Well, hey, everybody. First, I thought I'd have another excuse to yell into the microphone. And third, I thought I would do a little bit of a reboot of the podcast here. It's been a while since I've podcasted, and we haven't really done very many Pivotal podcasts recently. But we have a new person who I've been here at Pivotal who, I don't know, I'd say some people who listen to this podcast will know him already. But I was talking with him recently and thinking, oh, we should have a podcast buddy show that we do. And so here we are. We'll still call it the Pivotal Conversations. And my plan is to just do the usual format of, well, at least usual for things I listen to, where we go over just stuff we think is interesting and germane to the topic area that we have. And then every now and then, if we can wangle it out, we'll interview some people. This episode is just me and the co-host. Why don't you introduce yourself? Yes, thank you. This is Richard Siroter. I'm happy to be here. I just joined Pivotal, I guess, what is it, eight weeks or so ago. So my hazing period's done. I've recovered. And I'm going to be excited to help with our messaging, as with Coté and working with the Pivotal Cloud Foundry team. And I've done a number of things in the past, which hopefully give me a little bit of empathy for all the poor folks who build and run legacy systems or try to pick a cloud provider and hopefully now try to move up a level and actually ship meaningful apps. Now, you're up there in Seattle, right? I am, Cloud City. Man, it's like really raining down here in Austin. I don't know how it's going up there in hot air balloon land. But, you know, I think we might have switched the weather. We've got a little mix up. I know, 75 and sunny here. It's the apocalypse. Oh, yeah. It's just raining cats and dogs. There was a picture of the local dam here. And it looked like, you know, maybe there was a zombie outbreak and someone wasn't manning the station. Just water flowing everywhere. It's crazy. Here's the other thing I wanted to ask you. I was cutting up a watermelon earlier.
2:00You guys get a lot of watermelons up there or just like cranberries? It's a little more cranberry, a little more granola here in the Pacific Northwest. Hmm. Yeah. I'll have to bring some watermelons next time I get up there because we've got tons of them down here. They're delicious. It's, you know how to pick a watermelon? I don't. Are you supposed to shake it or tap it and hear your echo in there? What's the... That's right. There's two things other than price. And maybe this will be, we'll see if we come up with the recurring bit tips that have nothing to do with computers. We'll call them analog transformation tips. But yeah, that's right. You want to tap it. And the test is this very ambiguous KPI called, you want it to sound hollow, whatever that means. And then also apparently you want to make sure there's a big yellow spot on it where it's like rested on the ground or something. So you want to get a big yellow spot and make sure it sounds hollow. So now you know. That's right. Half the battle. So have you been following the serverless summit stuff? I did a little bit. It was fascinating last week. Obviously you and I were at the CF summit a bit, but it's this season where there's always dueling conferences going on. I think it was the first time they did that. So it was interesting to hear some of the thoughts coming out now around whatever serverless computing means nowadays. It actually still has a fairly meaningful definition versus cloud and DevOps and other things that have been corrupted beyond belief. So what would you describe serverless as? Like what's going on there? I mean, it's typically seen as the layer that's almost above what you even see as this traditional PaaS or what we might think of as Cloud Foundry, which is there's no concept of the infrastructure underneath. It's only it's deploying functions. It's saying, you know, the unit of compute isn't really an app, let alone a virtual machine or container. The unit of compute is a function. And so I deploy functions to a fabric and it auto scales underneath. It's pay per use. If you look at public examples like Google Cloud Functions or obviously Amazon Lambda or the new stuff that Azure has as well. It's about like this might run for 10 microseconds, pull from an object storage, resize an image,
4:03put it back in and you're done. And that's what you pay for. So it's a different way of thinking. Crazy asynchronous obviously brings up all other considerations for how the hell do you trace this thing? What's logging like? How do you do security? I mean, it's extremely immature in concept, but clearly a powerful idea that probably complements more traditional full featured apps. All right. It's like one of the original, I don't know, pre-cloud Cloud Visions. Like you remember Network.com from Sun? It's a big batch job grid like that was supposed to run in some Siberian data centers or something. Yeah. I mean, again, it's going to be fit for certain things. I can't fathom how you're going to rewrite your Java Spring web app as a serverless thing in that same sense. I mean, we have ways to go before it probably retools other things, but it opens up some cool scenarios for more batch processing or a lot of one-off tasks. Yeah. There's this drive almost, I don't know how to describe it, but to find the smallest unit of meaningful cloud compute, right? Where we're like, if we package up a whole application, that's not a small enough unit. If we package up just like one process, is that a small enough unit? Or if it's just one function, is that the smallest unit? Like at some point, we need to identify what the atomic unit of cloud compute is. Yeah, I believe our friend, Mr. O'Grady Redmonk had pointed out that, you know, I think he believes the function is that lowest level. At some point, you are at the atom level and there's nothing more to decompose here. So, but then you also have to take a step back and go, okay, at what point does it matter? Because am I going to do a Git repo per function? Am I going to build up all this infrastructure just to be serverless? And now, what have I gotten from that? You know, is that making my life any easier? Or do I just have now new complexity I couldn't have fathomed before? That's it to watch. Huh. Well, that's, yeah. I mean, there's a, I'll put a link in the show notes to it, but there's a lengthy write-up over in the new stack of the idea of serverless.
6:05And, you know, I always like lots of charts. There's even some charts in it from like big consulting firms, which is sort of exciting. But you can check those out. Very legitimizing. That's right. Once you have an infograph, you're in. That's right. As I always like to joke, I enjoy hiding behind charts. They're a good shield to put up there, especially the bar charts with year-over-year data. Right. I mean, I'm trying to be careful because I'm the same person who would poo-poo people who complained five years ago that cloud was immature and it wouldn't do anything. So I'm trying to avoid hypocrisy by saying serverless is just a silly fad because it probably isn't. But at the same time, it is early, right? This stuff's probably years away from being really mainstream. So everybody who's listening should be paying attention to this and you should be experimenting with this. I don't expect that it's going to redefine how enterprise IT or IT actually functions anytime in the next, you know, five years. Sure. Yeah. I mean, as you were pointing out, there's a lot of... If you sit down and write down all the operational requirements and even developer requirements, development requirements you need, you've got to make sure you... Those things integrate well with the new concepts that you have, which to your point, no doubt, like if serverless stuff remains a thing, that'll happen. But it's just a matter of making sure that what's... I don't know, that you have what you need. That's right. So also, have you been covering the Google and Oracle case that recently concluded basically in Google's favor? Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that means we can implement APIs now in the clear, right? Yes. The world breathed a collective sigh of relief that APIs are once again freed from the shackles of our Oracle compatriots. So what was interesting, I was reading some news today where the Oracle lawyer was actually saying that this actually spells the death of open source because now licenses don't mean anything. And, you know, GPL and others, you know, now it's open sources are free for all, which of course seems like that's a bit of hyperbole from a losing side, but it seems like it's
8:06good news. These things always become tricky because it's probably not as boogeyman as one side positions the other as, but it seems like it's a good blow for defining and using APIs and not locking these things down and screwing up a very large community that's built up around this stuff. Yeah. You know, you're making me remember the, what was the name of the company that was like suing all the Linux people with like the, uh, the, the, the hotshot CEO at the helm who is always just saying crazy stuff. It was one of, one of the Unixes and, uh, yeah, like, like to us, I remember it seems like the largest impact fear of that, I don't know, lawsuit, legal shenanigans, just like with this one was not so much, well, for us at vendors, it's a big deal, but it's more that if you, if you go to like all of the users, the buyers, the enterprises, out there, the large organizations, uh, you know, if once they start freaking out about implementing interfaces, like all those enterprise Java beans that are out there, those are just interfaces that have been implemented. It does, it does start to have a, uh, much larger impact of fear essentially. And, uh, you know, I was, I was at, uh, they have, uh, they had OzCon here in Austin, uh, a couple of weeks ago and, you know, I don't really know the answer to this, but I was looking around and, you know, we had a, um, a booth there and lots of people had booths and, you know, OzCon being the, what was it? The, the, the open source conference, I guess is what it stands for. Uh, and, uh, you know, out of the corner of your eyes, you could see like the usual open source people like juggling and wearing their utility kilts, but it seemed like everything there was pretty normal and mainstream. And, and it made me wonder, like, like one, obviously sort of like the open source world is mainstream, but it made me reflect that like, there's not really that much like fire branded open source stuff. So for, you know, and, and, and the reason I think of this is like, I guess if you had a very, uh, literal and well, not even literal, you had a very classical read of the, uh, the
10:11GPL, like this lawsuit would seem to damage open source because. Essentially, like, uh, if I remember the GPL, it's basically like if you do your object linking, which used to make sense way back when, but has been taken to mean that if you like basically, uh, at compile time, link your code to something, then, uh, all sorts of things come into effect and, uh, you know, implementing an API would sort of enact that, which I guess if you had this weird reading of open source would think that you were destroying open source as a consequence. But then like, there's a lot of other licenses out there beside the GPL. And in fact, like invoking them again, I'm sure our, our friends at red monk could run some numbers for us, but like, I'm not sure there's that many, uh, large projects over the past 15 years that follow GPL stuff. A lot of them seem to go with more permissive licenses. So it seems like everything will be dandy, but that is a, I don't know, that is a bit of a relief that now you can implement interfaces. Everyone can start compiling again. That's right. Until the next thing pops up and Amazon tries to copyright the AWS API or some other thing. Yeah, that's, that's, that's always been out there on the, uh, the ambiguous horizon. Right. Good point. So speaking of that, there was another like thing that's interesting in the, uh, the cloud native world that, uh, Salesforce is going to be running. Was it, is it all of it or, or just some of a large part of it on AWS? No, it's only, and I'm only, I'm doing air quotes right now, but it's only like $400 million worth. So it's not, it's not all of Salesforce retooling, but it was, uh, you know, obviously bought Heroku years ago, which runs entirely on AWS. And I think this was a, we're going to do a lot of our new work on AWS. So some interesting, you know, things you think about through that a, that means that the other cloud providers didn't win that business, which is always something people talk about. Then there's the, you know, what are the longterm plays of, you know, is Salesforce, you know, want to pull out from, you know, the hyper-invested Oracle stack that they have today and they're
12:14trying to run. They had a big curve, you know, big blow up a few weeks ago where one of their instances was down for a number of hours and they actually lost four hours of data, which is pretty unusual for a, for such a mature provider like that. And, you know, maybe it's maybe looking at diversifying a bit, which is interesting. You know, there was a big love fest between Salesforce and Microsoft a year or so back. And you wondered if those two were really going to get a little bit closer. So just interesting to see one thing from the CF summit that had popped up was I hadn't known that Salesforce was one of the first ones that looked at Cloud Foundry as a platform and ended up deciding to go the Heroku route because they wanted to own their destiny there. But how the world might've been different had they been the first deployment of CF for running force and some of those systems. Yeah. I think one of their buddies, SAP is using Cloud Foundry in a lot of their new stuff underneath, if I recall. So that's right. That's interesting. Yeah. And it's also, you know, I don't know much about the internals of Salesforce, but it strikes me that they probably have an architecture. I mean, they have many, many applications, but they probably have several large applications that have an architecture that one might consider legacy, if you will, or close enough to a lot of the, a lot of the large organizations we talk with and they want to know how to migrate to cloud. And, uh, you know, like if I, I forget if Oracle still, I mean, if Salesforce still has a lot of Oracle in the middle of it, but I remember that was a, uh, quite a big component of it, but it seems, it, yeah, it seems like, uh, if they, if they can manage to run, uh, what it was 400 million, is that maybe like one quarter's payment on that new building they're doing down in San Francisco? Right. Like it, you know, it's probably, uh, possible to, to move things over there. Now that said, it's, uh, it's probably worth, you know, wondering more what applications they're moving. If it's sort of like they're, uh, they're older things or newer things. Cause they, like I said, they've gobbled up a lot of stuff over the years. Yeah. I don't recall how open they are about some of their own internal plumbing when they speak at conferences or things like that. But, you know, I think we're all hungry for detail, so it would be awesome to see conference
14:15presentations over the next year or two about how did they move from some really tightly coupled Oracle driven architecture into some more cloud native stuff on Amazon. I would love to see that talk. I hope they loosen the reins on, on some of their more intelligent and, and well-spoken architects. Yeah. And then it's, it's, I mean, I don't know about you, but this, it's a question that comes up all the time. I mean, there's two versions of this question. I mean, the question is basically, uh, why would you do anything except run in, uh, in Amazon and or the public cloud, right? You know, the, the three or four public clouds, depending on how you bucket things out. And, uh, you know, what, one of the versions is, well, I just gave it is, is pretty, uh, strident and, and, and, and, and, and another one is, is, uh, is, is phrased a little differently is like, uh, you know, why, why would you want to run your own data centers or like what, what are people doing exactly? And how, how would, you know, when will, when will all the, uh, on-premises or private cloud stuff move to public cloud? And, and I think, uh, you know, we, we were, we were talking about this a little bit beforehand, but I think most of our customers run on, on vSphere. If I remember, I shouldn't say most, but if you were to rank them, uh, that's the number one type of infrastructure people run on. And then I think maybe second is like AWS and third is probably open stack. And it, you know, it kind of goes from there, but it is like, I, I have seen amongst, amongst our, our, our customers, they tend to like want to install on stuff they have right now. And, and there's also a lot of legacy systems they have to deal with. Like the example I always use is, you know, if you're a big airline, you've got to like integrate with like your reservation system. And so, unless you're going to move everything at once, you're going to need some kind of connection to that. But, uh, you know, the, the other thing that I, that that's interesting in tracking and especially looking at with something as big as Salesforce moving there is, uh, maybe eventually one day you could just move everything like whole hog and planning out like what it is as, as far
16:20as new applications, it seems like it's always a good idea to look at running on public cloud, uh, if that's possible. But then the real thing becomes what to do with all of your existing, you know, part of the bucket is legacy, but the other bucket is that thing I was describing where it's like legacy using applications and, and figuring out when, when, when they should move over or not. But, uh, yeah, it'll, it'll be interesting to track like amongst our customer base and other people, like who, who's running in public versus private cloud. And then ultimately my other, my, my other theory, or I don't know if it's a other, but my, my main theory is that a lot of what people want to do is like not have to be responsible for their infrastructure. And whether that means they run on premise or off premise, or it's managed or unmanaged, like it doesn't really matter. They just don't want to worry about it. And, and so far there aren't, I don't know, maybe enough managed service offerings or ones that are cheap enough that would, that would work out that way. But it seems like most people just aren't really interested long-term dealing with infrastructure. There's not really like, uh, it's sort of delightful in a riddle solving way and people who do it, like, enjoy it. But from a big, big picture perspective of the business, like running the, uh, running the servers is like just about as exciting as like making sure the electrical and facilities and plumbing is functional. Yeah, there was a good counterpoint. Actually, I just read it 30 minutes ago from, uh, us recording here, but some good counterpoints from the serverless conference from someone who presented and she wrote a, an excellent counter piece just saying, look, operations is arguably more important than ever. And it's hard to disagree with that. I think what we're more or less saying though, is, you know, investing more and more in operations isn't super attractive. It's that operations still matters a ton. It's just, I can't afford for it to be a growing part of my budget. So we need to be awesome at it. And I need tools that help me do it well. I just can't keep plowing more and more headcount into maintaining these systems. I need to do more with less and I need to empower those people to do it efficient, you know, efficiently with on-premises stuff, cloud stuff, whatever it is.
18:22So the job's probably changing. Ops still matters a ton. I just want to spend less time doing it. Yeah. Yeah. I think, I think that's definitely true. And the other thing that, uh, that I encounter a lot, and I would encounter this a bit as back, back when I was doing analyst work, we're definitely now going out to talk with large organizations is, uh, it almost seems like, and, and, and I would distinguish between like operations and infrastructure, just like raw infrastructure is just getting this, the, the, the, the, I guess the, the, the three things, your compute, your, uh, your networking and your storage sort of like functional and working together. And, uh, you know, being, being a former application developer, I just assume all this stuff is, you know, we can sort it out all the hard work's up in the level that I used to work. And of course, like that's, we can just take that for granted, but, uh, you know, it seems like there's a certain cut line where you need to worry about the operations of the application and the servers, services that you're using. But like eventually, and this is what, this is what I imagine when something as big as Salesforce goes into AWS, it's more like is there just isn't like this notion of like worrying about servers and storage and networking as much as if you had to manage all that stuff on your own. And so that sucks a huge amount out of there. And maybe you're still somewhat concerned about operating systems and like the, uh, your, your, your firewall, like settings and like all this kind of stuff, but you're slowly, you're like carving away at that, like some sort of convicts trying to escape from the, the prison of on-premise management. Yeah. I mean, I'm still moving up the stack a little bit. Somebody is still going to have to manage Amazon EC2 instances and all those things. But to your point, I'm not dealing with power and cooling and requisite, you know, getting data center space and dealing with those things, which is complicated. So again, I still need, I'm going to have to run my systems. Even if they're serverless, somebody is running something somewhere. So that sort of competency matters, but right. I think that where you're spending your time is probably going to keep differing and changing over time.
20:22And, and as anyone who's ever watched a movie about either artificial intelligence or robots in the future, you know, you got to have some human control over that. Otherwise they're going to take over the world. They'll just hide out down on your infrastructure and just take over. So you got to have some governance over that. Very important. No, I mean, I, I, I breakfast with a pancake bot during the CF summit and, and frankly, it may be a little uncomfortable. That's right. We, I should have brought my, uh, my, uh, my, uh, what's his name? Steve, Steve Gutenberg virus stick to upload to it, to just proactively disable our, our future overlords, the pancake bot. Right. So speaking of that, so we were at a Cloud Foundry summit, uh, last week. It was like, uh, was it like three and a half, four days or so out there in Santa Clara? It was, it was already like three cloud years ago. Cause it was seven days ago, but yes, it did just happen last week. I know. And we, we had a, we had, we had what you might call a work cleansing by having a, the Memorial day holiday. So we had a three day weekend, which sort of just, you know, washes out stuff from your brain. You can just reboot when you come back there. Exactly. It's good to reset there. So I, I thought, I thought this was, uh, I think I've been to one other CF summit and, uh, watch the videos from the, the, the, I don't know if it was the first, but the one that, that Andrew Schaefer MC'd a while ago. So, well, on that note, first of all, that, uh, that Dr. Nick guy, that's a good choice for an MC. He should run tech conferences more often. I think, uh, I think that was fantastic. He had all sorts of like, uh, I don't know. He's kind of like an Australian Ricky Gervais, except like not as caustic, which is sort of what you want in a, uh, a conference like that. Right. And I admired him because probably only 70% of his jokes landed, but he felt no shame. And I admire that so much. I know he didn't get caught by something that got no laughter. He just kept going. And that is so awesome. He, he, he embodied fail fast, stand up humor. He just plowed on through, gathered some data and, uh, went, went on, learned, learned and improved as things, things progressed.
22:22Indeed. So I, I, I liked this, uh, you know, what I look for in these, these summits is basically like, uh, essentially people who are using Cloud Foundry outing themselves, so to speak and going over what they're doing in details, kind of like we were talking about, it'd be great to know what Salesforce is running on AWS. And, and I think I, I haven't done some sort of scientific study, but I think if we were to compare, uh, what is this 2016, 2015 and 2014, and I don't remember what happened before that, but I think there's the most sort of, uh, uh, users and customers going over things and, and some of the better details out there. I spent a long time when I was writing stuff over the past year, looking through all the videos from last year to get little, little quotes and numbers and stuff like that. And there's a lot of good stuff in, in last years from like Humana and Lockheed and all state and the usual sorts of people. But there was, there were, there were new, new people as well in the Cloud Foundry community. Like, uh, Comcast was talking about what they're using. Like they've got something like 900 applications running in their, their Pivotal Cloud Foundry instance. And there were also some good, even, you know, it's good to see people come back up. Like, uh, I think over most all of the Cloud Foundry conferences core logic has come up and it's interesting to sit down and look at, um, the year over year videos and kind of see or talks, I should say how it's been going for them. But all state came up and they gave a, uh, I guess it's a year. I don't actually know how long they've been, um, using Cloud Foundry off the top of my head, but they had some pretty good numbers about increasing productivity and, and that things were improving for them. So, you know, I think, uh, our, uh, I always want to call them Altos, but that's a whole other company, but the, the Altoros people had a good, uh, summary of, of all these little zingers and stuff. And then, uh, one, one of our coworkers, David soul also published something just today, kind of, uh, pulling all of the, uh, interesting stuff he found while he was there at the summit. What, what'd you think yourself? What, uh, how did this is your, uh, your second one to go to just like myself, right? Or have you been to, to more? I think it was my second one. I actually, funny, I pulled up the one, it was called platform back in 2013.
24:25It looks like nine, nine people attended. Maybe it was more, but it looked like it was a, it was a small affair. I think, uh, somebody mentioned, I think Sam Ramsey mentioned that the Bosch day on Thursday was bigger than the entire CF summit a few years ago. So that's amazing. That's awesome. So it, it definitely was a, for me, a maturity sort of conference. Like you said, it was great to hear real proof points and, and the, the Altoros point, Altoros point where they listed out a hundred interesting quotes. It was a lot of good data points in there. Like, Hey, we're operating faster. We have hundreds of developers now pushing code to this. If you're all state or if you're Comcast, that it was real proof points. You could argue, gosh, we go back to the first one. It was almost like you were, I don't know, we're all dating last year. Everyone was pregnant and talking about how great their kids were going to be. And this year you actually have the toddler running around that looks legitimate. Like it's not just saying, this is what we think we're going to do someday. It's all state saying 30% of our data centers running PCF. Holy wow. What? That's great stuff. So you're finally seeing real proof points, not people just kicking the tires and saying, this is what we hope will be when we grow up. But instead saying, Hey, we're out, we're trying it. We're not done by any means, but we are now legitimately on this journey. I think that that was for me, something that really stood out. Yeah. You don't, you know, you make, you make me think of a, an interesting point is that the, a lot of the people in the, the Cloud Foundry community, the, the, the users, let's call them, they have a, um, they have a pretty like humble take at it. Like, like very few of them come out and say like, yes, we've solved all the problems done. And now here's, here's some slides. Yeah. But there, there's a, like, like Matt Curry, uh, he had a, he had a good talk among many others like this, that was going over how all state changed the culture around and things they were doing. And, and he had, he had a, a, a funny series of pictures. What was it? There was, it was, there were boats. It was sort of like, uh, every project starts out as this speed boat. Like it's really quick and things are going great. And then, and then, you know, thing, you get more success and more people are added and
26:25it's kind of like a pontoon boat. It's, it's, you know, you can accommodate more people. It's a little slower, but, uh, you know, you're more successful. And then, and then, and then he, I wasn't expecting this next one, but it was funny. He's like, but then if things go too poorly and they get too bloated and his next slide was a paddle boat that was just like, you know, way too many things going on and lots of governance. And I mean, I guess actually a paddle boat could be delightful if you want like a gambling boat and you, you miss your, uh, your Kenny Rogers sorts of memories and James Garner and all that. But it was, it was a, uh, it was a good analogy, the sort of a nautical analogy for, uh, for managing all of your, uh, your projects. But the point being that, uh, it's, it's fun to see a lot of those companies go over how they change things over because, uh, you know, no matter how much the sort of like agile and DevOps people talk, most of them are consultants. And so they don't necessarily have as much legitimacy as actual end users going over things. And that's what I'm always trying to encourage, whether they're people who are in the Pivotal, the Cloud Foundry, or just general using computers in a new way world is like, you just got to go out and talk about it. Like it's, uh, I mean, I almost feel like it's a responsibility that you have if you have enough spare time, uh, you know, when you're not trying to make money or do whatever goals you have, it's, it's, it would be good for us as an industry. If you came out and went over how you're doing those things. Cause it's a very, it's sort of dark knowledge at the moment. It is as a, as I guess a weird aside, I also find it, it changes my perception of the company. I'm a Comcast customer and then Comcast isn't always known for having the best public reputation, but you know, after hearing some of those presentations, you know, whatever, my, my score kind of ticked up a little bit just cause it was like, okay, they're, they're trying to do some interesting stuff. Here's a face on a company. So I guess this goes back to, you know, these are our, these are companies listening to the podcast. You should be sending your people to things because it makes me think more highly of your company because you're showing, pulling back the curtains. You're showing us your real place that has real weird challenges.
28:26And it's not just my cables out, but this is a remarkably complex distributed system that works beneath the covers. And I can appreciate that. So as an aside, I mean, I think that's for me fun as well, watching these companies get up on stage and explain what they do because heck I'm a customer of many of them. And now I understand them better. Yeah, no, that's, that's true. Like I, uh, we, we've, we've got a pretty active, um, us federal government sales team. So, so I, and other people go, go talk with people in DC a lot, government agencies. And, and I remember the last time I was out there, I was, I was just driving around. Well, being driven around, I guess I'm not an animal. I don't, I don't rent a car to drive in DC, but, uh, you know, you drive past all these buildings and, and you realize how massive the federal government is and how many moving parts there are and, and how complex of a system it is. And then, you know, when you go talk with the people, you, you, you get a little more confused or at least I do because they're just people like, like running stuff. They're not like these, uh, these crazy automatons or like weird, uh, you know, the kind of thing you'd see in that Apple 1984 ad or whatever. And they're generally interested in improving, but you know, that for me, the end result is that like, Oh, right. This is a very complicated system that does a lot of difficult things. And so we should figure out how to improve it. And that's like, you know, whenever I go talk with government people, you sort of like a cynical and, and a sardonic person that I am, I always tried to end in a bit of a, of a high note or, or, or a positive note. And when I go talk with government people, you know, I always feel like if we can just improve it, even a fraction of a percentage, like government has such a huge reach that it'll improve all of our lives more. And I think, uh, you know, you see that same thing in, in, in the commercial world, but it is, it is nice to actually get to know the people who are working behind these brands. Yeah. And to your point, I mean, that's what I think I enjoy the most about working for a company that that's mission is to help some of the largest companies because they can make some of the biggest impact. Like you said, I mean, a 1% improvement in how the gap processes or how the government processes
30:30are these very disparate things, but they're all large companies that impact hundreds of thousands and millions of lives that they don't have to completely retool everything to make a difference. But, you know, the other thing that stood out for me and watching the customer sessions or the analyst day was when you had people talking about, I don't know if maybe you heard it, I didn't, but almost everybody talked about a transformation journey. This was not, I bought software and now I run cool, shiny stuff. It was, I am trying to change how we deliver technology services to run a better business. And that is so refreshing and nice versus just, hey, look, I can orchestrate a thousand containers. Who cares? Did you actually get help your customer today? And it's just, I really like that. The Pivotal Labs makes a huge difference for how many of those customers on stage called that out specifically. That helping us think about test-driven and pairing and, you know, these things fundamentally change our outlook to how we develop software quickly. That's meaningful. It means that we're actually making a change, not just selling widgets or six units of DevOps. Yeah, no, that's, that's, that was true. I was thinking I should, I should write up something about the, that analyst breakfast there because there weren't that many people there to cover it like the other posts that we went over. But yeah, once the, some of the, during the Q&A session, a lot of the, not all of them, but a lot of the analyst questions were around what you were saying is how do you, how do you propagate these changes throughout? And, and I think, you know, I, it's, it's, I, I have another podcast, the Lords of Computing podcast. I do with, uh, to mention him again, Matt Curry from Allstate. And that's sort of the, the focus that we have on that podcast is answering that question. And, and one of the people we interviewed recently, uh, Brian over at Express Scripts, he was, he was on it recently and he kind of reprised a little bit of this in the analyst breakfast, but it really is just, um, at that scale that we were just talking about is, is slowly growing from, from successes and building up and building up, uh, further and
32:32further, right? There's no sort of like overnight change that you have. Um, and you know, whether, whether it's as Matt Curry was talking about perfecting your t-shirt design there on the, uh, the pontoon boat or whatever, or, or, you know, the story that Brian was telling is, is similar that we hear from a lot of customers is that, uh, if you expect to have, I hesitate to call it small, but incremental growth, you can build that up over time. So like he was saying, you know, they installed a Pivotal Cloud Foundry about five months ago and now there's like a hundred developers or so using it, which may not seem like a lot in the grounds, grand scheme of things. But as long as that, that, uh, to be all Charlie Munger, as long as that growth keeps on compounding over time, so to speak, like it, uh, it definitely, that's how you spread things out in a kind of safe and resilient way. And that, that seems to be the, uh, the journey that, that people are going on. And, you know, it's, it's, uh, unfortunately behind date. Well, unfortunately, if you don't have access behind a paywall, but I was just reading one of the analysts who was there, uh, Lauren over at Forrester, uh, she had a pretty good write-off with some tips at the end on, on this topic. Like exactly like how to transform to, uh, I don't know if she says cloud native, but how to transform the way you're doing your it around. Right. Yeah. I mean, there was that question midway through is either the analyst one or another, but I think it was the analyst day. I mean, how do you, how do you have a 5,000 person it group and, and help that transform or 10,000 or, I mean, that's a daunting problem versus we have, you know, 25 devs and we need to get them all thinking about agile. That's a fundamentally different challenge than a giant org probably distributed across continents thinking in a new way. And it was also, you know, as part of that, as you mentioned, incubation of success is key. You're not just going to top down mandate, say we're doing X, Y, Z, everybody figure it out, go. But I was impressed that the rate of acceleration that, you know, whatever Comcast or Allstate were doing a year ago, it seemed like they're doing a lot more of it now. And so you've gone from incubating to hundreds of devs.
34:32That is a pretty fantastic rate of adoption of people seeing like this, this makes my life better. I'd like some more of that, please. Yeah. I mean, there's probably some game you can play about how long I talk in any given setting before I mentioned that I've worked in strategy at Dell, but that is from working in strategy at Dell. Like that's, that's one thing that, that you understand about large companies is, I don't know if it's quite a hockey stick, but at some point the advantages of scale kick in at a very large organization. And once you've kind of proven something out, you can roll it out really quickly to a huge amount of people. I shouldn't say really quickly, but you can roll it out to a bunch of people. And then the overall impact that you get is the same. I mean, it's kind of analogous to the, well, I think they still have this power, but the heft of power that, that Microsoft has had, you know, ever since it, they, they did that deal with IBM way back when is that they just have this huge install base. And when something's proven out, you can propagate it very quickly. It's almost, if you were to put viral adoption on one end of a gradient, whatever it is I'm talking about is on the opposite end of it. It's, it's almost like, uh, it's almost like forced virality that, that, that you have. I mean, I think that, but that low, I think that low barrier to entry and the fact that this is run as a service makes a huge difference. It's one thing for people to say, Hey, Microsoft Excel looks awesome. Where do I get the CD and install this thing? This is CF push looks amazing. Can I just take my repo and start pointing stuff there? Like that's even easier than saying, sure, you know, pick your container technology looks great. How do I stand up a cluster and figure out how to script it together and push an app? Like the, the barrier entry is so low that you can see why an enterprise dev looks at this and goes, uh, yeah, I'd like some of that. And it, it takes them an afternoon to push a couple apps. Definitely. It's, it's, uh, yeah. And, and, and I think, I think that's, that's one of the main stories I see in, uh, in, I don't know, I, to, to use a phrase from one of my booklets of last year or my only
36:33one, the, the cloud native journey is there, there, there's a bit of a hump to get that initial thing set up. And as long, once you get it set up initially, you get, you get your enterprise cloud set up as it were, then it's exactly what you're talking about. It's like, oh, sure. I'd love to do that. And then, and then if it's available, and I think that's where the, the scale of a large organization comes in is if it's really easy for people in an organization to start using something, which requires that setting it up initially, then, uh, at that point it, uh, it spreads super fast, uh, you know, relative to, uh, installing a DVD, definitely going to back to your Excel analogy. Right. I think it was the Comcast fellow who had mentioned that, you know, when you, you make things, when you, when you lower that barrier to entry, you make things contagious and you make everyone want to jump in on that stuff, which sounds risky, like a Zika virus concern. But, you know, I think there's, there's something to that. And it was another thing mentioned in keynotes. You have to make the, you know, make the hard things easy. And when you start doing those things, I think world weary developers and operations staff who finally see a way to deploy things that function at scale on something that won't tip over and doesn't take a hundred admins to operate, that, that sounds pretty good. It doesn't mean it's perfect, but that's something where, you know, you mentioned early on the, even the public and private thing, Hey, a lot of enterprises because of their scale have a lot of unused capacity and dropping that thing on premises is probably less friction than figuring out how to stand it up in the public cloud. So all sorts of things of trying to make it easier to get this thing up and running and getting developers on board, getting operations staff efficient with it. I think we're figuring that out in a, in a pretty good way. Yeah, absolutely. What do you have anything else from the CF summit that stood out to you? No, besides, I mean, I think the quality of partner, not that, you know, we, Hey, you love partners every year, but this year that pavilion again, wasn't just full of, Hey, we have a distribution of Cloud Foundry. Come talk to us. This was, Hey, tip co's there. Everybody knows who tip co is for messaging. Hey, we work in Cloud Foundry now, or Apigee was actually on stage talking about stuff or for wonder of wonders, Microsoft doing three sessions built announcing service brokers for
38:36Cloud Foundry and having a booth. Like what alternate universe is this? So I think we saw a really interesting set of partners continue to come on. You saw more announcements of who's in the foundation. And, you know, now the challenge is going to be, how do you make sure you keep velocity with more and more kind of hanger ons onto the foundation, which is awesome. But how does that not accidentally cause you to become maybe a little more slow moving? Sam seems pretty focused on that and clearly Pivotal continues to add our value add to the base capability, but you know, size and scale can slow you down if you're not ready for it. Yeah. And, and, and, and, uh, you know, GE also had a booth there, which, which is interesting, right? Like you, you don't always see a lot of user booths and I, uh, of course they're, they're also an investor in Pivotal. So they have more than just a user stake, but, uh, yeah, they had, they had a nice little demo of, uh, what was it? It was kind of like a mock-up of, uh, of an oil refinery or whatever, like a tabletop oil refinery. So just a weird little model. And, uh, yeah, it was, it was interesting to like get, get an overview of how, how everything we've been talking about fits into that kind of industrial world. Now, you know, maybe it's not obvious, but obviously they don't, they don't run like a Cloud Foundry, like in the machinery or whatever, but it, uh, it gets uploaded to a central thing where there's a lot of near real time, uh, data processing to figure out what to do and all that machinery. But that's a, if you're ever at one of these shows and you get to get a chance to go over and see, uh, see that stuff, it's actual like three dimensional things, which is entertaining for software people. That's neat. Yeah. I mean, but to your point, as much as it might not be sitting here running the oil refinery, the other thing I think we saw is that this is not running people's static public facing websites. It's running a number of things that really matter within the company. And again, that's good to see. That's the sign of maturity. I think is that this isn't the play thing, or this isn't the thing where we just push a mobile app to it's look, I can run something that isn't allowed to go down on this platform. That's, I think the first Testament that you're running something that's meaningful. Yeah.
40:36Next year we need to, uh, we should tell the foundation to get one of the auto manufacturers like Ford or Dahmer or someone to come in and, uh, plop a, pump a car down. I think, I think you've said you, you can safely say you've arrived as a conference when you have a car there on the, uh, the booth floor. So that, that'll, that'll be a good milestone. Sure. We'll have a showcase showdown to give it away to, uh, whoever gets closest on price. Exactly. Maybe, maybe they'll have it in Las Vegas and we can get Drew Carey to come or whoever that, that, that'll be fantasy land. Well, so what, what, I, I don't know what we should close out with. I have a few like things upcoming. I can go over. Do you have a, you know, it's always good to have some sort of thing you do at the end of the podcast, whether it's recommendations or, uh, I don't know, jokes. Jokes are terrible. We shouldn't do jokes. No, no, we got to work on catchphrases, but there are some good things coming on up in the month of June. There's more of these cloud native roadshows, which I'm pretty excited about. We're coming to Seattle, so I don't have to go very far to check that out. Obviously SpringOne conference coming up. I bought my tickets to that and it sounds like we were just chatting with the, one of the organizers on, on Friday and he was sifting through and finalized 60 of the sessions. So you'll start to see that come online soon. It seems like there's a good set of things coming along in the summer from an event. perspective and all these user groups that keep popping up. And I don't know that the summer is not just the doldrums unless you live in Europe and take them on, you know, three months off. Or at least, yeah, you know, I, I, I used to, when I was at Red Monk, one of the founders is, uh, is, uh, British or half British. And, and then the other one enjoys Maine. So we would just have all of August off. Seems like a good lifestyle. That was, that was fun times, but yeah, that's true. There's tons of roadshows coming up. I'll, I'll put a, uh, a link in the show notes to it, but, uh, those are great. Cause one, you don't have to go anywhere and you can get a, uh, more or less free lunch. You know, there's no timeshare to buy, but you can get, you can get a, a free lunch and some snacks and you can see a demo of, uh, of what Pivotal Cloud Foundry actually does
42:36and how it fits in. And a lot of the people who give it are, uh, on the team that I work with. So I can vouch for them. They're, they're very entertaining and give good demos of stuff. And then also, uh, you know, I, I, I'm, I'm doing, there'll be a webinar that I'm doing with, uh, Donnie over at four or five, one research coming out, uh, I think at the end of June or so we'll, I'll have to, we'll have to mention that, uh, when we record next, hopefully we'll have a link up for it. And I'll also be, uh, in Poland of all places speaking at a meetup on June 20th in Warsaw. And then I'm going to be at, uh, the real, the real reason, the main reason I'm going is, uh, to go to devox and, and I broke one of my, my rules of conferences, which is only speak once at a conference. For some reason I'm speaking twice. I need to go, uh, find, uh, find my admin and tell them not to do this again, whoever that may be. Dangerous territory. Yeah. Luckily one of them is a very non-technical, uh, just sort of, uh, off the top of my head talk, which is to say off the top of my head, when I plan it out, I don't actually have to get anything right. Cause it's all just my opinion. So that'll be easy. No way to get it wrong. Right. Exactly. Yeah. So for those, uh, also for those listening is you have ideas for things you'd even like to hear us cover. I think finding, you know, Coté on Twitter and myself on Twitter, feel free to engage us, email whatever channels is we want to make sure we're covering things. They're also pretty interesting to, uh, to those who listen as you want us to debate certain topics or pretend to disagree with each other. Let us know. Exactly. Well, as always, and, and as is new, this is, uh, this has been Pivotal conversations. You can find the, uh, links to this episode and show notes and all the usual stuff, including the RSS feed to subscribe to, uh, we're listed there in the iTunes of course, but if you go to pivotal.io slash podcast, uh, I think you might be able to add an S there as well, but you can figure it out. You can, uh, you can find all of that there and we'll see everyone next time.