1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:05,160 so you know we have some news items this uh this week it's the uh oracle open world slash java one 2 00:00:05,160 --> 00:00:10,800 and i forgot that oracle is one of those companies thankfully one of the few who like starts their 3 00:00:10,800 --> 00:00:16,700 conference on sunday usually on the weekend there's like and and not to uh not to put this 4 00:00:16,700 --> 00:00:22,560 down at all i mean it's obviously important but but in in my life as being an analyst and and uh 5 00:00:22,560 --> 00:00:28,580 interloping marketer or maybe it's the other way around like uh you know it's nice when events start 6 00:00:28,580 --> 00:00:33,600 on a monday even better when they start on tuesday but anyhow usually what they do on the weekend is 7 00:00:33,600 --> 00:00:39,140 maybe like a partner or alliances summit which which is fine but but oracle is just like pow 8 00:00:39,140 --> 00:00:44,160 let's let's put the head honcho out on sunday so everyone has to uh come in and cover the event 9 00:00:44,160 --> 00:00:48,340 it was uh it was a reminder that i haven't gone to a java one in a long time obviously 10 00:00:48,340 --> 00:00:54,960 yeah yeah that's you know sometimes that's nice to i guess get things started on weekends if you want 11 00:00:54,960 --> 00:00:59,340 to but yeah it's rough when you have to fly on the saturday and but yeah no they jumped right in on 12 00:00:59,340 --> 00:01:04,160 all the news yeah in fact in fact we were going to have a uh we were going to record two episodes 13 00:01:04,160 --> 00:01:10,980 this week but our mystery guest who will be revealed uh in a next episode this mystery guest 14 00:01:10,980 --> 00:01:16,980 number one couldn't make it because of because of java one but we have we have mystery guest number two 15 00:01:16,980 --> 00:01:23,300 let's unveil the mystery who are you uh yeah matt walden i'm a uh platform architect for our field 16 00:01:23,300 --> 00:01:28,560 organization here at pivotal and uh yeah thanks for having me sure you're you're uh you're one of the 17 00:01:28,560 --> 00:01:33,060 rare people also in the central time zone which is always very exciting we've got we've got to have a 18 00:01:33,060 --> 00:01:42,200 little herd mentality around that very much so uh speaking of of uh the the oracle oracle open world 19 00:01:42,200 --> 00:01:48,160 java one what uh what have you been seeing coming out of that richard yeah i mean as you mentioned it 20 00:01:48,160 --> 00:01:53,000 was uh definitely bam on the first day as tons of stuff was coming out with larry ellison out there 21 00:01:53,000 --> 00:01:59,880 doing his his ellison magic of you know hey now now cloud is getting started because oracle is here 22 00:01:59,880 --> 00:02:05,380 everybody relax now so you know put out some as usual big claims that you know now amazon has to 23 00:02:05,380 --> 00:02:10,280 look on over their shoulder because there's a legit competitor out there they shipped some pretty good 24 00:02:10,280 --> 00:02:15,300 you know some good messaging around another generation cloud they've gone through a couple revs of this 25 00:02:15,300 --> 00:02:21,820 and uh lydia from gartner just a few minutes ago posted a good analysis of the new oracle cloud and 26 00:02:21,820 --> 00:02:27,480 again kind of called it a good mvp and doing a lot of the right things but they're doing a lot of 27 00:02:27,480 --> 00:02:31,060 things around infrastructure as a service they continue to invest in some of their software as 28 00:02:31,060 --> 00:02:35,580 a service sort of things whatever we're calling paths they're doing a lot of things with that so 29 00:02:35,580 --> 00:02:40,820 they're you know saying they're all cloud in thousands of engineers all working on cloud stuff 30 00:02:40,820 --> 00:02:45,220 re-platforming apps so a number of announcements we'll link to some of them in the show notes 31 00:02:45,220 --> 00:02:49,680 you know the biggest question is going to be is it too little too late is it a revenue protection 32 00:02:49,680 --> 00:02:54,800 sort of scenario that says if you're an oracle customer now this is the best place to stay with us 33 00:02:54,800 --> 00:02:58,740 are you actually going to get net new customers out of this offering i think that's that's what 34 00:02:58,740 --> 00:03:04,520 remains to be seen i'll have to go read the lydia thing is it is it behind the uh the the moat o'gartner 35 00:03:04,520 --> 00:03:10,280 or is it did she post it on her her blog oh very nice yeah she she blogged it so we'll uh we can 36 00:03:10,280 --> 00:03:15,140 add a link in the show notes as well to that as she's uh always has great insight yeah and and you 37 00:03:15,140 --> 00:03:20,500 know i think i think i think in past episodes we covered the uh the i as magic quadrant which which uh 38 00:03:20,500 --> 00:03:26,780 i i think i think you know lydia does good work uh hopefully that's a credible claim on my part since 39 00:03:26,780 --> 00:03:31,460 she doesn't really cover the stuff we're interested in so i don't it doesn't seem like i'm uh i'm 40 00:03:31,460 --> 00:03:37,000 plowing a field with a brown nose or anything but it it does see like her her coverage is generally 41 00:03:37,000 --> 00:03:42,680 good and and you like or i shouldn't say generally it is good and uh yeah i mean it's it's it's uh 42 00:03:42,680 --> 00:03:48,980 it's a tough thing to just suddenly sort of like sprightly and up and get into cloud stuff and and 43 00:03:48,980 --> 00:03:55,780 of course uh you know there's been a lot of a lot of entrances and re-entrances and into uh into cloud 44 00:03:55,780 --> 00:04:02,460 for oracle which is fine you know on on the other hand i often think that uh you know i have this this 45 00:04:02,460 --> 00:04:06,920 weird obsession with sun like sun had a tremendous amount of cloud stuff way back when and there's 46 00:04:06,920 --> 00:04:14,400 actually a lot of uh cloud people who were uh uh i guess immigrants from sun stuff so so who knows 47 00:04:14,400 --> 00:04:19,920 all sorts of excitement there but but it does it does remind me uh back at one of my previous 48 00:04:19,920 --> 00:04:25,980 companies that i'm now back at again uh yeah i we i i worked in the part of the company that was that 49 00:04:25,980 --> 00:04:34,680 was trying to uh go go from a small public cloud presence to a a market leading cloud presence and it it 50 00:04:34,680 --> 00:04:40,820 one takes a long time and is extremely difficult so i don't know if you start the clock now or start 51 00:04:40,820 --> 00:04:45,920 the clock a few uh a few years ago or whatever but it takes some time to build that up but i think i 52 00:04:45,920 --> 00:04:50,360 think from from our perspective and you know an infrastructure layer right like i think one of 53 00:04:50,360 --> 00:04:55,780 the things that would be interesting would be to see uh you know if if we end up in uh if you can 54 00:04:55,780 --> 00:05:00,700 end up taking like something like cloud foundry or pivotal cloud foundry and running it on top of 55 00:05:00,700 --> 00:05:06,740 uh the oracle cloud which which yeah i think for they had a lot of interesting uh uh mud to sling 56 00:05:06,740 --> 00:05:11,940 at amazon about lock-in and things like that so that would be a nice practice and anti-lock-in i don't 57 00:05:11,940 --> 00:05:20,060 know what the opposite of lock-in is i guess uh libre free in something yeah i mean we uh you know 58 00:05:20,060 --> 00:05:24,260 i especially for our listeners who are pivotal customers i mean we'd love to hear if if this would 59 00:05:24,260 --> 00:05:29,360 be attractive to you that we often do do partnerships obviously based on where our customers want us to be 60 00:05:29,360 --> 00:05:34,940 and one value of running a pcf means if i love the oracle cloud and i want to be closer to my data 61 00:05:34,940 --> 00:05:40,920 services then you know pcf on oracle cloud isn't outlandish so we want to make sure we do provide 62 00:05:40,920 --> 00:05:44,340 some of that that uplift but we want to we want to hear from customers on that we're not just going 63 00:05:44,340 --> 00:05:49,880 to run out and do those things so no i mean look i live up here in seattle the word on the street up 64 00:05:49,880 --> 00:05:55,080 here is that they have pulled together a very high pedigree team of people to build this cloud this was 65 00:05:55,080 --> 00:06:01,040 not just hey let's grab some database people from internal and build a cloud they they recruited from 66 00:06:01,040 --> 00:06:05,700 the best shops up here so you know hey you're gonna give them a chance they've got some great talent 67 00:06:05,700 --> 00:06:12,600 they have clearly brand recognition and a a uh attentive customer base so that's uh let's keep 68 00:06:12,600 --> 00:06:18,480 an eye on it now now matt to put you on the spot you you uh you you've been on the other side of the 69 00:06:18,480 --> 00:06:25,040 fence that is working at a at large organizations what uh sure did you guys have what did you what is a 70 00:06:25,040 --> 00:06:29,280 large enterprise you know to summarize yourself and talking with other people like what do you guys 71 00:06:29,280 --> 00:06:36,940 do with oracle and in large organization land um you know i mean i i have to i guess answer that 72 00:06:36,940 --> 00:06:41,180 from a historical perspective more than a current perspective but uh yeah yeah and you know i'm not 73 00:06:41,180 --> 00:06:46,480 i'm not looking for any gratuitous like hayton or whatever which which is popular with oracle but 74 00:06:46,480 --> 00:06:52,700 it's more of like i think i think a lot of people uh or oracle is good at like speaking about like 75 00:06:52,700 --> 00:06:56,780 the big grandiose stuff they do and i think it's always interesting to think about like in their huge 76 00:06:56,780 --> 00:07:02,860 portfolio all the not little but all the the components of the things that they do and how 77 00:07:02,860 --> 00:07:09,340 how how vital they are for a lot of people's it sure so i mean i think i mean specifically from the 78 00:07:09,340 --> 00:07:15,740 organization i was in um i think by and large it was largely their database right through all of the 79 00:07:15,740 --> 00:07:21,640 the versions and reversions and re-architectures of their core database product um would have been 80 00:07:21,640 --> 00:07:26,380 the lion's share of what we leveraged oracle for um as well as for some of their java runtime 81 00:07:26,380 --> 00:07:32,380 components right with with web logic as well as some of their identity management pieces but um 82 00:07:32,380 --> 00:07:37,720 i would say that it was it was kept pretty pretty in check and pretty much limited to those use cases 83 00:07:37,720 --> 00:07:43,460 yeah i mean i mean it seems like they're a uh they're one of the one of the few systems of record 84 00:07:43,460 --> 00:07:49,260 companies that exactly and and and they're few because all of the system of record companies have 85 00:07:49,260 --> 00:07:54,620 been gobbling up stuff for quite some time right like it's a uh that's a popular meal speaking of 86 00:07:54,620 --> 00:08:00,160 thanksgiving at least from years ago right i mean i'm sure Coté you remember from the years back 87 00:08:00,160 --> 00:08:05,480 gobbling up jd edwards and siebel yeah people soft and all these sort of just big things that all still 88 00:08:05,480 --> 00:08:09,880 i mean i don't remember which of those you can still buy right now i think a number of them but those are 89 00:08:09,880 --> 00:08:14,780 you know the hallmarks of most enterprise it shops and probably still sitting there i i remember running 90 00:08:14,780 --> 00:08:20,640 into a uh a relative who i guess is what you would call a sales engineer uh i think i think he was 91 00:08:20,640 --> 00:08:26,420 kind of like an upper level sales engineer for jde as he would say and he had like two bookshelves 92 00:08:26,420 --> 00:08:32,060 this is a long time ago two bookshelves full of like three ring binders of like stuff was like that 93 00:08:32,060 --> 00:08:36,620 that was that was a fun time when you could sort of like quantify your knowledge based on three ring 94 00:08:36,620 --> 00:08:42,700 binders so there's an anecdote for you it's an important asset there you go 95 00:08:42,700 --> 00:08:49,420 so so also i don't know if it's related or if it's been going on but i didn't realize this that uh 96 00:08:49,420 --> 00:08:57,580 that that oracle is is moving net beans uh which which is the open source uh ide thingy uh over to 97 00:08:57,580 --> 00:09:02,620 the apache the asf the apache software foundation which which this reminded me of two things 98 00:09:02,620 --> 00:09:08,780 one eclipse and net beans like back when i was an analyst and a java developer that was that was 99 00:09:08,780 --> 00:09:15,420 they were head to head there i remember i remember when it was young Coté as a developer i used uh i think 100 00:09:15,420 --> 00:09:20,620 i used like borland first and then there was net beans and then eclipse came and that's all that was 101 00:09:20,620 --> 00:09:26,060 used way back then but then i also and and so it seems like i if i remember reading somewhere in in 102 00:09:26,060 --> 00:09:31,500 a right if there's like a million and a half users that they uh they they say they have which sounds 103 00:09:31,500 --> 00:09:37,660 great and uh but i remember one time i was in an eclipse con way back when when sun was independent 104 00:09:37,660 --> 00:09:43,820 and there was like a rival little net beans evening with a couple presentations like across the street you 105 00:09:43,820 --> 00:09:50,060 know the uh the uh the santa clara convention center and then behind it there's like some building that's 106 00:09:50,060 --> 00:09:55,260 named something really funny like behind the hyatt there so the person had rented out the lobby of 107 00:09:55,260 --> 00:10:01,020 that other building and there was a maryland monroe impersonator who was like getting people to come 108 00:10:01,020 --> 00:10:05,740 over and enjoy like little little weenies and spinach and and see presentations on net beans 109 00:10:07,420 --> 00:10:12,780 i i i should drag that picture up i think i even got a picture with her clearly your new uh your 110 00:10:12,780 --> 00:10:18,220 new profile picture on twitter that's right so if people wonder what analysts do i've just told you 111 00:10:19,660 --> 00:10:25,020 peek behind the curtain cocktail weenies powerpoint and maryland monroe impersonators 112 00:10:25,820 --> 00:10:27,500 man that is your autobiography title 113 00:10:29,900 --> 00:10:35,180 anyhow i i think i think it it's uh yeah that that'll that'll be you know i i think it's it's in 114 00:10:35,180 --> 00:10:41,020 recent years like i used to think of like the asf as mostly infrastructure sort of software but they've 115 00:10:41,020 --> 00:10:44,940 they've been accepting a lot of like don't they have open office there too they've been accepting a lot 116 00:10:44,940 --> 00:10:49,660 of like front-end centric things yeah there's definitely a handful of things i you know for 117 00:10:49,660 --> 00:10:53,900 some reason dragging this back to pivotal there uh we we posted an interesting blog post this week on 118 00:10:53,900 --> 00:10:59,420 our approach to open source and what do you open source and what do you keep as ip and how do you manage 119 00:10:59,420 --> 00:11:03,980 all that so really interesting to see big companies as they continue to donate or give things to open 120 00:11:03,980 --> 00:11:08,940 source you wonder what goes on behind the scenes on those discussions i thought was a cool post by us 121 00:11:08,940 --> 00:11:14,220 it was our legal team talking about why open source is awesome but you know how did these big companies 122 00:11:14,220 --> 00:11:19,420 make these decisions now it's it's pretty fascinating yeah yeah i was just i was just noting that uh in 123 00:11:19,420 --> 00:11:24,460 twitter the other day and and because it's true that i i've encountered a lot of i guess you could call 124 00:11:24,460 --> 00:11:30,140 it open source objections i don't know if they're like speed humps or actual objections but uh i need 125 00:11:30,140 --> 00:11:34,620 to sit down and like sort through that i'm sure there's i'm sure there's some fun charts i can pull 126 00:11:34,620 --> 00:11:40,060 together that are basically like dude open source is okay don't freak out but it is it is uh something 127 00:11:40,060 --> 00:11:45,260 that i know is coming up a lot in the uh organizations that that we go talk with interesting 128 00:11:46,380 --> 00:11:53,740 so uh so also i think i think you read up more on this than i did it it looks like the uh java e8 is 129 00:11:53,740 --> 00:11:59,820 is is delayed a little while a little bit yeah i mean that's also part of java one as they're talking 130 00:11:59,820 --> 00:12:05,820 about that and last week it's kind of officially talked about that the goal is you know j8 by the 131 00:12:05,820 --> 00:12:14,060 end of 2017 and then the goal would be e9 about a year later which may be optimistic given that that 132 00:12:14,060 --> 00:12:18,940 eight slipped a bit but you know they're trying to do more cloud nativey stuff like they're going to 133 00:12:18,940 --> 00:12:24,300 talk more about it this week at at the java conference and you know it's just it becomes 134 00:12:24,300 --> 00:12:28,860 tricky as you have these big stewards of things and oracle figuring out what to do with java you 135 00:12:28,860 --> 00:12:33,100 know the article we linked to on this of course i'm i'm happy to see someone comment saying that 136 00:12:33,100 --> 00:12:37,500 hey spring boot and cloud foundry is the best way of building cloud apps and java i think we agree 137 00:12:37,500 --> 00:12:43,740 that it's great to see you know jee eight nine or nine kind of tracking the spring framework five 138 00:12:43,740 --> 00:12:48,140 which we're already about to ship so you know we're trying to stay ahead of the game for people 139 00:12:48,140 --> 00:12:53,420 doing java microservices spring bring up being a premier choice you know on the jee side i think 140 00:12:53,420 --> 00:12:57,500 it's been frustrating for the community to see where is this going but i guess credit to oracle 141 00:12:57,500 --> 00:13:03,660 to try to to reinvest here and get a hard concrete plan forward but the community gets kind of stuck 142 00:13:03,660 --> 00:13:08,780 in this sit and wait period what am i supposed to do in the meantime we're talking you know 16 months 143 00:13:08,780 --> 00:13:14,860 out yeah till another version and a couple years until i get something that has modern microservices and 144 00:13:15,420 --> 00:13:19,580 this the basic things you already have in spring today no and and speaking of young me i mean this 145 00:13:19,580 --> 00:13:26,060 this made me think of two things one uh i think as far as i can remember not and and as far back i 146 00:13:26,060 --> 00:13:33,340 should say not as as comprehensively as far back as i as i can remember uh i think the java community 147 00:13:33,340 --> 00:13:39,500 has followed the uh the epigraph at the beginning of the mythical man month which is if good cooking 148 00:13:39,500 --> 00:13:44,940 takes time it's you know if you're made to wait it's it's to ensure that the food is good i messed 149 00:13:44,940 --> 00:13:49,340 that up but it's basically like you know hey if you want something that tastes good you need to wait 150 00:13:49,340 --> 00:13:54,460 until i cook it and stop complaining right like if you want if you want something quick i can make you 151 00:13:54,460 --> 00:14:01,260 a fried egg champ but it also like it was making me reflect and and this of course is like you know uh 152 00:14:01,260 --> 00:14:06,780 seems like really biased but man the spring framework has had like an amazing run of being 153 00:14:06,780 --> 00:14:13,020 like a huge source of innovation in the java world like i even back when uh when i was still a developer 154 00:14:13,900 --> 00:14:18,700 i remember a lot of the conversations we would have is like oh why don't they just do this and 155 00:14:18,700 --> 00:14:23,180 then you know annotations were added and all these i mean i don't pay attention to job anymore but 156 00:14:23,180 --> 00:14:27,660 it seems like there's a lot of uh interesting innovation that you can put into practice that 157 00:14:27,660 --> 00:14:32,620 shows up in in spring and i'm sure many other places like i remember when java had this uh 158 00:14:32,620 --> 00:14:38,380 existential crisis about ruby for a long time and then it was you know that's an interesting 159 00:14:38,380 --> 00:14:43,260 historic example of like the java community not freaking out about i wouldn't call it a flash in 160 00:14:43,260 --> 00:14:48,620 a pan it's more like a long cooking thick chicken breast in a pan but eventually it gets removed and 161 00:14:48,620 --> 00:14:52,460 you're left with the pan so you got to live with yourself but they didn't get they didn't get too 162 00:14:52,460 --> 00:14:59,580 obsessed with uh with you know weighing around anyways yeah the long story is interesting yeah 163 00:14:59,580 --> 00:15:05,180 i mean if spring hadn't made a big change with spring boot and the like a couple years back 164 00:15:05,180 --> 00:15:09,580 i mean you wonder if there's a thesis that java would be seriously on the decline if boot hadn't 165 00:15:09,580 --> 00:15:14,380 boosted because all of a sudden now you are able to do things that don't feel like hey i'm being left 166 00:15:14,380 --> 00:15:19,420 behind by people doing things in dot net or node or go or whatever languages or people are kind of 167 00:15:19,420 --> 00:15:23,420 gravitating to is that all of a sudden java started to get some of these constructs whether it's 168 00:15:23,420 --> 00:15:27,420 coming up with reactive programming and all the things that boot gives you about look i can with 169 00:15:27,420 --> 00:15:32,380 eight lines of code turn up a web server because it's all embedded in the jar i mean i i'm a dot 170 00:15:32,380 --> 00:15:36,140 net node person and when i joined pivotal i committed to learning spring and boot and 171 00:15:36,860 --> 00:15:41,500 you know it's really pretty pretty great stuff and what we've been doing with spring cloud again we 172 00:15:41,500 --> 00:15:47,020 talked about a couple weeks ago this is really cutting edge stuff that's now baked into a java 173 00:15:47,020 --> 00:15:51,580 experience if that stuff hadn't come along you really wonder if we'd be talking about well i 174 00:15:51,580 --> 00:15:57,260 guess java's dead is it but instead you're seeing boot being downloaded you know millions and millions 175 00:15:57,260 --> 00:16:03,340 of times per month it just i i think we've done a good service hopefully then jee also kind of gives 176 00:16:03,340 --> 00:16:07,900 people some confidence that there's other things you can do with java besides spring but hopefully we 177 00:16:07,900 --> 00:16:12,940 can take some credit for keeping java in the spotlight so so then let let me let me ask you again matt 178 00:16:12,940 --> 00:16:18,300 when you go out including when you talk to yourself which you know there's not a sand of insanity it's 179 00:16:18,300 --> 00:16:23,260 fine you're just thinking sure to yourself like can you talk with like like enterprise architect types 180 00:16:23,260 --> 00:16:28,620 and other kind of people who are looking at the like long-term uh stability of their technology 181 00:16:28,620 --> 00:16:35,500 choices are they do they have like a huge alignment towards like like stock java ee or are they interested 182 00:16:35,500 --> 00:16:41,500 in just like whatever works so how do how are people balancing that out sure so i mean i guess from 183 00:16:41,500 --> 00:16:48,300 what i've seen i mean there's a huge a huge embrace of of not just you know j2ee but but spring overall 184 00:16:48,300 --> 00:16:55,820 right i think for many of the reasons that i think pivotal you know talks about right just like removing 185 00:16:55,820 --> 00:17:01,340 a lot of that undifferentiated you know boilerplate code that that i think people you know don't have 186 00:17:01,340 --> 00:17:07,180 the time or the patience to write i mean i think spring is a great option there um and i would say that 187 00:17:07,180 --> 00:17:11,980 whether it's you know spring with java or dot net i i see a lot of enterprises still gravitating around 188 00:17:11,980 --> 00:17:17,260 those two those two languages and those two frameworks i mean just because of you know the 189 00:17:17,260 --> 00:17:21,660 longevity that they've had and the stability that they've had um and that doesn't mean they're not 190 00:17:21,660 --> 00:17:25,660 dabbling with some of the other things that that you know you and richard just mentioned but 191 00:17:25,660 --> 00:17:29,260 i still see a ton of momentum and a ton of excitement around dot net and spring 192 00:17:30,300 --> 00:17:36,380 well well speaking of excitement just just to close out before we get to this part so i think i 193 00:17:36,380 --> 00:17:40,780 think finally richard we both work in marketing our marketing job is basically going to be over 194 00:17:41,820 --> 00:17:45,020 over in the sense of like we will be able to accomplish all our hopes and dreams because 195 00:17:45,020 --> 00:17:50,860 there's no longer 140 character limit in twitter now this is slight slight technicality i think 196 00:17:50,860 --> 00:17:56,380 there's a a character limit but when you link to other things when you put urls in there including 197 00:17:56,380 --> 00:18:02,060 images that doesn't count for it so what this means now everyone knows there's two things that everyone 198 00:18:02,060 --> 00:18:06,860 on the internet knows one your video could never be longer than three seconds that's why there's only 199 00:18:06,860 --> 00:18:11,980 one listener to this podcast which is much longer than three seconds so you got to have short form uh 200 00:18:11,980 --> 00:18:18,380 multimedia as we used to call it two you got to add an image to a tweet or no one will ever look at it 201 00:18:18,380 --> 00:18:25,100 so now true now we can have maximum messaging and positioning in twitter right and we can add images 202 00:18:25,100 --> 00:18:32,060 no problem i think i think uh next next year it's gonna be it's gonna be done where we'll uh we'll all 203 00:18:32,060 --> 00:18:36,860 be able to buy like english estates with all the excess money that we'll make because we'll be so 204 00:18:36,860 --> 00:18:43,340 successful with marketing oh so much time wasted now that i can do things like embedding gifts and 205 00:18:43,340 --> 00:18:49,420 uh videos and polls in 140 characters right all that's baked in so i mean look every tweet of mine 206 00:18:49,420 --> 00:18:54,460 will now have like a still photo of a bowl of fruit just because it can fit and it's fine it doesn't 207 00:18:54,460 --> 00:18:59,820 matter anymore so that's a but it's a good deal i mean again there's always these weird religious 208 00:18:59,820 --> 00:19:04,380 arguments about no it just has to hold this 140 characters and other people who want you to write you 209 00:19:04,380 --> 00:19:09,660 you know manifestos and no limits and you know at the end of the day i like the the forced brevity 210 00:19:09,660 --> 00:19:15,020 of tools like this twitter is a big part of my day-to-day experience in marketing and just learning 211 00:19:15,020 --> 00:19:19,580 things and meeting new people so i like that they evolve it i don't think they'll ever please remotely 212 00:19:19,580 --> 00:19:24,300 everybody but this feels like a good advance yeah i remember first reading about this in the summer 213 00:19:24,300 --> 00:19:29,100 and thinking if they if they did extend like if they really made it like you could do any length you 214 00:19:29,100 --> 00:19:34,620 want kind of like a facebook post then uh then then that would be kind of weird but like i like the 215 00:19:34,620 --> 00:19:39,740 idea of basically like you can have attachments essentially to your to your tweets so so that 216 00:19:39,740 --> 00:19:44,860 makes sense that'll be fun because it is nice to like attach images there's there's a weird corner 217 00:19:44,860 --> 00:19:50,700 case i always encounter which is let's see if you want to quote someone else's tweet you can't put an 218 00:19:50,700 --> 00:19:56,220 image in it which which is always annoying right i know especially when you want to include a funny 219 00:19:56,220 --> 00:20:01,420 yeah i want to throw a weird meme on it and i can't do it so exactly exactly there's a couple other 220 00:20:01,420 --> 00:20:05,740 things go ahead still coming that they are adding the uh you know Coté you probably know the quirk of 221 00:20:05,740 --> 00:20:10,700 doing the dot at symbol to try to actually start a tweet with a person's name but actually make sure 222 00:20:10,700 --> 00:20:14,940 everyone can see it they're doing away with that in the coming months and then some of these other 223 00:20:14,940 --> 00:20:19,740 things like hey any any other mentions don't count against your limit because you've probably been in 224 00:20:19,740 --> 00:20:25,580 these chats where 72 people get involved and you have six characters left to add any any text because 225 00:20:25,580 --> 00:20:31,420 there's no room left so yeah those things this is this is a good point a lot of people at the end of 226 00:20:31,420 --> 00:20:36,860 those those big twitter conversations which can i add those drive me crazy i hate those they they 227 00:20:36,860 --> 00:20:43,500 they will they will find the exit door by saying i cannot have this conversation in 140 characters 228 00:20:44,300 --> 00:20:48,700 or or even you know the characters allowed by all you know i don't have enough characters now you can 229 00:20:48,700 --> 00:20:53,500 say like bro because it's always you know some person i guess you've got enough characters make 230 00:20:53,500 --> 00:20:57,980 the argument or you lose and i think i think that's that's how that's how stuff works in twitter 231 00:20:57,980 --> 00:21:03,260 if i remember it's very civil discourse all hot takes so speaking of hot takes 232 00:21:06,860 --> 00:21:11,580 i don't know what why i segwayed with that but hot takes is funny i you know i like to think we 233 00:21:11,580 --> 00:21:16,780 should do warm takes are there are there like ice cold takes i guess that's uh that's uh if you're 234 00:21:16,780 --> 00:21:22,940 doing quarterly publishing of a magazine someone must still do that like aws is super is really uh 235 00:21:22,940 --> 00:21:29,020 gonna take off that's a super cold take it's like good lord that's a six-year-old that's that's 236 00:21:29,020 --> 00:21:36,540 right open source is a trustworthy technology to use it's a super cold take super cold glacier anyhow 237 00:21:37,340 --> 00:21:42,060 welcome back matt you've been here a little while now now it's your segment why don't you why don't 238 00:21:42,060 --> 00:21:47,180 you uh give us a little bit of your background like beyond beyond being a platform architect and 239 00:21:47,180 --> 00:21:52,780 living in the central time zone uh as as we've we've established like what uh what would you say 240 00:21:52,780 --> 00:21:56,460 like is is one of your areas of interest at the moment like what what do you what do you what 241 00:21:56,460 --> 00:22:03,740 are you working on around here yeah sure so i guess i'd answer by saying that i i came to pivotal really just to 242 00:22:04,620 --> 00:22:11,740 explore the whole area of um you know structured cloud native slash platform as a service just in 243 00:22:11,740 --> 00:22:15,980 depth because you know i think pivotal's been doing that for a long time and has a lot of really 244 00:22:15,980 --> 00:22:22,620 compelling technology in that space um and that was interesting to me because i had been you know 245 00:22:22,620 --> 00:22:27,820 spending probably the better part of the last two and a half years at a large fortune 50 company 246 00:22:28,540 --> 00:22:34,220 uh building my own platform right so not leveraging cloud foundry or any of the great work that's out 247 00:22:34,220 --> 00:22:39,820 there from any number of other companies but really trying to engineer that whole that whole uh set of 248 00:22:39,820 --> 00:22:47,660 capabilities um myself with the team that i was leading at my last company and and so let let's let's 249 00:22:47,660 --> 00:22:53,180 talk about the the idea of uh building your own platform a little bit i i was actually talking with 250 00:22:53,180 --> 00:22:59,100 one of my co-workers about about this yesterday how uh went on the team that i'm on where we go out to 251 00:22:59,100 --> 00:23:03,980 conferences and we traipse about and talk with people always there's a lot of traipsing like a lot of what 252 00:23:03,980 --> 00:23:08,940 you encounter are are exactly that people who build their own platforms and and first of all like like 253 00:23:08,940 --> 00:23:13,740 like what i mean people who've listened to this podcast kind of have a notion of what a platform 254 00:23:13,740 --> 00:23:18,460 is but like what is it what does it look like when when you're building your own platform like 255 00:23:18,460 --> 00:23:22,700 what are the components you're putting together and like what are you what are you doing like i i assume 256 00:23:22,700 --> 00:23:29,740 you're not writing a file system for example but right and yeah so i mean i guess you know my take 257 00:23:29,740 --> 00:23:35,580 on it i think is probably a little bit broader and um more comprehensive than i think maybe a lot of 258 00:23:35,580 --> 00:23:43,100 people go after but for me a platform is um you know something that i embarked on in order to provide 259 00:23:43,660 --> 00:23:49,660 you know a rich set of capabilities for more or less managing the full life cycle of not just 260 00:23:49,660 --> 00:23:55,980 applications that i was required to deploy but also all of the you know application dependencies 261 00:23:56,700 --> 00:24:03,820 infrastructure you know databases middleware runtime those sorts of things but be able to do that in a 262 00:24:03,820 --> 00:24:08,620 highly consistent highly automated highly predictable way um to manage all those things through their 263 00:24:08,620 --> 00:24:14,300 entire life cycle so to me that to me that's what what i would call a platform um 264 00:24:16,380 --> 00:24:21,660 yeah you you have a 30 words or less right you have a uh you there's like a little interview post 265 00:24:21,660 --> 00:24:26,140 that we have on the blog and if i remember there's you have a diagram in there of like all the 266 00:24:26,140 --> 00:24:30,780 different things that you need the uh the layers i need i keep forgetting to steal that for my stuff 267 00:24:30,780 --> 00:24:36,220 somewhere but but i i i think i think it's a good it's a good overview of like here's here's all the 268 00:24:36,220 --> 00:24:43,180 stuff that you need right right and you know i i try to break that down into you know various what i 269 00:24:43,180 --> 00:24:49,260 call uh capability domains um and honestly i think if you look at it it represents you know all the 270 00:24:49,260 --> 00:24:54,460 different teams and silos of work that have kind of traditionally existed within you know infrastructure 271 00:24:54,460 --> 00:25:00,460 and operations and application teams but taking that to this idea of having an automated platform for 272 00:25:00,460 --> 00:25:06,540 delivering you know things like infrastructure things like all the you know operations and metrics 273 00:25:06,540 --> 00:25:11,980 and reporting tooling that you might need all of the tooling you need to have a very effective 274 00:25:11,980 --> 00:25:17,740 continuous integration and continuous delivery process in place as well as you know a lot of you know what i 275 00:25:17,740 --> 00:25:24,220 call the the application dependencies which are the things like application runtimes integration technologies 276 00:25:24,220 --> 00:25:29,340 database technologies etc and then kind of layered around all those things would be all of the 277 00:25:29,340 --> 00:25:35,180 different things that you need to keep all of those pieces um secure throughout throughout their life 278 00:25:35,180 --> 00:25:40,300 cycle so so when when you're like like in your experience and talking with people like who uh 279 00:25:41,420 --> 00:25:47,660 so i i mean the whole the whole thing of a platform initiative is is probably like at least a year long 280 00:25:47,660 --> 00:25:55,180 initiative from like you know uh let's say we come we come back from uh the the holiday vacation it's like 281 00:25:55,180 --> 00:26:00,540 what would it be like january 5th or 9th depending on the calendar and it's like hey we should have a 282 00:26:00,540 --> 00:26:05,260 platform well first i need to find time on everyone's calendar and i gotta schedule this out and then you know 283 00:26:05,260 --> 00:26:10,140 maybe a year later you're like boom we got a platform but like who like what's what's like 284 00:26:10,140 --> 00:26:16,220 the core team of people who are doing that like is it is it like a business side person or like is 285 00:26:16,220 --> 00:26:24,060 a bottoms up thing or architects or like what what drives this platform project sure i mean i think it 286 00:26:24,060 --> 00:26:29,980 can be driven in a couple of different ways um i think in my particular scenario it was more of a 287 00:26:29,980 --> 00:26:37,340 business um led initiative um i think the the main reason that we brought our platform into existence 288 00:26:37,900 --> 00:26:43,980 was to help migrate um a bunch of workloads for doing e-commerce and mobile and and like api type 289 00:26:43,980 --> 00:26:51,260 services um from kind of traditional managed you know outsourced data center type hosting to running 290 00:26:51,260 --> 00:26:58,940 on a public cloud right and so in order to effectively you know take over all of those you know operations 291 00:26:58,940 --> 00:27:05,260 deployment support security all of those sorts of capabilities and to do that in a way that um where we 292 00:27:05,260 --> 00:27:10,860 would not get locked into a particular cloud provider it basically necessitated creating all of these 293 00:27:10,860 --> 00:27:16,780 different platform capabilities um in order to effectively move those workloads and be able to 294 00:27:16,780 --> 00:27:22,460 manage them in a meaningful way at scale you know throughout their life cycle so um so so do you think 295 00:27:22,460 --> 00:27:28,780 just to interject there do you think uh yeah do you think a common genesis if you will which makes me 296 00:27:28,780 --> 00:27:32,780 think about like spock and a bunch of white robes but whatever do you think i think a common genesis is 297 00:27:32,780 --> 00:27:40,300 like uh we're going we're cloudizing everything like is that a thing that kicks people off to to 298 00:27:40,300 --> 00:27:45,740 think about a platform uh you know i think i i don't know if it's like the thing you know that was 299 00:27:45,740 --> 00:27:49,420 definitely the scenario in my case right where we were trying to move these applications we were 300 00:27:49,420 --> 00:27:55,340 trying to move them into more of a you know loosely coupled microservices type architecture but i think 301 00:27:55,340 --> 00:28:00,300 honestly what i see most of the time is not that scenario um i think a lot of times what i'm seeing 302 00:28:00,300 --> 00:28:08,140 is almost like a grassroots movement within um you know operations or infrastructure and then 303 00:28:08,140 --> 00:28:13,660 occasionally sometimes within development right where they're trying to introduce you know honestly a lot 304 00:28:13,660 --> 00:28:19,740 of the the patterns and approaches and architectures that that i think pivotal embraces and um tries to 305 00:28:19,740 --> 00:28:24,700 enable within organizations they're very slowly like trying to enable those sorts of things as well and 306 00:28:24,700 --> 00:28:29,820 i think that's where they stumble across things like you know infrastructure is code and all the tools 307 00:28:29,820 --> 00:28:34,540 that are out there to do that um you know continuous integration and all the orchestration engines 308 00:28:34,540 --> 00:28:39,980 that are out there to do that and then i think now i think what what a lot of those same teams are 309 00:28:39,980 --> 00:28:45,180 seeing is oh well i think if i add containers and a container scheduler to that well that 310 00:28:45,660 --> 00:28:50,540 that that that that gets to you know more of these outcomes and more of the kind of 311 00:28:51,100 --> 00:28:55,740 you know new school microservices automated ci approaches that i think a lot of companies are trying 312 00:28:55,740 --> 00:29:01,500 to embrace i mean when you're looking at some of the things you described there and some of it coming 313 00:29:01,500 --> 00:29:05,820 from kind of top down like business imperatives hey we want to go faster we want to have no lock 314 00:29:05,820 --> 00:29:10,860 in things like that but then the grassroots of gosh cd and ci are awesome how come everything's broken 315 00:29:10,860 --> 00:29:15,820 and you want to fix it both ways so you're seeing that kind of both pressure on both directions do 316 00:29:15,820 --> 00:29:19,980 you think if you were if a company's looking at cloud first and saying look let's just run this 317 00:29:19,980 --> 00:29:25,020 on azure aws google whatever yeah do they have the same feeling of trying to build everything from 318 00:29:25,020 --> 00:29:30,380 scratch versus using as a service components or does this come from wanting to have more control or 319 00:29:30,380 --> 00:29:35,020 keep it on premises sure where do you think you go into that extreme diy where you're actually setting 320 00:29:35,020 --> 00:29:40,780 up your own load balancers and and sands and and things like that do you like yeah what what takes 321 00:29:40,780 --> 00:29:46,060 you to that extreme um you know i think honestly a lot of that has to do with you know the culture of 322 00:29:46,060 --> 00:29:52,060 whatever organization you might be operating in um i think there's organizations that have you know very 323 00:29:52,060 --> 00:29:59,180 traditionally had a buy or kind of an embrace and extend sort of mentality um or like a let's buy but then 324 00:29:59,180 --> 00:30:04,860 customize um but i think there's a lot of organizations that either started from an 325 00:30:04,860 --> 00:30:12,540 opposite you know position where um you know call it an engineering culture call it a maker culture 326 00:30:12,540 --> 00:30:16,620 call it whatever you want but are maybe at the opposite extreme and then i think you've got a 327 00:30:16,620 --> 00:30:22,060 bunch of companies that maybe traditionally were you know more in the let's buy everything you know 328 00:30:22,060 --> 00:30:26,780 it isn't differentiating let's maybe you know use a lot of third-party solutions and and maybe even 329 00:30:26,780 --> 00:30:32,380 outsource a bunch of technology that have seen you know now that you know software is such an incredibly 330 00:30:32,940 --> 00:30:37,900 important component of of i guess what you would call like competitive advantage that they're trying 331 00:30:37,900 --> 00:30:43,580 to move back into maybe more of the middle where they're doing a lot of this engineering in order to 332 00:30:43,580 --> 00:30:49,260 you know create more of an engineering culture in order to maybe encourage um more engineering to 333 00:30:49,260 --> 00:30:54,380 happen within their companies right so sure i guess i wouldn't say that there's any any one paradigm i 334 00:30:54,380 --> 00:30:58,220 think it just all depends on you know the culture of the company and where they're starting from 335 00:30:59,500 --> 00:31:04,700 yeah that makes sense i mean do you see there was a an interesting tweet last night uh i i saw from 336 00:31:04,700 --> 00:31:09,420 actually lydia and funny enough from uh gardner it was uh recounting a bank that had gone through 337 00:31:09,420 --> 00:31:14,860 kind of this is the the new modern tech stack they built to run their the bank technology and 338 00:31:14,860 --> 00:31:18,300 interesting post really cool stuff it was exactly the things you've described here in terms of the 339 00:31:18,300 --> 00:31:23,420 platform components and someone i respected this morning had commented on it saying this feels like 340 00:31:23,420 --> 00:31:28,620 kind of like a premature optimization so how do you when you were even doing this yourself and i mean 341 00:31:28,620 --> 00:31:34,700 did you have a pretty schematic all those things you were going to have to do or does it grow organically 342 00:31:34,700 --> 00:31:39,180 as you come up with more needs i mean can you accidentally plan way too much up front without knowing what 343 00:31:39,180 --> 00:31:45,900 you're doing yeah i think i think you absolutely can um and i would say that i was more of the latter 344 00:31:45,900 --> 00:31:52,060 right where i actually did spend probably the better part of i mean this is going to sound obnoxious and it 345 00:31:52,060 --> 00:31:57,420 probably is but the better part of a year you know strategizing architecting come up you know coming up with 346 00:31:57,420 --> 00:32:03,180 what i thought was you know probably like the perfect you know reference architecture or capability architecture 347 00:32:03,180 --> 00:32:10,300 for all the things that i felt that we were going to need to effectively manage you know a pretty significant 348 00:32:10,300 --> 00:32:16,380 e-commerce site running on public cloud right so i did have the schematic but i think i think that 349 00:32:16,380 --> 00:32:21,340 probably most people don't start from there honestly they probably don't have the luxury of that kind of time 350 00:32:21,340 --> 00:32:26,780 on their hands in order to invest in in designing something like that up front and so i do think they 351 00:32:26,780 --> 00:32:32,220 probably get more into the smaller iterations where you know maybe you're embracing a you know 352 00:32:32,860 --> 00:32:37,740 container technology such as docker right and it's you know giving you a lot of those quick wins 353 00:32:37,740 --> 00:32:42,860 where you know you're able to get your code into into production maybe a little bit more quickly with a 354 00:32:42,860 --> 00:32:47,500 little bit more consistency but then you know a lot of the a lot of the things that you know i talk about 355 00:32:47,500 --> 00:32:52,860 are okay well what happens after that as part of you know running in production on day two right which is 356 00:32:52,860 --> 00:32:59,420 i think where a lot of the other components start to come into play yeah that's something um from the uh 357 00:32:59,420 --> 00:33:05,500 the interview you had that uh i don't know i i don't think i thought about it in that much detail 358 00:33:05,500 --> 00:33:09,340 when it comes to building your own platform like usually the quip is like you know the quip that i and 359 00:33:09,340 --> 00:33:14,540 other people use is like you know now you have two problems you have you have like the uh the 360 00:33:14,540 --> 00:33:18,940 platform you have to maintain and also the application that you want to put on top of it so instead 361 00:33:18,940 --> 00:33:25,740 of one you have two which you know sounds funny um but the the detail on that is that um 362 00:33:27,340 --> 00:33:33,340 to the to the quippiness of that like you do have a product that requires all of its own process and 363 00:33:33,340 --> 00:33:38,940 product management and ongoing work right like you don't you can't really like just uh throw up a 364 00:33:38,940 --> 00:33:44,060 wiki page and hope that it gets maintained like it's it's right it's as real a product if not realer 365 00:33:44,060 --> 00:33:47,420 as the application you're going to build on top of it because it'll be supporting multiple 366 00:33:47,420 --> 00:33:53,660 applications so it's almost a uh a complete parallel process that you have to do now i i think i think 367 00:33:53,660 --> 00:34:03,500 the pushback that a lot of people would give is no it's not that like yeah that that like the the uh 368 00:34:03,500 --> 00:34:09,180 the application team or whatever can can like take care of it but i mean i mean and and to that end 369 00:34:09,180 --> 00:34:15,420 can can you kind of like quantify i mean is it like is it like a doubling of resources that you need or 370 00:34:15,420 --> 00:34:21,580 like what there there must be some part some point where like if if you have one application 371 00:34:21,580 --> 00:34:27,500 and one team or maybe and they have two applications like it seems like there there are cases because we 372 00:34:27,500 --> 00:34:32,060 see this demonstrated where you can build your own platform but there seems to be a certain like 373 00:34:32,060 --> 00:34:36,380 scale that you achieve or where you don't have the staff for it where it's not possible so 374 00:34:36,380 --> 00:34:41,980 you know we've been having this ongoing discussion about roi stuff which is as as people who read all the 375 00:34:41,980 --> 00:34:47,420 stuff i do knows is like this albatross on my back but like it seems like it seems like that's where 376 00:34:47,420 --> 00:34:52,140 a lot of the cases is like how much do we need to spend resource wise on building our own platform 377 00:34:52,140 --> 00:34:58,380 versus not doing it and so how do you like quantify what that effort is it's like longest question ever 378 00:34:58,380 --> 00:35:04,460 there yeah i mean no no no and i i i struggle with that same albatross honestly because i do think 379 00:35:05,020 --> 00:35:10,620 you know when you're getting started i think that that the the the challenge or the problem of like 380 00:35:10,620 --> 00:35:13,820 doing this whole platform thing i think on the surface looks really small right and i think that's why 381 00:35:13,820 --> 00:35:14,620 it's really attractive 382 00:35:17,660 --> 00:35:22,220 you know individual development teams individual developers to take on some of the burden of managing 383 00:35:22,220 --> 00:35:29,100 that right because um there's just a a level of scale that they have haven't reached yet but i think 384 00:35:29,100 --> 00:35:33,020 what i would say is that even even if you're a single team or a small development team and you're 385 00:35:33,020 --> 00:35:38,300 currently handling all these platform tasks like at some point you know all of the same 386 00:35:39,980 --> 00:35:45,580 life cycle and management and product management and all these things um i think eventually come come 387 00:35:45,580 --> 00:35:52,300 home to roost right because if you're going to continue to justify having a platform at all like 388 00:35:52,940 --> 00:35:56,940 in some sense it has to be competitive with what other platforms are doing right because otherwise why 389 00:35:56,940 --> 00:36:01,820 would you have your own platform right so it's one one thing to get a form built once i think it's 390 00:36:01,820 --> 00:36:06,380 another thing to keep it going because i think by its very nature if if you're going to continue to 391 00:36:06,380 --> 00:36:12,540 justify having a platform like it has to be you know it has to achieve some level of feature parity 392 00:36:13,100 --> 00:36:18,060 um and stability and and serviceability as you might find with some of the more commercial 393 00:36:18,060 --> 00:36:24,060 offerings and so i think that's where you get into um not just deploying the platform the first time 394 00:36:24,060 --> 00:36:30,540 right like not just standing up kubernetes or whatever you're using but actually okay so if i'm going to 395 00:36:30,540 --> 00:36:34,540 continue to be competitive if i'm going to continue to have this platform it's got to do more over 396 00:36:34,540 --> 00:36:40,300 time right so then you're into you know planning for you know what are the new features i need what 397 00:36:40,300 --> 00:36:45,420 what what new releases do i need to upgrade to what are all the patches i need to do um how do i 398 00:36:45,420 --> 00:36:51,180 introduce you know changes to my various platform components without causing a lot of disruption 399 00:36:51,180 --> 00:36:57,580 right and so that starts to look like well now i'm doing things like uh it's not a great analogy but 400 00:36:57,580 --> 00:37:02,220 test-driven development for my platform components and doing things like continuous integration for my 401 00:37:02,220 --> 00:37:07,020 platform components and so i think over time especially as you start to have more and more consumers 402 00:37:07,260 --> 00:37:13,980 the the the expectation and the and the demand on that platform team goes up um in a lot of the ways 403 00:37:13,980 --> 00:37:19,020 that i just that i just mentioned right and as you continue to grow the platform and it continues to 404 00:37:19,020 --> 00:37:24,940 have more capabilities and more moving pieces um that starts to look like a big snowball running down a 405 00:37:24,940 --> 00:37:32,140 pretty big hill right so you've kind of become our uh i think our accidental closer when it comes into deals 406 00:37:32,140 --> 00:37:37,980 deals it's like yeah oh god this is a big ball of mud customer who just has this platform that they 407 00:37:37,980 --> 00:37:42,300 know and love or they're clinging to and we really want to talk to them about pivotal cloud foundry and 408 00:37:42,300 --> 00:37:48,060 platform so if we're talking details when you go talk to a customer sure how do you help them decide whether 409 00:37:48,060 --> 00:37:52,940 to either keep going or start with a role their own or the target let's say pivotal cloud foundry 410 00:37:52,940 --> 00:37:58,940 and kind of second part of that what are those things in the platform that you talk about that say these 411 00:37:58,940 --> 00:38:06,060 are things you don't want to worry about sure so that's yeah let me uh there's a few questions in 412 00:38:06,060 --> 00:38:10,140 there i think so maybe i'll i'll start at the beginning and then maybe just help guide me through a little 413 00:38:10,140 --> 00:38:17,420 bit um i think i mean by and large what i try to talk to people about especially you know large companies 414 00:38:17,420 --> 00:38:21,980 because honestly some of these problems are kind of like big company problems more so than small company 415 00:38:21,980 --> 00:38:27,420 problems um but that if you're really going to grow a platform and have it be something that's not just 416 00:38:27,420 --> 00:38:33,340 providing service for you know one team or two teams but for your entire enterprise um then there's a 417 00:38:33,340 --> 00:38:39,420 certain you know scale and size and maturity that that platform has to have and so what i end up 418 00:38:39,420 --> 00:38:45,820 doing is walking them through um basically the journey that i went on over that two and a half 419 00:38:45,820 --> 00:38:51,260 year time period from not having a platform to having a fairly feature complete comprehensive 420 00:38:51,260 --> 00:38:57,420 platform that that in a lot of ways um had a lot of the same features and functionality that that 421 00:38:57,420 --> 00:39:03,100 cloud foundry has um and so i walked them through like all of the resource but actually even before 422 00:39:03,100 --> 00:39:07,580 the resources just walking them through things like the time frame and how it actually took you know 423 00:39:07,580 --> 00:39:14,700 close to two years to get to a feature complete platform um i also walked them through all of 424 00:39:14,700 --> 00:39:20,780 the things that they might not be thinking about from an overall capability perspective right because 425 00:39:22,060 --> 00:39:26,380 well you know i think a lot of people like very quickly gravitate towards hey i'm going to build a 426 00:39:26,380 --> 00:39:31,420 docker container on my laptop and then i'm just going to deploy that to a kubernetes or other scheduler 427 00:39:31,420 --> 00:39:37,420 in production right and they don't necessarily think about you know how i continue to manage the 428 00:39:37,420 --> 00:39:43,980 the quality of those artifacts that i'm pushing how do i continue to you know upgrade them patch them 429 00:39:43,980 --> 00:39:50,620 maintain them how do i provide for you know seamless deployments of those artifacts how do i do 430 00:39:50,620 --> 00:39:56,220 monitoring how do i do reporting how do i manage um particularly in the case of like public cloud 431 00:39:56,220 --> 00:40:02,780 deployments how do i manage my cost on an ongoing basis so that i don't have just you know over 432 00:40:02,780 --> 00:40:09,660 deployment of of these these these containerized or virtualized resources um walking through all the 433 00:40:09,660 --> 00:40:15,100 security things and just walk them through all these components and then talk about you know each one of 434 00:40:15,100 --> 00:40:20,940 these components has a life cycle right like if you're really going to have this thing survive and scale and 435 00:40:20,940 --> 00:40:26,540 be sustainable over time like you can't just be thinking about how do i deploy it it's how do i actually 436 00:40:26,540 --> 00:40:32,380 manage it from from cradle to grave right and i think i think that starts to open people's eyes quite a 437 00:40:32,380 --> 00:40:38,780 bit um and so that's just kind of from a capability perspective i also walked them through you know just 438 00:40:38,780 --> 00:40:44,060 basically what what i did from a resourcing perspective right so if you take all of these different 439 00:40:44,060 --> 00:40:50,620 capabilities um well ultimately they need to map back to a set of engineers right and so at least in the 440 00:40:50,620 --> 00:40:56,540 the way that i tackled the problem i actually stood up uh product teams around each one of the capability 441 00:40:56,540 --> 00:41:03,180 domains that that that factored into that overall platform so i had a product team for you know the 442 00:41:03,180 --> 00:41:09,420 automated delivery of infrastructure i had a product team for all of the automated codified ways that we 443 00:41:09,420 --> 00:41:14,380 would do things like monitoring and instrumentation um a team around continuous delivery a team around 444 00:41:14,380 --> 00:41:19,020 middleware a team around data and a team around security right and so it's like if you're going to manage 445 00:41:19,020 --> 00:41:24,220 things for an enterprise at scale throughout their life cycle it just it it takes a lot of people right 446 00:41:24,860 --> 00:41:29,340 and so i end up showing them that hey after i was all said and done like i had this amazing platform 447 00:41:29,340 --> 00:41:37,260 and it was you know absolutely the most the most rewarding most um fun most intense period of my career 448 00:41:37,260 --> 00:41:42,460 but at the end of it i had this platform um that was kind of going to be an ongoing concern for 449 00:41:42,460 --> 00:41:46,860 the company i had a team of you know about 55 engineers that was having to maintain it 450 00:41:47,500 --> 00:41:51,820 um and if you put those two things together there's there's a pretty hefty price tag that you end up 451 00:41:51,820 --> 00:41:57,580 associating with that effort and so the question then then ends up being like hey if you've got you 452 00:41:57,580 --> 00:42:02,060 know in my case it was you know around between seven and eight million dollars of payroll that i was 453 00:42:02,060 --> 00:42:06,700 spending to engineer and keep the lights on for this platform right and if you've got that kind of money 454 00:42:06,700 --> 00:42:11,820 to invest in talent and engineering do you want to be doing that for a platform or do you want to be 455 00:42:11,820 --> 00:42:18,140 doing that for your core business right and so now you have i think those are right so those right so 456 00:42:18,140 --> 00:42:22,780 those are the two things right yeah so well i think you've got three problems right you've got these two 457 00:42:22,780 --> 00:42:27,820 ongoing concerns right so you've got the platform problem that you're trying to solve and the and 458 00:42:27,820 --> 00:42:32,380 the overall business problems you're trying to solve and the third problem is that you know you're robbing 459 00:42:32,940 --> 00:42:38,380 you're robbing the business to run this platform in a sense right and so it's it's illuminating all of 460 00:42:38,380 --> 00:42:42,860 those different things and then i think also illuminating that um you know when i started 461 00:42:42,860 --> 00:42:47,900 there there weren't comprehensive solutions out there you know like cloud foundry or or a number 462 00:42:47,900 --> 00:42:52,940 of our competitors so like building a platform was something we almost had to do at that point in time 463 00:42:52,940 --> 00:42:58,460 but then there's much more there's much more viable options out there where you can remove a lot of 464 00:42:58,460 --> 00:43:05,020 that you know undifferentiated engineering that my team had to do so that you don't have to be incurring 465 00:43:05,020 --> 00:43:12,620 that that cost or those those delays um yeah i mean that's that's that's that's one of the the sort of 466 00:43:12,620 --> 00:43:19,420 like uh theoretic footnotes or or whatever that i have in this discussion always is that uh you one 467 00:43:19,420 --> 00:43:25,660 reads a lot about people who have built their own platforms because you know if you if you reverse out 468 00:43:25,660 --> 00:43:31,660 the math i don't know what i said there but but if you sort of walk back from presenting now it probably 469 00:43:31,660 --> 00:43:38,860 means like two to three years ago they started out doing this and and at the time the the uh i don't 470 00:43:38,860 --> 00:43:44,380 know what the new phrase for off the shelf is but the off the internet like options were not as viable 471 00:43:44,380 --> 00:43:47,820 as they are nowadays so like it would make sense that people had to build things just as you were 472 00:43:47,820 --> 00:43:52,780 explaining but nowadays uh if you weren't in that little that little vanguard there's a lot of other 473 00:43:52,780 --> 00:43:58,140 options that you have so i i had i don't know i don't know if richard has more but i had just 474 00:43:58,140 --> 00:44:05,100 one more one more question which is um you know you know in in in the breadth of of all the things 475 00:44:05,100 --> 00:44:11,180 you need to support one thing that i think is interestingly different about uh about the the 476 00:44:11,180 --> 00:44:17,980 platform as a service or the platform area nowadays is a much tighter integration with with continuous 477 00:44:17,980 --> 00:44:23,100 integration and continuous delivery like all of those pipelines which you mentioned many times 478 00:44:23,100 --> 00:44:28,460 right like i think right i think i think aside from the buy everything from one vendor pitches that 479 00:44:28,460 --> 00:44:34,380 you would see in the 2000s like people tended to keep those things separate and so so i wonder like 480 00:44:34,380 --> 00:44:41,180 how how integrated do you think your your cicd stuff is into your platform consideration like how how much 481 00:44:41,180 --> 00:44:49,340 are those things tied together or should um together well i think i think you absolutely need to have a 482 00:44:49,340 --> 00:44:55,420 platform that supports whatever you're trying to do from a cicd perspective right so i i think there has to 483 00:44:55,420 --> 00:45:02,540 be um you know a really great integration between you know the practices and the approaches that you're 484 00:45:02,540 --> 00:45:08,220 trying to use to enable your software development organization um those have to be enabled and present 485 00:45:08,220 --> 00:45:14,940 within your platform as well right and and the way and honestly that was one of the big one of the bigger 486 00:45:14,940 --> 00:45:19,340 of the many kind of guiding principles that that we took when building that platform was that we wanted 487 00:45:19,340 --> 00:45:23,980 to be able to continuously integrate and deliver all of our platform capabilities so that we could 488 00:45:23,980 --> 00:45:29,180 really not so that not only could we you reap all the benefits of you know better quality and faster 489 00:45:29,180 --> 00:45:33,980 time to market and all those good things that we always talk about with ci but so that we could also 490 00:45:33,980 --> 00:45:39,980 really intimately um understand and identify and empathize with the developers who ultimately we're 491 00:45:39,980 --> 00:45:46,540 going to be consuming right platform right right so that so that we could provide a very clear link 492 00:45:46,540 --> 00:45:51,980 between um the practices that that we're trying to enable because we're we're actually using those 493 00:45:51,980 --> 00:45:57,820 practices too yeah no that's interesting i mean i i i i picked up on that one little part and wanted to 494 00:45:57,820 --> 00:46:02,540 like pull on that string because with uh there's been several several organizations i've spoken with 495 00:46:02,540 --> 00:46:09,020 recently who spend a lot of time perfecting their pipeline which which makes sense right like like 496 00:46:09,020 --> 00:46:14,540 there's a lot of of uh i mean that's the software you're building it's it's it's your workbench 497 00:46:14,540 --> 00:46:21,020 in in some way and and i i've been curious to like see uh you know sometimes i encounter people who 498 00:46:21,020 --> 00:46:25,340 like they give you an overview of what they're doing and it's sort of like gold plating to some 499 00:46:25,340 --> 00:46:30,460 extent or maybe silver plating but but i think i think over the next few years that'll be you know 500 00:46:30,460 --> 00:46:35,660 the cicd spot will be an interesting area to look at in the same way that as we've been talking about 501 00:46:35,660 --> 00:46:40,700 it's generally a good idea to get a platform instead of build one i wonder how much of like 502 00:46:40,700 --> 00:46:46,540 the pipeline process if you will not the actual tools itself but the actual kind of process that you do 503 00:46:46,540 --> 00:46:50,540 will be sort of people adopting conventions that are out there rather than coming up with their own 504 00:46:50,540 --> 00:46:57,660 things yeah i mean i think that gets gets back to like where is value actually added right and i 505 00:46:57,660 --> 00:47:03,500 don't think probably the value is added in building you know a very super custom unique pipeline like 506 00:47:03,500 --> 00:47:10,460 the like the value is probably added in how how good are your tests right so it's it's i think it's 507 00:47:10,460 --> 00:47:14,540 kind of like you know we talk about these value line conversations at pivotal a lot and i think you 508 00:47:14,540 --> 00:47:21,500 can have value line conversations you know within platform within development within within ci and cd 509 00:47:21,500 --> 00:47:28,620 um yeah i think i think you're right on with the silver plating comments yeah so yeah a couple last 510 00:47:28,620 --> 00:47:34,060 things for you so sure when you do talk about this i mean whether it's the pipeline or others when you 511 00:47:34,060 --> 00:47:39,020 talk about to platform builders what are the pcf features that click the most like where do you see 512 00:47:39,020 --> 00:47:42,700 light bulb moments when you're talking to people who have been building platforms or 513 00:47:42,700 --> 00:47:47,020 are thinking of going down that journey are there a couple things that when you show 514 00:47:47,020 --> 00:47:51,980 x or talk about y that they go sheesh i don't want to have to do that myself like are there some of 515 00:47:51,980 --> 00:47:59,500 those uh yeah i think i think definitely right and i think a lot of them are uh i think what i would 516 00:47:59,500 --> 00:48:03,500 describe as all the infrastructure is code that you no longer have to write 517 00:48:04,540 --> 00:48:09,580 right which which kind of cuts both ways right because it is a lot of work you know whether you're 518 00:48:09,580 --> 00:48:15,420 using shaft or puppet or any of the other tools that are out there it's a lot of work to write and 519 00:48:15,420 --> 00:48:21,660 maintain and continue to grow like your base of infrastructure code um and it's also really hard to 520 00:48:22,380 --> 00:48:28,300 coerce the organization into using you know a set of canonical artifacts around infrastructure code 521 00:48:28,300 --> 00:48:32,140 and i think that that's one of the things that i think pivot that the cloud foundry product makes 522 00:48:33,100 --> 00:48:39,260 really easy in both just an overall execution perspective like in like the actual getting the 523 00:48:39,260 --> 00:48:45,900 the automated config managed you know um infrastructure built out but then also from a governance perspective 524 00:48:45,900 --> 00:48:52,620 where it's it's much easier to to manage the the automation and and the structure within the platform than 525 00:48:52,620 --> 00:48:58,060 it is through you know github repositories that might be getting cloned and forked all over the place 526 00:48:58,060 --> 00:49:01,660 so i think that's that's a big piece you know whether you're talking about the virtualized 527 00:49:01,660 --> 00:49:08,380 infrastructure management we do with bosch or with the actual um container build and deploy process that 528 00:49:08,380 --> 00:49:14,620 we do with our build packs and elastic runtime i think those are two things where like like all that effort 529 00:49:14,620 --> 00:49:20,620 that that you may be spending right now is just gone right so that you can focus on some of the more higher 530 00:49:20,620 --> 00:49:25,100 value things like you know helping helping customers actually you know re-architect their 531 00:49:25,100 --> 00:49:30,620 applications effectively use the platform um getting into things like performance and availability 532 00:49:31,260 --> 00:49:36,540 some of those things instead of you know mucking around trying to perfect the perfect chef cookbook 533 00:49:36,540 --> 00:49:42,300 yeah awesome yeah so i want to close with uh one of my favorite hot takes from the last few 534 00:49:42,300 --> 00:49:47,340 months is something you wrote in an internal chat and i saw you write it into another paper so clearly you 535 00:49:47,340 --> 00:49:52,780 like the line but okay so what you said was i'll read verbatim the uh the over empowered full stack 536 00:49:52,780 --> 00:49:58,460 developer is an over correction created as a necessary response to the inefficient processes and poor 537 00:49:58,460 --> 00:50:05,260 outcomes created by yesterday's suboptimal ops teams so i think that is a bold and interesting 538 00:50:05,260 --> 00:50:10,380 thesis that sure to some extent this idea of a full stack engineer is not a desired end state 539 00:50:10,380 --> 00:50:17,340 instead it's the kind of messy middle we're in as as a result as you say because ops just there wasn't 540 00:50:17,340 --> 00:50:23,100 the right relationship between dev and ops so you know i want to give you a minute to maybe explain that 541 00:50:23,100 --> 00:50:28,860 but then also what do you think is the desired end state a full stack engineer is an over correction 542 00:50:28,860 --> 00:50:35,660 what what is the right place to end up yeah so and i know that's kind of a product provocative bold 543 00:50:35,660 --> 00:50:42,300 statement um but i think just coming coming from my background i there that for quite a while we we 544 00:50:42,300 --> 00:50:48,460 really did embrace and try to propagate this whole idea of the full stack engineer right like whether 545 00:50:48,460 --> 00:50:56,540 that's in um and or operations and infrastructure or in development um and i think what we saw was and 546 00:50:56,540 --> 00:51:05,260 i'll just focus on development for for a second is that during the era in which we didn't have api driven 547 00:51:05,260 --> 00:51:11,420 infrastructure right like we didn't have true infrastructure as a service we didn't have um 548 00:51:12,700 --> 00:51:19,660 platforms that provided the services that we really needed um and expose them in a way that was easily 549 00:51:19,660 --> 00:51:25,900 consumable in a self-service way to developers i think that the over correction to that was this idea that 550 00:51:26,460 --> 00:51:33,340 development teams along with actually writing kind of like the the the the added the value added business 551 00:51:33,340 --> 00:51:39,660 functionality that they have within their applications were also spending a ton of time doing things like 552 00:51:39,660 --> 00:51:48,540 writing chef cookbooks and using you know uh puppet or chef or whatever to automate the deployment of not 553 00:51:48,540 --> 00:51:56,380 only their application but also all of its dependencies and infrastructure and i just saw um that was a very 554 00:51:56,380 --> 00:52:01,660 very very exciting i think i think time that we were in and i absolutely helped to support that and drive 555 00:52:01,660 --> 00:52:07,500 that forward um and the whole idea of really empowering um developers and engineers to to own 556 00:52:07,500 --> 00:52:13,180 their whole stack but i think in hindsight you know having come through this platform experience and and now 557 00:52:13,180 --> 00:52:18,140 with a lot of what i'm seeing at pivotal customers i think i would say it's an overcorrection because 558 00:52:18,140 --> 00:52:24,380 ideally you wouldn't have developers focusing on things that aren't applications right you would have them 559 00:52:24,380 --> 00:52:31,420 focusing their time there and instead having a very rich um feature complete set of capabilities being 560 00:52:31,420 --> 00:52:36,300 provided to them in a way that's super easy to consume right so that they don't even have to worry 561 00:52:36,300 --> 00:52:42,540 about those things those things are present um and available as as much as like turning on your water 562 00:52:42,540 --> 00:52:47,420 faucet or picking up the phone and hearing a dial tone right so i think that's that's really what i'm 563 00:52:47,420 --> 00:52:54,220 talking about is that there was a gap between let's just say like enterprise um infrastructure 1.0 and 564 00:52:54,220 --> 00:52:58,380 the developers that forced them into this model of having to do everything themselves because they 565 00:52:58,380 --> 00:53:03,980 weren't getting what they needed i think with you know everything that we've seen with cloud and with 566 00:53:03,980 --> 00:53:08,620 cloud native platforms and those sorts of those those those approaches that have developed over the 567 00:53:08,620 --> 00:53:14,620 last couple of years i don't think for most people it's probably necessary to engineer the full stack anymore 568 00:53:14,620 --> 00:53:20,700 hmm yeah i i mean this is this is the benefit and uh what's the opposite of a benefit problem with 569 00:53:20,700 --> 00:53:28,220 developers is is uh they code their way out of any problem so right and and you know i i remember uh 570 00:53:29,340 --> 00:53:35,420 to speak fondly of myself like quipping that i think i think many advances in it are based on 571 00:53:35,420 --> 00:53:41,580 the fact that someone didn't give the developers the credentials right like so the the server admins or the 572 00:53:41,580 --> 00:53:46,460 security people or whoever like nope you you can't like deploy vms or whatever and so boom you write 573 00:53:46,460 --> 00:53:50,620 your own platform which is right it just it's just an example of people coding their way out of a 574 00:53:50,620 --> 00:53:56,220 problem and and you know also uh before we wrap up i should add if you really want to be a platform 575 00:53:56,220 --> 00:54:02,140 developer we're hiring you should come work for us and you can that's it should be building platforms 576 00:54:02,140 --> 00:54:06,460 right people who actually need to build platforms exactly there's lots of people who are hiring if 577 00:54:06,460 --> 00:54:12,300 if what you want to do is be more of a uh i wouldn't say an uppercase systems programmer like work on uh 578 00:54:12,300 --> 00:54:17,980 like hardware and stuff but if you want to work on platforms there's many options out there so uh so 579 00:54:17,980 --> 00:54:23,180 hey thanks for being a guest it was it was good thanks for having me so if people want to uh follow 580 00:54:23,180 --> 00:54:28,060 on with you and see if you have any uh whatever the temperature of the take may be see see what else is 581 00:54:28,060 --> 00:54:32,220 going on what what should they what should they do you got twitter or a blog or what what's what's 582 00:54:32,220 --> 00:54:36,460 what's your what's your thing yeah you know i'm i'm out there on twitter at matt walburn 583 00:54:37,420 --> 00:54:43,180 so pretty simple first name last name uh i'm out there well there you go so you can you can look that 584 00:54:43,180 --> 00:54:48,300 up well as always this has been Pivotal Conversations if you want to look up the show notes you can go to 585 00:54:48,300 --> 00:54:54,780 pivotal.io podcast and we're in soundcloud as well that's our our not so secret back end you can go to 586 00:54:54,780 --> 00:55:01,900 soundcloud.com Pivotal Conversations and uh if if if you like this podcast and and you want to help out 587 00:55:01,900 --> 00:55:06,460 in a way that costs nothing it's good to subscribe to the feed just put that in your old uh your old 588 00:55:06,460 --> 00:55:12,220 podcast listener i use overcast myself but i understand there all are alternatives out there 589 00:55:12,220 --> 00:55:17,740 also it'd be great if you go into the itunes store and leave a comment and it's even better if you 590 00:55:17,740 --> 00:55:23,420 tell your friends that they should listen to this so so we can get a broader reach for all of our uh 591 00:55:23,420 --> 00:55:29,740 all of our delightful nonsensicalness as as i like to think of it and with that uh we'll see 592 00:55:29,740 --> 00:55:31,820 everyone next time bye bye