and cover some use cases. Also, as always, some recent infrastructure software news.

Modernizing Legacy Applications with the App Transformation Program

Thu, 28 Jun 2018 02:00:00 +0000

Every successful organization is faced with a daunting task: modernizing your legacy applications and services. The benefits of cloud native are alluring, to be sure, but modernizing your existing applications can seem impossible. Sarah Ehmann & Rohit Kelapure go over Pivotal's App Transformation methodology to get you over that hump. Full show notes: http://pivotal.io/podcast

Cloud-native .Net, all the Great KS’s, and Travel

Mon, 18 Jun 2018 02:00:00 +0000

In this episode, among other topics, Richard and Coté cover some recent kubernetes news, cloud native .Net, and tips for making business travel more enjoyable.

Cloud-native Malay Food, Tracing in Java, and Databases

Tue, 12 Jun 2018 16:48:00 +0000

During a discussion of South East Asian good, Coté & Josh Long manager to talk about Josh's book, Cloud Native Java (co-written by Kenny Bastani). They go over some of the less well discussed sections, like instrumentation and monitoring applications. In doing so, they discuss opentracing, Zipkin, Sleuth, and how developers should both code and use for better tracing. There's some nuanced detail on monitoring versus tracing as well. Also, we discuss how relational databases are traditional tacos, while all these new data stores are fusion tacos.

Working with Legacy Code, with Rahul Rajeev

Mon, 04 Jun 2018 02:00:00 +0000

An enterprise application of any significance will end up needing to work with legacy systems. It's often legacy code itself! Dealing with legacy code brings its own challenges, which Coté & Rahul discuss. Most of it has to do with getting a high confidence in your tests, which is a devilish problem for legacy code. We also, of course, discuss food in Singapore. This episode was recorded at Voxxed Days Singapore. http://pivotal.io/podcast

Pay transparency, being public, and hiring for culture, with Joe Militello (Ep. 103)

Sun, 13 May 2018 02:00:00 +0000

In this episode, we check back in with Pivotal's head of HR, Joe Militello. We discuss progress on Pivotal's pay transparency program and why it'll net help the employees and company. Also, there's some tips on practical Interviews for a creative, software driven companies like Pivotal and many of our customers. Since last we talked Pivotal went public, so we talk about the relatively small) differences in HR since then. Full show notes: http://pivotal.io/podcast

Conference, news, & white papers catsup with Jared Ruckle

Thu, 10 May 2018 02:00:00 +0000

With all these conferences since last time, we have to bring in Jared Ruckle to help us sort out all the news that's happened since last time. There's Dell Technologies World, CF Summit, Kubecon, and Microsoft build. We also discuss the new Built to Adapt Benchmark and how Jared's picks for other interesting, revent Pivotal content. Full show notes: http://pivotal.io/podcast

The Technologist’s Hippocratic Oath & #techethics, with Mariesa Dale

Mon, 09 Apr 2018 02:00:00 +0000

All these "users" are actually people using our software. What designers, programmers, product managers, QA, and operations people put into the software and support in it has real impact on our actual life, here in the real world. Despite that, we don't have a strong sense of ethics in software, which our guest this week, Mariesa Dale, is trying to start addressing. She recently wrote a Hippocratic oath for technologists which we discuss. As always, we also go over recent infrastructure and cloud news, plus cover tips on what to take, and not take, when you go camping. Full show notes: http://pivotal.io/podcast

From grumps to transformation metrics, the questions we get asked (Ep. 100)

Sun, 01 Apr 2018 02:00:00 +0000

What do you do with grumpy people? How do you track how much - or how little! - you're actually improving? These are two of the questions Richard and Coté are frequently asked. In this episode - our 100th! - we go over these two questions and others that we're often asked. Of course, we also cover our attempts to answer them. As always, we also cover some recent infrastructure news and give some business travel tips at the beginning. Full show notes: http://pivotal.io/podcast

The Cloud Foundry Foundation & CF Summit, with Abby Kearns (Ep. 99)

Sun, 25 Mar 2018 02:00:00 +0000

The Cloud Foundry user base and projects have expanded over the past year, adding members, users, and major components like the Container Runtime. In this episode, we catch up the CFF's Executive Director, Abby Kearns, on the Cloud Foundry ecosystem and the upcoming CF Summit. Also, Richard and Coté's tell you the sessions they're looking forward to and discuss when it's time to do the great pants to shorts switchover, plus Coté's seersucker collection. Full show notes: http://pivotal.io/podcast

The Twelve-Factor App, with Nate Schutta (Ep. 98)

Fri, 23 Mar 2018 17:30:00 +0000

Part of what defines an application as "cloud native" is an application and management style described by "the 12 factors." While these seem simple at first, each of them just the top of the iceberg of recommendations. Coté plumbs the depths with Nate Schutta to see what's under the waterline. They also discuss where state is in this stateless model and how it's managed. Full show notes: http://pivotal.io/podcast

Spring Tools 4 and IDE Innovation, with Martin Lippert (Ep. 97)

Mon, 05 Mar 2018 01:00:00 +0000

Developer tools have changed wildly over the past 10 years from build tools to IDEs. The IDEs available have not only increased, but usage of each has grown. In this episode, Richard & Coté talk with Martin Lippert about Spring Tools 4. And, as always, we cover some recent news in the cloud, infrastructure, and development spaces, plus, the squirrels of Coté's yard. Full show notes: http://pivotal.io/podcast

Security processes & culture, with Molly Crowther (Ep. 96)

Wed, 28 Feb 2018 01:00:00 +0000

Security is more about more than finding holes and devising patches. For one, once you find those holes and have a patch, you have to make sure everyone not only knows about them, but applies them. We talk about how Pivotal is doing this both inside Pivotal and with our customers, with Molly Crowther. Also, we talk about tactics for getting your developers more security conscious, in a way that both is useful and doesn't spook them off. As always, we also cover some recent news and discuss the merits of dog licks. Full show notes: http://pivotal.io/podcast

Beyond stateless - DevOps & Databases, Robert Reeves of Datical (Ep. 95)

Fri, 09 Feb 2018 01:00:00 +0000

While much of the magic of cloud native apps comes from being stateless, state must exist somewhere. Not only does this data need to be stored and accessible, but just as with the source code and builds for your application, the backing databases need to be managed and included in the build pipeline. Datical has been working on this problem for sometime. In this episode, their CTO, Robert Reeves, discusses all of this with us. Full show notes: http://pivotal.io/podcast

Kubernetes, Serverless, and DevOps, with Paul ”Czarkernetes” Czarkowski (Ep. 94)

Tue, 06 Feb 2018 01:00:00 +0000

All the kids are crazy for kubernetes. And for good reason, it's helping smooth out the rough, weird area between IaaS and PaaS, making it easier for organizations to run their IT in a cloud native fashion. In this episode, Richard and Coté talk with Pivotal's Paul Czarkowski about the history, purpose, and experience of running kubernetes. We also touch on how it intermixes and effects serveless and DevOps. Plus, we talk about doing CFPs, and, as always, we also go over recent news in the infrastructure world. Full show notes: http://pivotal.io/podcast

Building Product in the Enterprise, with Emily Tate (Ep. 93)

Wed, 31 Jan 2018 01:00:00 +0000

Doing proper, product-driven, user-driven agile in large organizations is hard. Much of it, of course, has to do with organizational processes that are inflexible and built around long-term planning. Emily Tate knows all this first hand, and we discuss her about her recent talk on this topic. As always, we also go over recent news in the infrastructure world. Full show notes: http://pivotal.io/podcast

Open Source and the People Who Love It

Tue, 23 Jan 2018 01:00:00 +0000

Open source has become one of the most popular - if not the most popular? - ways of producing and maintaining software. What are the advantages for developers, and how should organizations evaluate the long term viability of open source projects? We discuss these topics, plus a little bit of a look back at the history of commercialized open source in this episode.

Navigating the no, and moving from .Net to Java, at Great American Insurance Group (Ep. 91)

Tue, 16 Jan 2018 01:00:00 +0000

Technology and process are important when it comes to improving how you do software, but selling the organization on the change is always an issue. GAIC's Jon Osborn gave a great talk on navigating the "no's" to change at SpringOne platform. The day before he gave the talk, Coté talked with him about his experience getting a large organization onboard with cloud native and agile concepts, all the way down to tactics like how like slides and business cases. He also talks with Ben Romito who'd moved from doing .Net development at GAIC to Java development. Full show notes: http://pivotal.io/podcast

Kubernetes for app modernization in manufacturing, with Ben Wilcock (Ep. 90)

Mon, 01 Jan 2018 01:00:00 +0000

Very few enterprises start with a pure green field portfolio, with the ability to create and manage applications in a cloud native mode. They often need to intermix "legacy" style application with these new ones, let alone just run the applications on their own. While at SpringOne Platform, Coté talked with Ben Wilcock about a project he'd worked that fits right in here. Full show notes: http://pivotal.io/podcast

2018 analysts predictions round-up, plus, our own, with Rita Manachi (Ep. 89)

Mon, 18 Dec 2017 01:00:00 +0000

At the end of the year there's no end of predictions from the IT analyst would. In this episode, Richard and I talk with Pivotal's head analyst relations, Rita Manachi. We cover predictions in software development, infrastructure and cloud, and handful of miscellaneous ones like AI. Just for funsies, each of us throws in a prediction as well, plus a bonus book recommendation to start the new year with. Full show notes: http://pivotal.io/podcast

Event-driven architectures, with Kenny Bastani (Ep. 88)

Thu, 14 Dec 2017 01:00:00 +0000

While event-driven applications have existed for as long as our cyber-memories can rollback, we're seeing a revitalization of interest in them at the moment. In this episode, Coté talks with Kenny Bastani about his talk on this topic, meandering from some basics on the topic, to why you'd be interested in this architecture style, to the benefits of it. Matt Curry also joins into the discussion. Full show notes: http://pivotal.io/podcast

DevOps in the enterprise, and if it even really exists (Ep. 87)

Wed, 13 Dec 2017 01:00:00 +0000

How is DevOps actually panning out in organizations? In this episode recorded at SpringOne Platform, Kenny Bastani and I talk with Matt Curry about his talk on putting DevOps in place. We discuss how being more open in conversations helps build trust, shifting to a product-centric approach, and some ideas about scaling DevOps. Also, we discuss the idea of "is DevOps actually real," a favorite topic of Coté's. Full show notes: http://pivotal.io/podcast

SpringOne Platform 2017 Preview (Ep. 86)

Wed, 29 Nov 2017 01:00:00 +0000

The best conference in cloud native is right around the corner, SpringOne Platform, Dec 4th to 7th. Chock full of actual end-users and enterprises (along with your friends from Pivotal), it'll be a great time to learn about new technologies and how to improve how your organization does software. There's somewhere around 150 sessions. Richard and Coté go over some of their highlights, what to get out of the conference, and, as always, some recent infrastructure software news. Full show notes: http://pivotal.io/podcast

Learning Spring Boot, with Greg Turnquist (Ep. 85)

Wed, 22 Nov 2017 01:00:00 +0000

Spring Boot is unquestionably a popular framework and has been rising in popularity as the months flip by. In this episode we're joined by Greg Turnquist who talks about the second edition of his book, Learning Spring Boot. We also talk about the process of writing a book and Greg's fiction writing.

Learning cloud native architecture and coding, with Michael Barinek (Ep. 84)

Tue, 14 Nov 2017 05:52:00 +0000

The benefits of truly doing agile and XP are well proven at this point. Supported by a platform like Pivotal Cloud Foundry, you can expect to start improving how you do software. That said, cloud native development is a new style of doing software, from pair programming, to following 12 factor coding practices, and breaking apart software into independent services. It helps to get some training on this shift, which is what the Platform Acceleration Lab at Pivotal does. In this episode, we talk with Michael Barinek about that team, how it operates, and a little bit about the training they do. As always, we discuss some infrastructure software related news and explore some options for keeping warm.

Concourse, with James Ma and Lyle Murphy (Ep. 83)

Tue, 31 Oct 2017 01:00:00 +0000

Your build pipeline is one of your most valuable assets in a cloud native organization. When you need to build and test your application, managing all the dependencies, branches, and, not to mention setting up your cloud environments is no small feat. And then there's the whole part where you deploy to production as well. In this episode, Richard and Coté talk with Pivotal's James Ma and Lyle Murphy about Concourse, the build pipeline system that's used by Pivotal and several of Pivotal's customers to manage, well, their pipelines.

Pivotal Cloud Foundry 1.12, with Jared Ruckle

Sun, 29 Oct 2017 01:00:00 +0000

After a brief overview of some recent kubernetes news (Docker has added support), we talk with Jared Ruckle about the new features and updates in Pivotal Cloud Foundry 1.12. There are, as always, many security updates including tools to help migrate to CredHub and mTLS. Also, .Net support has widened in the Steeltoe framework and additional operational functionality. We also discuss the small footprint Pivotal Cloud Foundry profile which compliments the PCFDev desktop profile, as well as PCF Metrics.

Pivotal Container Service (PKS), with Cornelia Davis and such (Ep. 81)

Mon, 23 Oct 2017 02:00:00 +0000

There's a new option for running kubernetes, Pivotal Container Service, or PKS. PKS uses the underlying management layer from Pivotal Cloud Foundry to create a standardized cluster manager. This means you can run your applications in the existing Pivotal Cloud Foundry runtime, the Elastic Run Time (ERT) or PKS. With both of these runtimes in PCF, you can run virtually anytime of application, from cloud native apps to I/O intensive and "legacy" applications. We talk with Cornelia Davis about PKS and also here upcoming book, Cloud Native. Full show notes: http://pivotal.io/podcast

And now for this thought-lordin’ break, plus CF Summit EU (Ep. 80)

Mon, 16 Oct 2017 02:00:00 +0000

We’re back after a month off with tales of New Zealand’s expansive bacon selection, discussion of the new Spring Framework version, and CF Summit EU. We also discuss three pieces of ours from the past month on the usual topics of why all this cloud-native stuff is kind of a big deal.

Pivotal Container Service at VMworld 2017 (Ep. 79)

Tue, 12 Sep 2017 16:40:00 +0000

A couple weeks ago Pivotal announced how kubo is being productized into Pivotal Cloud Foundry, namely, as Pivotal Container Service (or "PKS"). We discuss what PKS is and the types of workloads it seems suited for compared to the existing Pivotal Cloud Foundry platform. There's also a couple of studies about container adoption and some other news from the infrastructure software world.

Blue-skying machine learning in retail and fast-food (Ep.78)

Thu, 07 Sep 2017 02:00:00 +0000

We discuss a retail-oriented demo application that looks around trying to find latent buyers. See the project diagram we mention here: https://twitter.com/sct/status/878377986520633344

Agile strategy & roadmaps, with Joanna Beltowska (Ep. 77)

Sun, 20 Aug 2017 02:00:00 +0000

"Agile Long Term Planning" sounds like an oxymoron. Or does it? A common misunderstanding about agile methodology is that it doesn't get along with long-term planning. In this episode, Coté talks with Joanna Beltowska on the topic of long-term planning in cloud-native organizations. Being agile doesn't mean a lack of vision, strategy, or a road-map at all. Indeed, those activities are more important than ever, but adding in the ability to experiment with theories and learn from the results in key. It's not that we don't want strategy and long-term planning: we want those, but with the ability to correct and modify them as they collide with the buzz-saw of reality. Full show notes: http://pivotal.io/podcast Transcript: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/p7yqhyynfrvptla/AACwF7VfYZNaXzHjkkooZoe3a?dl=0

PCI, BOSH, CI/CD, and microservices - white papers galore, with Jared Ruckle

Sun, 13 Aug 2017 02:00:00 +0000

It's a white paper party! Jared Ruckle helped several Pivotal platform architects put together four white papers, all released last week, on microservices, PCI, build pipelines, and BOSH. Jared gives us a brief overview of each paper and tells us his highlights. We also discuss recent infrastructure news from Amazon, the world of RAD-cum-low-code, and a bevy of new hype-cycles in the appdev space. The papers: https://content.pivotal.io/blog/the-whiteboard-sessions-introducing-a-new-tech-paper-series Show notes: http://pivotal.io/podcast Transcript: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/wwl4j34afmom384/AAB7tDv5--cDRPzrpZHh-HMVa?dl=0

PCF Data Services and hipster coffee scouting, with Ben Laplanche (Ep. 74)

Mon, 31 Jul 2017 21:49:00 +0000

Hey, so data matters. Where are you supposed to stick it and does anything about that change when you’re acting all cloudy? Coté and Richard talked to Ben Laplanche who leads up Pivotal’s data services effort. We chat about what Pivotal offers, how the role of the DBA is changing, what to consider when crafting “high availability”, and more.

A hopeful view of cloud-native enterprise architecture (Ep. 73)

Sun, 23 Jul 2017 02:00:00 +0000

It's probably a good idea to learn about enterprise architecture by talking to someone who's actually done it. In this episode, we talk with Stuart Charlton, now of Pivotal, but previously of roles where he EA's, even back in the SOA era! We discuss the mapping of traditional EA to cloud-native, and also some strategies for Coté to increase his Twitter followers, and, as ever, some recent cloud-native news. Full show notes: http://pivotal.io/blog Transcript: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/774jj5umouoiaob/AACmwBobWX7cOTI2ZXSGT6VSa?dl=0

The Fat Baby in the Water: Cloud-Native Enterprise Architecture (Ep. 072)

Mon, 17 Jul 2017 02:00:00 +0000

In the cloud-native and DevOps world, there's a lot of hand-wringing and snark around the role of "enterprise architect." At scale, the goals of this EA function seem to be valuable: understanding and translating to IT what the business does and how it functions, ensuring that best practices and technologies are used, and helping make sure IT is actually helping the business with as little risk taken on as possible. However, the relationship between EAs and cloud-native teams seems a bit misaligned at the moment. This week, Coté talks about his research so far into figuring out how "traditional" enterprise architects could and should figure into cloud-native think, mostly by giving an overview of 2006 book on the topic. As ever, we also discuss some recent cloud-native news. Full show notes: http://pivotal.io/podcast Transcript: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/v3odxmabapz600k/AABDLIqlUujB4wEDeCH3TKURa?dl=0

It’s private cloud all over again (Ep. 71)

Sat, 08 Jul 2017 02:00:00 +0000

There's some exciting private cloud news on the horizon with Microsoft's Azure Stack coming out in September. We discuss the brief history of private cloud and several models people have tried, along with some other news from the infrastructure software world. With no guest, Richard and I discuss some projects we're working from cloud-native .Net, enterprise integration, and enterprise architecture. Full show notes: http://pivotal.io/podcast Transcript: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/c1bxamn5wskej9m/AAA-Qw21XFGdacysg_E2nPqYa?dl=0

Cloud Foundry: The Definitive Guide, Duncan Winn’s new book (Ep. 70)

Wed, 05 Jul 2017 02:00:00 +0000

Cloud Foundry for operations staff can seem a bit of a black box. Lucky for you, Duncan Winn's new book, Cloud Foundry: The Definitive Guide is freshly out, making that box much more clear. We talk with Duncan about his new book, giving an overview of the book, who it's for, and delving into some of the contents like BOSH. As always, we also discuss some recent infrastructure software news like new Google Cloud regions, Microsoft's new cloud sales force, and an early preview of SpringOne Platform. See show notes: http://pivotal.io/podcast

Cloud-native Ops, with Tony Hansmann (Ep. 69)

Wed, 28 Jun 2017 19:34:00 +0000

Operating IT in a cloud-native mindset requires changes up and down the stack, especially in operations. The degree of automation in the stack changes the need for much of the manual work and process-driven checks and balances in IT ops as we know it. In this episode, we talk with Pivotal's Tony Hansmann on what those changes are, how the technology pushes these changes, and some of the barriers. See full show notes: http://pivotal.io/podcast

Cloud-Native Monitoring & PCF Metrics, With Todd Persen (Ep. 65)

Mon, 15 May 2017 02:00:00 +0000

In this episode we talk with Todd Persen on the topic of monitoring cloud-native applications with Pivotal Cloud Foundry Metric. We discuss the changing nature of monitoring in cloud-native platforms, how developers can now turn black-boxes into white-boxes, why time-series dominates the thought-technology in this space now, and the benefits of open source taking over most innovation in systems management. Richard is out this week, so Andrew Shafer returns to fill in as co-host. Full show notes: http://pivotal.io/podcast

Blockchain in Cloud Foundry, with Gary P. White (Ep. 62)

Tue, 02 May 2017 02:00:00 +0000

Previewing his CF Summit talk, Gary White explains what blockchain is and how it's being integrated into Cloud Foundry as a service. We start talking about how blockchain works and what kinds of capabilities it provides, beyond just bitcoin. We use the example of a shoe supply-chain to go over an example of using a blockchain verified ledger. Gary then goes over some examples of blockchain could be used in Cloud Foundry and how folks he's working with are integrated it into the platform for easy, reliable use by product teams. If you're interested in attending CF Summit (June 13th to 15th in Santa Clara, CA) to see Gary's talk - and many, many others! - use the code cfsv17cote when you register to get 20% off. Full show notes: http://pivotal.io/podcast

Cloud Foundry Myths Dispelled (Ep. 63)

Sun, 30 Apr 2017 02:00:00 +0000

There's a whole slurry of myths about Cloud Foundry. With the platform updating so quickly, many of the issues behind these myths have long been addressed, and many were just false from the get-go. Coté and Richard talk about a recent post dismissing common myths. We also discuss recent news from the infrastructure software world and go over a bunch of upcoming events that Pivotal will be at. See full show notes: http://pivotal.io/podcast

Container networking & storage with Usha Ramachandran (Ep. 61)

Tue, 25 Apr 2017 06:30:00 +0000

Networking and storage are two of the most difficult and complex parts of a cloud-native platform. In this episode we talk with Usha Ramachandran who product managers containing networking and volume services in Cloud Foundry. We discuss the networking problems being solved with c2c and why networking problems is so difficult. While not as extensive, we have a brief conversation around storage. Also, as ever, we discuss some recent news from DockerCon, Google voice services, and the recent Spring Cloud Data Flow release. Full show notes: http://pivotal.io/podcast

How Microservices Enable DevOps, with Josh Long (Ep. 60)

Wed, 12 Apr 2017 02:00:00 +0000

In preparation for his DevOpsDays Atlanta talk, Josh and Coté (well, mostly Coté) talk about the relationship between microservices and DevOps. They use the CAMS framing to go over how microservices could provide the architectural requirements to make DevOps possible. Full show notes: http://pivotal.io/podcast

The Google SRE Book With Andrew Shafer (Ep. 58)

Sat, 08 Apr 2017 02:00:00 +0000

The Google SRE book is a great collection of Google's practices, approaches, and management priorities that form the basis of how Google operates and builds their overall platform. Google Site Reliability Engineers are a combination of system administrator and programmer who spend about half of their time on traditional operations "toil" and the other half actually coding updates and net-net services and platforms used by the product teams at Google. Andrew Shafer and Coté discuss a general overview of the book and then highlight some of the more interesting and generally applicable topics. Full show notes: http://pivotal.io/podcast

Always Be Shipping: Pivotal Cloud Foundry 1.10 (Ep. 57)

Thu, 06 Apr 2017 02:00:00 +0000

A new release of Pivotal Cloud Foundry was announced today, version 1.10. We bring back Jared Ruckle to discuss the highlights of the release, namely: further .Net and Windows support, monitoring and tracing improvements, several security and networking additions, and several other improvements to the platform. As usual, we also discuss some recent infrastructure and cloud news from the likes of VMware, Rackspace, and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Full show notes: http://pivotal.io/podcast

”Running like Google,” the CRE Program & Pivotal, with Andrew Shafer (Ep. 56)

Tue, 14 Mar 2017 01:00:00 +0000

What does it really mean to "run like Google"? Is that even a good idea? Andrew Shafer comes back to the podcast to talk with Coté about how the Google SRE book and the newly announced Google CRE program start addressing those questions. We discuss some of the general princiapls, and "small" ones too that are in those bodies of work and how they represent an interesting evolution of it IT management is done. Many of the concepts that the DevOps and cloud-native community talks about pop in Google's approach to operations and software delivery, providing a good, hyper-scale case study of how to do IT management and software development for distrbuted applications. We also discuss Pivotal's involvement in the Google CRE program. See full show notes at http://pivotal.io/podcast

Bringing Agility to Enterprise Data Workflows, with Sina Sojoodi (Ep. 55)

Tue, 14 Mar 2017 01:00:00 +0000

This week we talk with about how organizations are increasingly looking to improve how they use data and workflows around data to innovate in their business. As with discuss with our guest, Sina Sojoodi, More than the usual ideas about "big data" and "machine learning," we talk about the practical uses of data workflows like insurance claims handling and retail optimization. In many large, successful organizations the stacks to support all this processing are aging and not providing the agility businesses want. Of course, as you can guess, we have some suggestions for how to fix those problems, and also how to start thinking about data workflows differently. We also cover some recent news, mostly around Google Cloud Next and Pivotal's recent momentum announcement. See full show notes at http://pivotal.io/podcast

Dieu Cao on PMCing in Cloud Foundry, isolation segments, & cloud-native QA (Ep. 59)

Fri, 10 Mar 2017 01:00:00 +0000

In this episode, Richard and Coté talk with Dieu Cao, the Elastic Runtime PMC, about how work on the open source Cloud Foundry code base works, prioritizing features, and some of the projects she works on like isolation segments. While we have her, we also talk about the naming schemes of Cloud Foundry components and the evolution of QA from way back in Dieu's early days as a tester. Our short news segment goes over Microsoft buying Deis and some cloud spending indicators around public cloud capital expenditures and bank's need to rewrite piles of COBOL. Full show notes: http://pivotal.io/podcast

Beyond ”Survival Is Not Mandatory,” the Cloud-Native Cookbook (Ep.54)

Tue, 07 Mar 2017 01:00:00 +0000

There's a handful of cloud news to go over - AWS S3 going down, Google's new database, Spanner, and others. We then discuss some ideas for how enterprise architects can help out in a cloud-native organization. Then, we discuss Coté's new project, tactical advice for organizations who are finding it difficult to do all the right things that DevOps and cloud-native think prescriptions. See the work in progress at http://cote.io/cloud3. See full show notes at http://pivotal.io/podcast.

Bringing Data to DevOps (Ep. 53)

Wed, 01 Mar 2017 01:00:00 +0000

We talk about the traditional and new relationship between data and application development, and, now, DevOps. The world of databases, data warehouses, and other DBAs is not starting to collide with DevOps. In this episode, we talk with Dormain Drewitz, Stephen O’Grady, and Kenny Bastani about the evolving role of data in DevOps-think. See full show notes: http://pivotal.io/podcasts

All you ever wanted to know about cloud-native Java, with Kenny Bastani & James Governor (Ep. 52)

Tue, 14 Feb 2017 01:00:00 +0000

We've got all your answers to "what exactly is 'cloud-native'?" in this episode with special guests Pivotal's Kenny Bastani and RedMonk's James Governor. Kenny gives us a good overview of what cloud-native is, as Coté summarizes it: handling the configuration and automation for your applications along with all the supporting frameworks and platforms to do that. We then discuss the process ("culture") angle, the origin of Spring Boot, the concept of "lock-in," and if public cloud is needed or not. Bonus: serverless talk! Full show notes and more at: http://pivotal.io/podcast

Thawing the frozen middle (Ep. 51)

Sun, 12 Feb 2017 01:00:00 +0000

Improving how you do software requires changing how every layer your organization's functions day-to-day, from executive leadership, to middle-management, and staff. Often, middle-management is resistant to change and acts as a "frozen middle," slowing and sabotaging leadership and staff's desires to change. Along with Pivotal's Dormain Drewitz, we're joined by RedMonk's Rachel Stephens and Stephen O'Grady to discuss this frozen middle problem and tactics to thaw it. See full shows and more at http://pivotal.io/podcasts

Dino Helps Us Figure out What to Do With Legacy Applications (Ep. 50)

Fri, 10 Feb 2017 01:00:00 +0000

Once you have your shiny new Pivotal Cloud Foundry instance installed, it's time to start selecting new applications to build and existing applications to migrate. Many of this second bucket will be "legacy" applications that aren't immediately compatible with the cloud native approach. Dino Cicciarelli and his team work with Pivotal customers to navigate through this process. We talk about the common process, roadblocks, and mental shifts people go through to be successful. One of the chief thought-technologies deployed is to start working on real, actual applications rather than inflicting a long process of analysis paralysis on yourself. We also cover a sampling of recent news: Visual Studio and Cloud Foundry, patent troll protection in Azure, and Snap's whopping spend on public cloud. See full show notes at http://pivotal.io/podcasts

A false choice: systems of record vs. systems of engagement (Ep. 49)

Tue, 31 Jan 2017 01:00:00 +0000

What's the best way to categorize and prioritize your IT projects? Splitting them up between systems of record (ERP) and systems of engagement (user-facing apps) is a popular mode of thinking, highly related to bi-modal IT. In this episode, guest Ian Andrews explains why this framing is a bad idea and offers a value-driven way of thinking about it instead, along with plenty of commentary from Coté and Richard. See full show notes at: http://cote.io/conversations49

Avoid the Ninja Anti-Pattern, Planning Out Your Cloud Platform Project (Ep. 48)

Wed, 25 Jan 2017 01:00:00 +0000

How do containers fit into your cloud native planning? That's a the question we start with this week, with (returning guest) John Feminella. We quickly arrive at a conversation on the larger question which is how to build a cloud platform and the allure of building it yourself. Also, we cover recent news in the infrastructure software space. Show notes: https://content.pivotal.io/podcasts/avoid-the-ninja-anti-pattern-planning-out-your-cloud-platform-project

The Undying Death of JEE - Gartner, App Servers, and Cloud-Native (Ep. 47)

Sun, 01 Jan 2017 01:00:00 +0000

One of your favorite technologies is on the death wagon, again. Gartner recently recommended avoiding JEE for new, cloud native application development. This predictably kicked up all sorts of push-back from the JEE stalwarts. In this episode we discuss the report, the responses, and all the context to figure out what to make of all this. Spoiler: JEE isn't dead, as ever, it's just a part of the ongoing gumbo that is a Java application. See full show notes at http://cote.io/conversations47

Filling the Developer Skills Gap, with Abby Kearns and James Governor (Ep. 46)

Fri, 16 Dec 2016 01:00:00 +0000

We don't have enough people, and the people we have don't have the right skills. That's a gasp oft heard during the machinations of digital transformation. To investigate this sentiment, the Cloud Foundry Foundation recently fielded a survey to probe into both sentiment around developer skills and how organizations are addressing it. The findings were actually optimistic, but there's still work to be done. In this episode, we dig into this survey and what the findings mean for how IT departments need rethink their approach to training and hiring. To do so, we invited Abby Kearns and James Governor. Abby is the Executive Director of the Cloud Foundry Foundation who did the survey. James is one of the founders of the analyst firm RedMonk. See full show notes: http://pivotal.io/podcast

Checking in with the Analysts at #GartnerAPPS, with Rita Manachi (Ep. 44)

Tue, 06 Dec 2016 01:00:00 +0000

How are analysts reckoning with "cloud native"? Rita Manachi joins us again to talk about industry analysts and what they're up to. We briefly recap what analysts relations (AR) does, and then jump into how analysts are thinking about Pivotal now. There's several new reports out that are good reads for the Pivotal-minded. Having just talked with several analysts over some chafer warmed lunch, we discuss how analyst meetings go and what to get out of them. We also cover recent news, primarily, the slew of announcements out of AWS re:Invent last week. Full show notes: http://pivotal.io/podcast

Cloud-native at Home Depot, with Tony McCulley (Ep. 45)

Mon, 05 Dec 2016 01:00:00 +0000

Home Depot has been using Pivotal Cloud Foundry and developing in the Pivotal way for over a year now. Thus far, they have roughly 150 applications running in Pivotal Cloud Foundry across all parts of their business. While at Gartner's Application Strategies & Solutions Summit, we talk with Tony McCulley about Home Depot's journey putting cloud native thinking and technologies in place. Tony had just given a talk about this experience so we all had the topics fresh in out minds. There are two great talks Tony's given before on this topic: one from 2015 at a MeetUp, and another from SpringOne Platform. Tony's great for talking about what works, what doesn't work, and how to plan out transforming from the "old way" to the "new way" of doing IT. See full show notes: https://content.pivotal.io/podcasts/045-cloud-native-at-home-depot-with-tony-mcculley

Step One: Build a Pizza Factory (Ep. 43)

Sat, 26 Nov 2016 01:00:00 +0000

We're seeing more adoption of agile in large organizations than ever before. More interestingly, they're really doing it, totally transforming the multiple layers of process to boil down to the the leanest bucket of parts that ensure quality, useful software. While there's a lot - a lot! - of work to be done, there's a slew of useful best practices, stories, and anecdotes emerging. In this episode we discuss this general trend and two of the related topics: scaling agile up and pair programming. We also cover spate of recent news about Cloud Foundry performance, .Net rolling out into various ecosystems, the new leadership at the Cloud Foundry Foundation, and lobster eggs benedict.

The Alignment Anti-pattern, Improving Developer Skills, and Cloud-Native Teams (Ep. 42)

Fri, 11 Nov 2016 01:00:00 +0000

Companies that want to get better at software are staffing and organizing themselves in new ways. The traditional "silos" approach clusters teams together into functional groups, whereas modern approaches cluster around product. We cover skills by looking at a recent Cloud Foundry Foundation survey on developer skills and then discuss some sections of Coté's upcoming cloud native journey booklet related to team composition and outsourcing. While news is sparse this week, we point to some "what does the US election mean for tech" news and also cover Microsoft Teams in relation to how "chat ops" has been extended to be SOP in most modern IT shops or, rather, how it should be.

Containers Ain’t No Sriracha Sauce (Ep. 41)

Sun, 06 Nov 2016 02:00:00 +0000

Containers are as big a deal in the Cloud Foundry world as anywhere else; what was once an obscure method of process isolation is a good way to boost developer productivity. In this episode we talk with Pivotal's Onsi Fakhouri and James Bayer about containers and Pivotal Cloud Foundry. After discussing the history of containers, we talk about how containers are supported in Pivotal Cloud Foundry, and then discuss how to think through the use of containers versus buildpacks, or using containers at all. See full show notes here: https://blog.pivotal.io/pivotal-conversations

Rebasing Your Wobble Detector, Industrial IoT and Pivotal (Ep. 40)

Sat, 29 Oct 2016 02:00:00 +0000

There's no end of discussion about the Internet of Things now-a-days, but much of it is either about flashing toothbrushes or crazy-making huge numbers with abstract use cases. This week we talk with Pivotal's Saurabh Gupta about the work he's been doing in the IoT space with Pivotal customers. He has a great model illustrating how to think about IoT use cases which we cover in-depth, with several examples. At the end of our discussion, you'll have a good appreciation of IoT is improving the business of "the big, noisy, dirty machines." We also discuss some recent news: clouderati's new jobs, CenturyLink buying Level 3, new MacBooks and Surfaces, AI market-sizing hijinks, and an example of cloud native business thinking in the hotel industry. See full show notes: https://blog.pivotal.io/pivotal-conversations

Inter-Service Communication, Consumer-Driven Contract Testing, and Service Versioning (Ep. 39)

Sat, 22 Oct 2016 00:12:00 +0000

Distributed systems are hard. Building a microservices architecture that supports evolutionary changes without breaking “contracts” among services? Especially hard. In this podcast, we grabbed Oliver Gierke, Kenny Bastani, and Andrew Clay Shafer to talk about inter-service communication, consumer-driven contract testing, and service versioning. Listen in as we wrestle with tricky concepts, and still end up as friends. See full show notes at https://blog.pivotal.io/pivotal-conversations.

Live to Tape from DellEMCWorld (Ep. 38)

Thu, 20 Oct 2016 02:00:00 +0000

Live to Tape from DellEMCWorld (Ep. 38) by Pivotal Software

Microservices Governance with Spring Cloud Contract, guest Marcin Grzejszczak (Ep. 37)

Fri, 07 Oct 2016 22:29:00 +0000

When you're moving fast, things will break more often. It's little wonder, then, that with a microservices approach you need to pay close attention to ensuring the safe, yet speedy change to APIs. The idea of "consumer-driven contracts" has been percolating for a long time. The idea is to shift the "power" in the relationship between the provider of APIs and the consumer of those APIs more to the consumers. In this episode, I talk again with Marcin Grzejszczak on this topic and we discuss how the newly GA's Spring Cloud Contract enables all this thinking. See https://blog.pivotal.io/pivotal-conversations for full show notes.

Managing Employee Experience and Building Trust, Cloud-Native HR with Joe Militello (Ep. 36)

Sat, 01 Oct 2016 02:00:00 +0000

Building a high performance organization requires more than just putting good technologies and practices in place for developing and delivering product, it requires the right culture as well. In large organizations, this often means changing the culture. At the heart of that is people, so it's natural that Human Resources will get involved, hopefully sooner rather than later. To discuss these topics, we bring back Joe Militello for the second time to discuss how Pivotal thinks through HR and the consultative work our team has been doing on these topics. His framing that I really liked relates to his summary of what HR does: improving "the experience of our employees and candidates.” We go over some best practices for transforming how HR operates and give a little peek into how Pivotal manages employee's experience.

Pivotal Cloud Foundry 1.8 with Jared Ruckle (Ep. 35)

Sun, 25 Sep 2016 02:00:00 +0000

Released a few weeks ago, Pivotal Cloud Foundry 1.8 is chock full of new features and improvements. We talk with Jared Ruckle about them, delving into security, databases, and new services. These features deliver on the Pivotal Cloud Foundry goal of speeding up time to market (with faster release cycles) and, yet, still being a general purpose application platform that organizations can use to run all their customer software. We also discuss another recent piece from Jared on opinionated platforms - check out that tree house! In the news, we cover the recent data breach at Yahoo, Windows Server 2016 and Docker support, Azure's ever growing geographic foot-print, and our hopes and dreams for the rumored Twitter acquisition. See full show notes: http://pivotal.io/podcast

Building DIY platforms: now you’ve got two problems, with Matt Walburn

Sun, 18 Sep 2016 02:00:00 +0000

Backed up into a corner, developers will start coding. It's little wonder then that as large organizations have been faced with modernizing their approach to software - all that "digital transformation" - developers in years past have been focusing on building their own platforms. Our guest this week, Matt Walburn, worked on one such project. He joins us this week to talk about the lure of the DIY platform and why, now that options like Pivotal Cloud Foundry are available, it's usually a poor use of organization time. Not only do you need to build the full platform with all the features from the development phase to running in production, but you have to maintain it as well. As Matt says, this will run you several millions of dollars in staff salary alone. And then, after all that, you still have to write all those applications you originally set out to make. See full show notes at http://pivotal.io/podcast

Gigantic Stranglers and Crazy Infrastructure, Working on Legacy Code with Rohit Kelapure (Ep. 33)

Tue, 13 Sep 2016 19:46:00 +0000

No matter how fresh and new your company is, you're going to have some "legacy" applications to work with when you're mounting your cloud native efforts. The nature of those legacy apps and services are varied: mainframes, ESBs, batch job, and plain old J2EE and .Net apps. If you find yourself unable to make changes quickly enough without the fear of it all blowing up in your face, you're probably dealing with legacy. Pivotal's Rohit Kelapure talks with us in this episode about the type of analysis and, then, types patterns he and his team use to "break up the monolith." Before all that we discuss some recent news: HPE selling off its software group, Google buying Apigee, Richard and Abby's recent commentary on the container market, and fresh coiffure advice for listeners. Visit https://blog.pivotal.io/pivotal-conversations/ for show notes and other episodes.

The Microservices Substrate - NetflixOSS, Spring Cloud Services, and Pivotal Cloud Foundry (Ep. 32)

Sat, 27 Aug 2016 02:00:00 +0000

Microservices aim to bring an unprecedented amount of agility to complex, distributed systems: each service can update at will, always getting the latest innovations and functionality into production. That said, this amount of rapidly moving parts brings a whole new set of management and operations needs to the forefront, not to mention simple acts like looking up a service to use. In this episode, we talk about the history of how Netflix solved these problems with their Netflix OSS stack. Some time ago, Spring Cloud sprouted up around this stack, making it easier to manage and consume, and, of course, this means Pivotal Cloud Foundry comes with the resilient microservices framework out of the box. Richard and Coté discuss some of the more important components in Spring Cloud like Eureka, Hystrix, and Spinnaker. We also discuss recent news, like Rackspace going private and figuring out practical applications for AI. See https://blog.pivotal.io/pivotal-conversations/ for full show notes.

Stories, Points, and Backlogs with Pivotal Tracker, guest Ronan Dunlop (Ep. 31)

Sat, 20 Aug 2016 02:00:00 +0000

Continuing our Circle of Code agenda, we talk with Ronan Dunlop of Pivotal Tracker. Tracker was developed over ten years ago as the in-house project management software used by Pivotal Labs and has since then become a product in its own right used by many teams. We discuss what Tracker's history, what it does, and most importantly the philosophy behind tracker. We also discuss some recent news about the Gartner IaaS Magic Quadrant (see free reprint and Coté's highlights), SQL Server support in the Google Cloud, and the wrap of SpringOne Platform, including just released videos of many of the talks. See https://blog.pivotal.io/pivotal-conversations/ for full show notes.

Tracing and Monitoring Microservices and Applications with Spring Sleuth (Ep. 29)

Tue, 02 Aug 2016 02:00:00 +0000

While at SpringOne Platform 2016 I, Coté talks with Marcin about one of the projects he works on, Spring Sleuth. There's plenty of technical overviews of Sleuth out there, but I wanted to talk with Marcin about the "why" of Sleuth, how he came to use, and get a high-level overview of how it works. Sleuth, based on Zipkin, is a framework for distributed tracing which turns out to be handy for the types of architectures we see in cloud native applications, particularly microservices. Monitoring a single user interaction across a mutli-service, composed application has historically been difficult: you can lose track of what code and service is participating and doing what, ending up in a lot of log salad and correlation hacks after the fact to diagnose problems and monitor for overall performance. Check out Marcin's blog at http://toomuchcoding.com/ and find him in Twitter at @MGrzejszczak. More: Visit http://pivotal.io/podcasts for show notes and other episodes. Feedback: podcast@pivotal.io

Platforms as Contracts with John Feminella (Ep. 30)

Mon, 01 Aug 2016 02:00:00 +0000

While at SpringOne Platform I talked with John Feminella about his talk on platforms and contracts. He uses the legal metaphor of contracts to describe the beneficial trade-offs between things like 12 factor coding and continuous delivery. As the abstract for his talks puts it: Platforms like Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) can be viewed as contracts between applications and the people who build, operate, and deploy them. At the root of these contracts is a core premise: if your application checks off a few boxes, the platform can provide enormous amounts of power and enable capabilities that wouldn't otherwise be possible. Check back from the video recording of the talk and find John in Twitter at @jxxf. Visit http://pivotal.io/podcasts for show notes and other episodes. Feedback: podcast@pivotal.io

Partnering in the Cloud-Native Ecosystem, Guest Josh McKenty (Ep. 28)

Sun, 31 Jul 2016 02:00:00 +0000

This week, while at SpringOne Platform, Richard and I talk with Josh McKenty, head of the partnering engineering team. With a general purpose application stack like Pivotal Cloud Foundry there's a lot of partner applications, services, and consulting that typically gets used beyond what Pivotal provides out of the box. Josh's team does the implementation with partners around these extensions and service integrator partnerships. We discuss how the program works, why it's needed, different modes of operating with partners (from agile to Gnatt-planned out waterfall style), why an ecosystem is needed, and how service integrators fit in. Since Josh has worked on OpenControl we slip in an overview and update of that compliance automation framework. Josh in Twitter: @jmckenty. Visit http://pivotal.io/podcasts for show notes and other episodes.

The Circle of Software (Ep. 27)

Sun, 24 Jul 2016 02:00:00 +0000

When you put all of the step needed to create good software up on the board, there's a lot of them. It's a lot more than just writing code, or even writing requirements and stories. Around Pivotal, we think of this full, end-to-end process as the circle of code: Ideas → prioritization / planning → coding → deployment → runtime → monitoring → feedback, and back again. Richard and Coté discuss these steps and how organizations are starting to appreciate "the big picture." They also cover some cloud native news: Amazon buying a browser-based IDE, Cloud9; Google expanding their cloud; and Verizon's purchase of Yahoo! News AWS buys Cloud9, makers of a cloud-based IDE. Also Codenvy and the related Eclipse project. Google add West Coast cloud spot. Yahoo! And Verizon love child. Coté's collection of coverage. Main Topic "Circle of Software," Onsi’s talk where he outlines this concept: Ideas → prioritization / planning → coding → deployment → runtime → monitoring → feedback, and back again What do Coté and Richard think of this model? Lots of individually popular tools at each stage of the circle … Prioritization: Jira, Pivotal Tracker, Trello, and more Coding → Java/Spring, Node, .NET, Ruby, and more. Plus countless IDEs from IntelliJ to Visual Studio Code to Spring Tool Suite. Not to mention web IDEs. Deployment → Jenkins, Concourse, GoCD, TravisCI, and more. Platform → Pivotal Cloud Foundry, cloud IaaS, containery stuff Monitoring → Datadog, New Relic, Dynatrace, and more. Log storage in Splunk and others. Feedback → Tools like UserVoice Where does friction arise in the handoffs between those stages? Damon Edwards value-stream talk from DevOpsDays Austin 2015. Is anyone currently trying to bridge the gaps? Between which stages? The marriage of tools and culture in making this work If you aren’t committed to continuously delivery and using feedback to fuel the next iteration, don’t waste your time setting up this machinery Also: SpringOne Platform! Aug 1st to 4th. Use the code pivotal-cote-300 for $300 off registration.

SpringOne Platform Preview, Pokémon Go, Will Azure Win Against AWS? (Ep. 26)

Thu, 07 Jul 2016 02:00:00 +0000

The biggest, best cloud native conference around is just around the corner, SpringOne Platform, this August 1st to 4th. This week we talk about the sessions we're looking forward to: Richard has his top five and Coté has a longer write-up. As both a technical and "meatware" conference, there's a whole lot to like, spanning the broad category of better ways of doing software. There are some great case study talks from the likes of Home Depot, ExpressScripts, Allstate, and Dish. In the technical buckey, there's all sorts of talks going over cloud native style development and several on handling data as well. Of course there's a lot on microservices! If you haven't registered yet, use the code pivotal-cote-300 to get $300!. In addition to talking about SpringOne Platform, we cover some recent cloud native news like the prediction that Azure will overtake AWS and, of course, Pokémon Go. Full show notes: http://pivotal.io/podcast Feeds, archives, etc: https://soundcloud.com/pivotalconversations

.NET and Beyond 12 Factors with Kevin Hoffman (Ep. 25)

Mon, 04 Jul 2016 02:00:00 +0000

We've seen a goodly spate of news in the container space recently which we cover in the episode. In the second half, we talk with Kevin Hoffman about the .NET world, Steel Toe, and his book, Beyond the Twelve-Factor App. A recent survey from the Cloud Foundry Foundation is widening the framing around container management, adding in the use of Platform-as-a-Service into the usual container orchestration mix. The survey also shows some interesting results around adoption, e.g., managing containers in production ends up being more difficult than people predict during evaluations. Also since our last episode, DockerCon brought a bevy of announcements in the container ecosystem which we cover briefly. And highly relevant to our guest, Kevin Hoffman, .NET Core 1.0 was officially released, as open source. In the second half we talk about the recent history of .NET and how it's being used to create microservices. We also talk about the three extra "factors" Kevin's book adds to the 12 factor app and typical experiences when migrating to 12 factor apps. Full show notes: http://pivotal.io/podcast Feeds, archives, etc: https://soundcloud.com/pivotalconversations

Analyst Relations, How Does it Work? (Ep. 24)

Mon, 20 Jun 2016 23:29:00 +0000

You've heard of "analysts," those people who cover the technology world with all sorts of quadrants, waves, and forecasts about how much money is spent on different types of software. What industry analysts do is actually a long, interesting list depending on who you are, their customer: a buyer and user of IT, financial and investment banker types, or vendors. This week, after a small section of new left over from last week - are you keeping up here? - we interview Rita Manachi, head of analyst relations at Pivotal. We ask her to go over what analysts do and her tips on working with them. Full show notes: http://pivotal.io/podcast Feeds, archives, etc: https://soundcloud.com/pivotalconversations

Can ”PaaS” Be Saved, Or Is It Gibberish Now? (Ep. 23)

Mon, 13 Jun 2016 02:00:00 +0000

After all these years, what does "PaaS" mean? Most of the vendors in this space fight tooth-and-nail to avoid the term. Coté and Richard discuss a brief history of PaaS, starting in the mid-2000's to now and then discuss why "PaaS" may not be the best term to use currently. Spoiler: it's overly anemic when it comes to all the stuff a full "cloud platform" does. Plus, it has a limited view and sentiment based on the "plug-in" origins of the term. The two also cover recent interesting tech news, including "synergy" theories on why Microsoft would buy LinkedIn and the growing market in cloud migration service integrators. With a new release of the Spring Framework, we also talk about the continuing rise of Spring Boot and what it's used for: sometimes, a "governance choke-point" is actually a very, very good idea.

Dealing with Legacy, Cloud Native & Otherwise (Ep. 22)

Fri, 10 Jun 2016 19:15:00 +0000

This week, Richard and I talk about dealing with legacy systems. Of course, defining exactly what "legacy" means is part of the trick. We settle on a loose definition that I've been using: it's the software in production that you're sort of afraid to change. Why would you be afraid? Well, it usually starts with having poor test coverage: so you're not sure if changes will break the application. The criticality of the system adds to that fear: if you make a change, and it breaks, business will be lost. We discuss some basics of re-platforming legacy applications to Pivotal Cloud Foundry, but also how to avoid getting trapped by legacy in the future. In addition to that discussion we go over recent news in the cloud native world from security, to AWS outages and how to think about uptime in the public cloud, a round-up of studies that shows small teams are better than large teams, and some interesting anecdotes from the UK GDS.

Cloud-Native Transformation at the CF Summit (Ep. 21)

Tue, 31 May 2016 02:00:00 +0000

Last week’s Cloud Foundry Summit was full of large organizations talking about revamping their IT strategy to be cloud native. We heard from the likes of Comcast, Allstate, Daimler, and ExpressScripts who each have been using Pivotal Cloud Foundry as the central enabler of their cloud strategies. These companies are modernizing how they create and deliver software, well on the journey to becoming software defined businesses. As Greg Otto from Comcast said, “We placed a bet on Cloud Foundry. We get features in days, not weeks, and scale takes minutes, not months.” In this new format for Pivotal Conversations, Richard Seroter and Coté talk about these stories and other happenings from the Cloud Foundry Summit. We also cover some recent news like the Serverless Summit and the the ruling in Google/Oracle case over APIs.

Cloud Native HR - talking with Pivotal’s Joe Militello

Fri, 11 Mar 2016 01:00:00 +0000

Episodes from before the new format switch (where Coté & Richard MC each episode). These are episodes that come from libsyn. Their download numbers aren't total, just since being in SoundCloud.

Community, conferences, unconferences, and Platform SpringOne

Tue, 16 Feb 2016 01:00:00 +0000

Episodes from before the new format switch (where Coté & Richard MC each episode). These are episodes that come from libsyn. Their download numbers aren't total, just since being in SoundCloud.

Data. Why did it have to be data?

Tue, 17 Nov 2015 01:00:00 +0000

Episodes from before the new format switch (where Coté & Richard MC each episode). These are episodes that come from libsyn. Their download numbers aren't total, just since being in SoundCloud.

Moving up the stack, talking Pivotal Cloud Foundry 1.6 James Watters

Thu, 29 Oct 2015 01:00:00 +0000

Episodes from before the new format switch (where Coté & Richard MC each episode). These are episodes that come from libsyn. Their download numbers aren't total, just since being in SoundCloud.

Talking DevOps ROI with the finance department

Tue, 08 Sep 2015 02:00:00 +0000

A short while ago, I wrote up how to approach doing ROI cases for DevOps. The catch, of course, was that doing ROI for DevOps is often the wrong “question.” That said, we all live in the real world, so you need to tell the finance people, let alone your management chain, something if they’re asking you to justify a decision. To follow-up on the piece, I called up my old friend Ed Goodwin, a programmer friend of mine who went and got an MBA and entered a whole new career in finance. I asked him to walk me through how you’d think about doing the ROI for something like DevOps and, more broadly, how to work with finance people who are curious about new IT processes like DevOps and cloud native. He gives some excellent, pragmatic advice. As always, it always helps to just talk with people, even if they’re from finance. Episodes from before the new format switch (where Coté & Richard MC each episode). These are episodes that come from libsyn. Their download numbers aren't total, just since being in SoundCloud.

That Cloud Native Lifestyle

Tue, 18 Aug 2015 02:00:00 +0000

Andrew is back for a discussion of what cloud native means, and wood-paneling. We discuss what we see as "cloud native," the full stack: Cloud Native Application Frameworks Cloud Native Runtime Platform Cloud Native Operations Cloud Native Empowered Culture Episodes from before the new format switch (where Coté & Richard MC each episode). These are episodes that come from libsyn. Their download numbers aren't total, just since being in SoundCloud.

Operations Has Plenty To Do In A Cloud Native Enterprise

Wed, 10 Jun 2015 02:00:00 +0000

From sleepy storage admin jobs to MongoDB, there's no end of jobs operations people can be doing now-a-days. Fresh of many years being an operations person, Bridget Kromhout (@bridgetkromhout), now at Pivotal, talks with me in this episode about DevOps and operations. We discuss the opportunities operations people have in a cloud native world, moving to and from management, organization change management, being "promoted" to management, and, of course, USENET. Episodes from before the new format switch (where Coté & Richard MC each episode). These are episodes that come from libsyn. Their download numbers aren't total, just since being in SoundCloud.