SpringOne Platform 2017 Preview (Ep. 86)

Episode 71 · 44:19 · SRT · archive.org · all Tanzu Talk

Well, next week is our big conference, SpringOne Platform, over there in Moscone West. Are you supposed to say Moscone West instead of just Moscone because you're humble? Like, why do I do that? Yeah, I don't know. It's like an east-west divide, you know, that you don't want to be on the east side. I don't know. I think west is the place to be. Yeah, it's definitely, I definitely think it's probably the newer, well, I think they're redoing the main area, but it's the nicer one. And it has that, you know, I was, maybe about four or five years ago, I went to Toronto on a little, back when I was an analyst, a little, one of those little junkets where they like get an analyst to come in and then you get some floppy chicken and a storage vendor pitches you, you know, that kind of situation. Sure. My recommendation is don't do those unless you as the analyst are very desperate. It's, you know, it's kind of a good excuse to kind of get out, but like unless you're really going to work that as a travel expense thing, it's going to be more than it's worth unless they pay you really well. Anyhow, I was driving around there and it's like condo town. And I realized that basically all glass nowadays has this blue tint to it. And so I'm sitting here in a lovely aloft, brand newish kind of here in Charlotte. I seem to come to Charlotte a lot and I'm looking out and there's a Wells Fargo building across the street that has this blue glass. And so my prediction is just like, you know, the first time I went to Silicon Valley, I was driving around and I thought like, this looks like all the background shots from the fall guy that I used to watch. You know, it's got the kind of like, like ranch style wooden stuff behind trees, like has this to me very 80s feel. And I think several decades from now, when you see this blue glass, you'll be like, man, the early 2000s were awesome. It's a good time. Or maybe not. We'll see what happens. But I don't know, am I off base? Do you feel like blue glass is sort of like a recent phenomena that you see everywhere in buildings? I mean, I think I'm going to notice it more now, now that you've highlighted it. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yep. Yep. Also, I'm focusing on your fall guy reference, not the great American hero or what else you

could have sported there. Yeah. Fall guy. Yeah. Might have that song go. I might be with Cheryl Teagues or In Some Hay. I forget which, the way it goes. I was watching something the other night. Oh, I was watching, there's this, and then we'll get to the actual stuff, but there's this new documentary about Jim Carrey being in that Man on the Moon movie. And it was interesting to see all the, like, he used to wear, like, Talking Heads class sports coats. It's interesting to see all the historic footage and stuff. That's a pretty good movie. There's a lot going on there. Yeah, I've heard. Man, and he's got a wicked beard going on there. It's very, very well-grown. You're not too shabby yourself. I know, I was getting a little inspired. I was thinking about, what is the difference? I think, one, he has let it grow long. Well, there's two. One, he's let it grow long. And two, he doesn't shave his upper cheeks like I do, right? So you see the very long, it's kind of like this curvy thing. And then two, I'm sure he had, like, a $500 beard cut or something, right? Like, you know, I would assume that... He doesn't have a family of birds living in it, like, you know, you may after a long time. Yeah, yeah. Or that, what's the name of the guy in Lord of the Rings who's got the birds living in his head? On top of his head, I mean. I know what you're talking about. Yeah, no. So I guess Jim Carrey avoids that. That's good. Yeah. I don't know. He's close to that wizard. We'll see. Anyhow, so like I said, next week, it's SpringOne Platform. So Richard had the good idea to kind of go over what our picks are and a little preview of it. And we'll get to that soon. But as always, there's been a little bit of news. I mean, there's a lot of news going on right now. You got the Amazon reInvent, which I would like to commend you, Richard, on properly casing and spelling the reInvent conference. Very good. In our show notes. It's a lot of work. Yeah. It's attention to detail, though. That's what makes this podcast special. I was editing, giving some suggestions to a piece that one of our two new team members on my team, Paul, was writing about Kubernetes. And I spent a lot of time consternating about how you write .cloud.

Now, of course, you can look at Wikipedia. The D is lowercase, which is fine. And the C, of course, is uppercase. I forget what they call that. That's not camel cases. It are studly caps. There's one. Anyways. Wow. It's like mega tangent episode here. But then what do you do when it's at the beginning of a sentence? It's very difficult. Yeah. Mind blow. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It is reInvent week. You know, I just got done watching some of the morning keynotes. And as usual, tons of great stuff. Good stuff on databases. Good stuff on containers. The long expected Kubernetes announcement from them. Some really cool stuff with geographically scaled databases. And, you know, open serverless database, at least positioning it as such. You know, bare metal servers. The usual complete craziness of stuff, which is great. And at the same time, it's all the notices on Twitter. You probably see these, too. Like, you know, this was just the sound of a thousand startups screaming out in horror as their business model went away. It seems to happen every year where everyone gets really nervous. But then, I don't know. It doesn't seem like it kills all the startups. No, no. It still seems like there's a lot of value in having things that aren't sitting in one cloud, even if that one cloud is awesome. Yeah. That people still like technology that might not be pinned to one place. Yeah. I mean, you know, as a side note, for all the creative destruction babbling about startups, it sure takes them a long time to die. At least the failed ones. But, yeah. Yeah. Over in our software-defined talk, my other podcast, Slack channel, one of my co-hosts has been, I guess, live slacking the announcements. So, I was flying out here to Charlotte this morning, so I missed it. And, you know. But, yeah. So, is it EKS or AKS? What do they call in their container service? Oh, I want to say it's EKS. And there's really, we're almost out of vowels or letters to stick before K. So, nobody else can really do that anymore. So, the KS is going to be tough to keep doing. Yeah. And so, what's the deal with that? What's your quick hot take on that? I don't have enough quick hot takes yet. I have to digest it all.

But, you know, they're offering some ways to just run kind of straight up Kubernetes. They're offering this other technology that almost sits in front of it and hides all the scheduler, which is interesting. So, again, as usual, kind of giving you multiple ways to consume stuff, which has also allowed the cottage industry to pop up to help people pick among the 14 databases and 16 ways to run compute. Yeah. The only, and, you know, I'm interested to see how the, I mean, you know, obviously we are a pivotal part of it. I'm interested to see how the Kubernetes landscape evolves over the next year with respect to sort of two things. One is like how nice people are, which is always fun. And so far, it's just been a lot of like, not even welcome to the party stuff, but like, you know, you had the Heptio, I forget which one of the founders is just like, oh, that's great. It's so nice that Amazon is here, but which is good. So we'll see what goes on there. And then second, there was actually a, I forgot if I put a link to here, but I'll have to put one in now. There was a really good write-up in Computer Weekly, of all places. That's kind of a backhanded side comment. I've actually been reading them recently, and they have a lot of good coverage. But it was a very thorough piece about how basically the big tent strategy at OpenStack has been declared not helpful. And all the way up to Jonathan Bryce, you know, the executive director, talking about how they're not doing that anymore. And so, you know, comparing the Kubernetes community to the OpenStack community may gall people, but it is the thing one would do. And so it'll be interesting to see how all the vendor concerns and stuff are managed. What size tent gets installed? Or maybe a canopy. I don't know. I mean, I'm interested in your take, because you're an industry watcher, and you've got some history as you keep an eye on things, is that almost unlike OpenStack, though, this wasn't widely embraced by some of the new age vendors, if you will. It was embraced by a lot of the existing tech conglomerates as ways to run private cloud stuff. So, I mean, have you seen something where there's this sort of hot thing that everybody,

including, you know, again, the newest providers, I mean, now you have Google, Microsoft, Amazon, let alone IBM, let alone the other 25 certified Kubernetes providers, all offering something, and many of them claiming to offer vanilla. So not changing anything upstream, just kind of making it kind of more interesting, better. That's fascinating. But you're right. I mean, where do you start jostling there? You can't just kumbaya your way through the whole thing, can you? Yeah, no, and I mean, as a confirming side note, that's the other thing I've been noticing and is worth tracking is how often people say they're doing vanilla mainline stuff, right? Because that is a very, it's not deeply coded, but it's a very specific comment on this is ultimately compatible and not zero lock-in, all that kind of stuff. Yeah, which did not happen in the OpenStack world. I don't know if it was by design or whatever, but it ended up being on purpose. Anyways, so, yeah, I mean, as far as a comparison, I mean, I don't... I mean, sure, they're like everybody running MySQL. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, even that's a little different because that's like to overly nuance it, which is the point of the question, like, there's single source open source, and then there's multi-source open source, and I think, I'm sure I'm missing some infrastructure thing, like, let's just get rid of way, way back when all the IETF RFCs and how that drove things or didn't, I mean, because that's pre-internet time, not really internet, you know what I mean, that's too far back, but I mean, even Linux is not really like that. There's been competing distros that are just like infinitesimally incompatible enough to be meaningful, and early on, like, it took a long time to shake out to just be the, you know, Red Hat, basically, and then Canonical and a little bit of SUSE, or SUSE, and then so it's kind of, Linux has kind of ended up that way, but I wouldn't say it started the same way that, like, Kubernetes seems to be, and then, I don't know, really the only thing

I would pull, and maybe you know from your neck of the woods, so to speak, about this, but, like, Java was pretty good at all of this, like, and it kind of fragmented out for a while, and, you know, you can just go look up any debate that involves the guardians of the Java or whatever to see how, you know, you got all sorts of stuff going on there that we get pulled into, but I would argue, even now, like, Java is pretty much like a multi-source standard thing, and I think what concernates a lot of people is how broad that has become, but early on, back when there was a 2 in J2EE, vendors would differentiate on performance and manageability, but they wouldn't really differentiate on what the developer saw, right, like, there really was this true idea that you would be able to run your Java code, for the most part, on any app server or any platform, and I would suspect, just as will happen with Kubernetes, like, sure, you're going to have to change your IP addresses, or something like that, right, and, you know, you'll have to change these kind of undergirding things, whatever that girding tends to be, but in general, so far, the goal looks like your application code won't have to change all that much. I think that's mostly, yeah, I think that's pretty fair. What you saw with Amazon even this week, and you see with others, is, as always, just like with serverless, is that you're trying to connect to the other services. Like, yeah, Kubernetes is vanilla, but by the way, you know, multi-homed, you know, serverless Aurora from Amazon has no equivalent, really, elsewhere. Not the same way. Yes, there's interfaces, but for the most part, you're trying to connect me to your really sticky services, like S3 and others, so yes, I can move the container, but I can't move any of the stuff the container talks to. So, I don't know, maybe there's a long game in there of just commoditizing the compute to just nothing, and then it's always about the interesting services that kind of keep me in your walled garden, which, hey, kudos, that's not a bad strategy. Yeah, yeah, and, you know, you read over this for me, but if I ever actually get out this piece, I'm writing the answers to this question for the register, then maybe I'll be able to refer

people to it. I think I'm finally done. I'll see. There you go. Well done. I had to, I made the little changes we talked about, and I think it works out well. A little less swearing. That's right. A little less swearing. So, let's see. So, also, in other news, you know, I'm, you know, I didn't actually go read this in detail, but it looks like there's 51 companies. Is that right, or is it 50 that you can... 51, yeah. 51. Hopefully, one is the bonus one. I think one of the worst pieces of writing advice that the world ever gave is that in your conclusion, you should add something as a bonus, which is just annoying, right? Just keep it to 50. You don't need to surprise me with 51. Anyways, but, you know, I think we were included on that list as a good place to go work at to bet your career on. I think as who was it? Not Lisa Loeb. That's a singer. But who's the... Was it Sheryl Sandberg or Marissa Meyer said when Eric Schmidt was hiring her for Google, he was like, if you see, if someone offers you a seat on a rocket, don't ask them what you'll be doing. Just get on the rocket, which that's probably good advice for high growth companies, if you're into that kind of thing. Oh, that's a good point. I mean, sheesh, I left a vice president job to take a job with no job definition of pivotal. So, you know, you got to take a leap of faith when you're going to trust where you're going to go work. So, yeah, it was good to see us on the list. I mean, I included this not just for, you know, self-congratulatory back slapping, but also like this is a good list to go over and kind of see what it... Because this is a list of enterprise startups, right? Kind of enterprise centric. So for our listeners, I think it's just good to go through that list and see kind of what's interesting right now. Where are the problem spaces that you're seeing some innovative thoughts here? And it's not just going to come from Amazon or Microsoft or Google. It's going to come from these other companies that have sometimes a very specific thing they're tackling around security or data or what have you. So I think it's just a good list to get a sense for where the market is as well as, look, if you're a little bored in what you're doing right now, maybe these are... All of these look like good opportunities for people.

Yeah, no, that's a good point. It is always good to get a unicorn listicle reassessment of companies. And I think, you know, just skimming through it, I think what you see nowadays is a lot of these kind of companies, they're not what I would call necessarily always, although these ones look like it, they're not always like tech companies. Like a lot of companies are using software and technology to change the way that they're doing things, which sounds trite and helpful. I'll move on to the next one. So also, let's see, what are the next items we got? I'll let you take a look at it. Yeah, listen, one of the next ones, Azure, Microsoft announced this interesting, they keep adding these sort of tuning capabilities to their cloud database. And I included this because Oracle touted the same thing when they had their conference at OpenWorld. A little while ago as well, you're like, here's this database that just runs. Like you don't really need people, it just kind of self tunes itself, it does backups, it does whatever. And you're seeing this again in the cloud. Heck, you're seeing it from Amazon today. Like, hey, don't worry about backups. Don't worry about this. Hey, we're going to automatically scale up and scale down your database based on usage. Don't even worry about it. This interesting move towards almost skipping the DevOps of databases and just say, like, we'll just take care of it all for you at the platform level. You don't really have an ops story as a DBA. So I don't know where that trend's going. But it's interesting to see so many more of these databases become a little more autonomous with really no way to manage them as a DBA. Like you're purposely hiding all that stuff from you. Yeah, what do you think is that the idea of I was reading, what do you think of like the future of caring about what happens inside your databases? You know, I used to spend a lot of time, what do they call it in Oracle plans or traces or something? And I don't know, is that is that still going to be a thing? I mean, I think when you have like Oracle declared this, I think Microsoft did too, is almost AI powered. So it's not just a couple of simplistic rules that say, hey, if this query is slow, do this,

it sounds like it's actually meant to be something that learns over time or gets smarter based on all these other customers running in the cloud. So I guess I kind of trust the machine in that case over a person who goes this, this is how I'll look at this query optimization and make a change. You know, maybe that's, but it's gonna be so hard to pull that out of a DBA's hand because that's something that, you know what, that's a real good skill set. That's, those are smart folks. So is that going to be the next sort of blocker in terms of introduction of technology as DBA is going, yeah, yeah, I don't like this weird black magic database you're bringing in here. I like tuning. I like sizing. I like those things, even though a developer just wants a database on demand that it kind of takes care of itself. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I mean, I guess this is a completely incorrect characterization, but I often think of like, machine learning as brute force, dumb AI, in the sense of, if you have a big enough scale, just try a bunch of stuff out and see what works. And then and then repeat that cycle over and over again. And, you know, for example, in that sense, it's sort of like, if I've got the entire corpus of the English language of the web, I can tell you how to probably spell things somewhat accurately, just, just not by knowing the like ontological way you should spell things, but just like, I don't know, this word is there is spelled this way most of the time. So that's probably what you want. I'm sure it's much more complicated than that. But anyways, like, you know, it'd be interesting that if you're running at like a public cloud scale, you're running your database stuff. I have no idea what the fine print stuff about this is. But in theory, you could just like try out a bunch of stuff and see what the optimal way to configure your databases are and to tune the performance. And then it would be nice to like reflect that back to the broader community to kind of pool and then share best practices. Yeah, I mean, data seems like the next frontier. I mean, we saw this with Amazon this week, we're going to talk about it even spring ones with the data and DevOps and modern data. It seems like we figured out a little bit apps. I think we figured out the right way to do apps and deliver apps and architect them and not, you know, it still takes a while for that to become totally

mainstream. But there's some really definitive patterns there. I think it's starting to emerge for data. That's where we're all turning our gaze to. I think that's a great thing. And so then speaking of the data area, over here in Pivotal Cloud Foundry land, there's now MongoDB as a service, right? Added officially? It is. Yeah, they put a blog post up themselves just making it on demand, which again, I'm glad they use the on-demand broker. Get yourself an enterprise cluster. MongoDB is obviously still really popular, successful technology. It had a good IPO. So, you know, some people still see it as somewhat simplistic, but our friend James Governor wrote a great post that, you know, if you attribute MongoDB's growth to good marketing, you're not paying attention. Because what they did was actually solve a convenience problem better than anyone else. And that is why developers treat it like a go-to. So, let's give props where they, you know, deserve. And even in enterprise, it seems like Mongo's getting good traction. So, I love seeing that as an integration into PCF now. Yeah, yeah. I was talking with one of our customers recently, and they're rebuilding their whole platform. And they have Mongo at the center of it, which seems nice. I actually ran into the person who's the Mongo admin. I mean, in a platform context, it's a little, you know, he's building it out and also running it. And yeah, I mean, in my Thomas Friedman style, getting in a taxi and telling you how the world operates thing. Like, I think Mongo, Kafka, and Cassandra, like, come up over and over again as the data stores. I assume that's also because people just don't mention MySQL or MySQL or whatever you're supposed to call it, MyraDB. That must be used everywhere as well. But it certainly seems to have proven out to be something that people want to use that has power. Absolutely. Now, you got to give the people what they want. I mean, arguably, again, I mean, you even, again, if I go back to re-invent again, when Angie Jassy's on stage saying, look, our container service is popular, but you're asking for Kubernetes. That's what we're going to give you. Sometimes that's what it takes, is that you might say Mongo is not your best choice and you want to use something else, but that's what people want. And it solves a great problem. So, I like when platforms at least are a little pragmatic about what they offer.

Absolutely. Well, I'll just throw out two other items, and then we'll get to the SpringOne platform news. So, in our ongoing effort, I think, especially as older people ourselves, it's always good to worry about, like, making sure that you have, I wouldn't even use the word diversity, but that you widen the aperture to all of humanity to hire from. And, you know, I wrote a column on this in the register a couple months ago, or maybe it was a month ago. I forget. And I came across a survey. Now, it was done by, like, a, I don't know, recruiting or HR company or something. So, whatever. You can get that bias. But I think, at least on this point, it, there was an interest in the coverage of it. There was interesting commentary on how old people turns out. And by old, they mean people in their 30s. So, there's that going on. But old people are a lot more stable as employees. So, when you spend a lot of time, if it's like a high tech sort of role or a high skill role, and especially with domain expertise, you spend a lot of time training them. And, you know, if they just leave all of a sudden, then you wasted that. And it sort of has a huge cost to it. So, it might be cheaper to buy young people, and they might be more thrilling and, you know, stay later or whatever. But probably, at the end of the day, it's good to have a mix in that portfolio. So, there was a bunch of other stuff in there that was interesting. But especially for, like, you know, in talking with the enterprises who want to improve how they're doing their software and do the digital transformation and stuff. I think thinking about your workforce and your hiring practices comes up all the time. And it's good not to get lost down the hole of hiring a bunch of, like, you know, hoodie college dropouts. Or digital natives, apparently. Digital natives. That's the one. That's the one. Oh, use that word. Yeah. You can hire the people over 30. They can still wear hoodies. But, you know, they might be a little more stable. There's good lumber in that pile in the back. Yeah. I mean, you know, Amazon got a lot of credibility for some experienced hires this

year from, you know, Adrian Cockroft, James Gosling, others that they've brought in the fold. And, yeah, there's some awesome experience there. There's also great stability, some great technical leadership, and people who are still coding every day. It's not like they're just hand-wavy, you know, PowerPoint people. These are the people who are still bleeding ahead. So, you know, look, the person who, people who work at Pivotal, like, we have a great age range here on the engineering side. People building modern frameworks at all stages of life. That's, again, awesome to see. You know, speaking of, our head of engineering reminded us that we have a slew of programming and development jobs open, and designers and product managers. So, if you're interested in that, coming to work at Pivotal, that hires all ages, you might be forced to wear a hoodie at some point, but that'll be fine. That's true. But that'll be fine. You could just go over to, what is it, Pivotal.io, and go to the bottom and find the jobs thing. But there's, especially over the next eight or 12 months, there'll be a lot of new jobs there if you want to, as I like to say, have a job that sucks less. There you go. Put off retirement for a few years and do something fun. That's right. That's right. And as long as you put me down as a referral, I'll be... No, no, I want that. That's right. That's right. We'll attribute it to the podcast and make a trust fund. The podcast fund. We'll buy some new microphones. So, then, you know, go to the show notes at Pivotal.io slash podcast to find that link about the survey. And then this other one, there's also just, there's a good interview with charity majors about what observability is and monitoring and logging and that kind of thing. And I think as, to name check him again, as James Governor pointed out to me last time I had lunch with him, observability seems to be the way to talk about all this management and systems management stuff nowadays. So, it's interesting to keep track of the evolving notion of what that is. And I mean, you know, I think ultimately a lot of observability comes down to the classic problems of monitoring and log management, which is it's really hard to get the right data because people don't usually instrument their code. So, you should

instrument your code. You should make it observable. And then, of course, there's the old thing of like, you know, you want to avoid event, you know, storms and only focus on what actually matters. And I'm sure there's some more high science and fanciness to it. But yeah, it's always good to improve the way you do monitoring stuff. And she makes some good points in that interview. So, as mentioned, next week, what is it? December 4th and 5th? I feel like it's three days. No, it's three. Yeah. Get your date right. Three. Three to fifth. Sending people wrong to the conference. Yes. Yes. What are you doing? Yeah. No, I think it's four through seven, technically, with the big stuff happening, five, six, seven. There you go. Don't worry. I have all my travel and hotel booked. So, my computer will just tell me what to do and I will show up at the right place. But yes, starting, I guess, on Monday and wrapping up, what was it, Thursday or something? Yep, Thursday afternoon. We did the smart try to end around lunchtime on Thursday so people flying East Coast can still catch their flights and everyone doesn't just dribble out throughout the whole day. So, by the end of the day, there's like six people. You really want to just have a nice, strong close and not keep people tall. That's good. That's good. And you, I have not curated a list of sessions, but you, I just read it on the plane over here. You came up with a wonderful list of not only suggested sessions, but you categorized them, which is amazing. That's right. And so, give us some, well, first of all, how would you describe the tracks? What are the buckets of types of content that people could expect? Yeah, we're very clear, Peter Humphrey on the team, very clear not to let me use the word tracks because we treat these as topics. Because tracks sometimes implies like, look, you don't leave this room. This is a sort of, you just stay in this area if you care about this. Versus like, there's different topic areas and you're going to mix and match. It's probably semantics, but let's go with topics. So yeah, the conference has a ton of topics coming, covering things like spring and agile methodology and reactive programming, the case study stuff, cloud native platforms, databases, the whole DevOps-y track, geode, and some of the pivotal cloud cache stuff,

which is great. And then you end up with things like microservices and serverless. So there's lots of these different focus areas. I'll be shocked if people don't jump between them. I mean, some people just are just, you know, I guess DevOps heads, maybe yourself. We just won't leave that room. But for the most part, I expect a lot of people to bounce around. We have, I think it's over 150 talks. We've got just a crazy list of enterprise customers presenting and speaking and attending. So I don't know. For me, this is, I'm just excited by the audience. I think that the program itself is a lot of fun. We sold out the pre-training. So there's a bunch of training on Monday for, you know, things like Spring Boot and even Steel Toe, the .NET stuff. Spring Cloud, all these things completely sold out. So people are pumped. It's good to see it. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I mean, there's, do you have a handle on how many sessions there are? I think there, yeah, I think there's about 150 breakouts, give or take. Yeah. And then we've got, what, three hours of main stage stuff. And so I was responsible for putting together some of the main stage speakers and ordering and sequencing and that kind of fun stuff. So this team at Pivotal has done a silly good job of figuring out all these logistics. But like the main stage is a lot of fun. We have folks from Google, Microsoft. We've got customer talks from like Scotiabank and Boeing and MasterCard and these others. So I just, I'm pumped to see a lot of customer talks. I made a tactical and maybe it will be a complete miss, but I purposely didn't put Pivotal people on stage much. So Hansi Fakori is going to kick off and Rob Neal make a quick sneak appearance and Cornelia Davis will jump on stage. But other than that, it's spring engineers and customers. Yeah. And I think that's kind of the way it should be. I mean, you know, we don't have to be up there just announcing stuff or making ourselves feel great. I think it's about highlighting good stuff that the people in the audience can take home from the conference. Yeah. I mean, obviously I'm biased to what I pay attention to, but that's, that's the format I like, right? Cause it's sort of like, I don't know, you can figure out the technology stuff any day. That's not a problem, but actually getting your, uh, getting as, as my favorite thing to, to sort of, uh, use an example, getting those 19,000 developers at JP Morgan

chase to improve how they do software. That's, that's the real problem. Right. Although maybe JPMC doesn't have that problem, but you know, you know what I mean? And so it's good, I think to hear from, uh, hear from actual people who have been down that path or, and to be fair, all of them who are currently on that path and hear what, uh, on the one hand, you know, I mean, first of all, it's good to hear just the straight up, like five to 10 minute talk about how, uh, things were terrible before and now they're awesome. And, uh, and cause it's, it's, it's nice to know that like, you know, uh, it's actually possible at, at, uh, an organization like yours. And then also in the, and sometimes in the shorter ones, but in the longer talks, especially in the breakout sessions, you get a lot of, um, you get a lot of tips of, of things to do. And I would say not only tips of things to do that you are in tactics that you may not have heard of, but even if they go over the usual thing, uh, like you should have everyone in one room. Like it's, it's, it's validating to hear over and over again, that you should actually do this thing. You know, like to go back to my favorite analogy pool, right? Like when it comes to, uh, to diet, I think the only thing we can all agree on is you should try not to consume a lot. We don't know if wine is healthy, if coffee is going to kill you, is butter healthy or not? What's up with fried eggs? Like every, every five or so years the table gets flipped and everything's opposite, but we can at least, what I always hear over and over again is don't eat a lot. And so, uh, you know, anyways, so those are the takeaways you can have from that, I think. And, you know, I, I've, uh, so we're not supposed to say, uh, to say track the topic area that, that I, early on I helped curate a little bit. And to be fair by help, it just means, I think I had three phone calls where I told people what I thought about various rows in a spreadsheet. Uh, but there's, there's, uh, we, we put together in the DevOps and build pipeline area. There's, there's some good talks like that from, uh, from people like FedEx and, and, uh, who else is in there and several other customers going over how they've actually done

DevOps and cloud native things. And I've seen a few of these, uh, I think, I think, uh, great American insurance company is, uh, in there as well. And I've, uh, I've seen and done a little bit of, uh, messing around with, like collaborating with some of those speakers on them and they'll be great. I'm, I'm also looking forward to the, uh, not only of those talks, but of all the talks, the videos that we'll put up sometime afterwards. And those are, I mean, those, that, that provides a good year of slide content for me. Absolutely. You can just go in there and, uh, and, and get the exact advice that people say and, uh, start building from it. So you don't have to, uh, you know, frantically take down notes as you're sitting there in the room. Yeah. So, I mean, you were kind of asking which ones do you think you have to hit? And that's the one reason when I wrote the blog post, I kind of thought of who's coming. Cause you know, for one person, some sort of data talk is awesome for another it's meh. So, you know, when I think about, you know, as much as again, these cloud vendor conferences are a lot of fun, you know, whether it's reinvent or Microsoft's build or GCP next, I mean, those are all great, but you're still living in their universe. So, you know, pivotal, at least it gets to have somewhat of an interesting conference because we're the Switzerland of cloud. I guess we're just going to make sure that you can run wherever you want. We're not going to have a preference. So learn about multi-cloud stuff. So there's a number of good talks from the Google folks, from Microsoft folks, from others. And again, it's practical stuff, right? Even our tracker team explaining how we moved between environments because, you know, most enterprises think about that too. So some good chances to see multiple cloud technologies, not just one. But in terms of like developer talks, you know, spring boot two is right around the corner. So you don't want to miss talks that really explain what's new there. You know, all this reactive stuff, you know, you and I could have had some people on the podcast to talk about reactive programming. It's going to be great if you can actually watch people coding it on stage. And sometimes things click when you watch an application get built and go, okay, I understand why I want to do callbacks and I want to do async stuff, not a bunch of blocking calls. So hitting those. And I will say we just added yesterday, we purposely kept

it off the schedule just for sneaky purposes, but there will be a next version of PCF talk right after keynotes that I will be doing with a friend Jeffrey Hammond from Forrester kicking it off. So there'll be an hour right after the keynotes. You of course shouldn't miss that because you make good choices. So that'll be a good one. What's, uh, what's, what's Hammond gonna do in that? Uh, I've got him just doing like a puppet show to start with really just to warm up the crowd. He's good with marionettes. He's not going to admit it, but he is a pretty adept. Well, it's that new England vibe that you just pick up in the water there. You know, the Punch and Judy show just kind of came across the boat changing the marionettes. You get skills. Yeah. So he's going to warm up, uh, folks with some of the information, some research he's done around dev productivity and platforms and the likes. That should be great. Yeah. Yeah. He used to, uh, back when I was on the analyst circuit, he would, he did a good job opening up with like his most recent developer surveys for various things, which, uh, which are always fascinating to look at. I've been checking on that a long time. Yeah. So there's some other developer talks serverless spring. I can't wait for that team's doing some awesome stuff and serverless and Mark Fisher and team presenting on that on, on Wednesday. But then, you know, the talks I'm probably going to spend a lot of time in as well, or all those sort of transformation things that you, you were just talking about. There's, you know, discover has a good story there. You've got, as you mentioned, a number of ones talking about CICDs or Liberty mutual others. That's for me, some of the more interesting stuff. Cause that's, that's the first thing that seems to unlock everybody. Like once you figure out how to start deploying code without 15 tickets. And as you start to automate your pipeline, everything else changes. So how are these companies like Liberty or all state or others pulling that stuff off? I think that that's one of the most impactful things you can do if you're an enterprise trying to figure out how you kickstart things is go to the CICD talks. Cause you're going to pick up a tip that actually speeds you up. Yeah, no, it's true that I've, I've, I've noticed recently when talking with large organizations that sometimes you have to painfully remind them that the whole point of all of this is to actually release the software. And so, and so

making sure that you have that, that kind of a last mile of a, of a pipeline set up and that you're, you're even doing continuous integration and stuff. It's always good to not only make sure you're doing that, but learn from others about how they've, they've set that up because clearly there's a, there's challenges to doing that. And people are happy to share how they got over those challenges. Yeah. And then there were some talks, you know, I was thinking about when you and I were really, you did all the work as we talked about enterprise architecture over the summer. And we talked about kind of that, what is that role of the architect? And so I was thinking through like, what if I'm an architect attending and I'm trying to not even cling to relevance, but I'm trying to make sure I know the tech my teams are using. I know the new patterns they're using. How do I get this sort of crash course? And so, you know, there's courses on, or, uh, sessions on how do I warm up on spring cloud? Like, what is this thing? What are these microservices patterns? You get into all this sort of domain driven design event sourcing stuff too. So there's some great talks planned. Kenny Bastani has one on stator events. You know, how do I think of event driven architecture? Like that's a huge talk. Absolutely attend. And I love Ford is doing a whole, like, I guess they built this cloud reference application to demonstrate all these patterns that they could do a road show of and show people. So, I mean, that's a great way. Again, if you're trying to figure out how do you get a big organization to glom onto the core patterns you want, how did Ford do it? You know, how did they build and what, what did they build? They're going to go into depth on that. So again, as an architect, it seems like there's a lot of ways that you can speed up or accelerate or even just digest some of this new stuff that then you can go evangelize a bit. Yeah. Now there's a lot of, a lot of stories being flung out there. That's good. I mean, I think, uh, is this the third one we've done or, uh, this is the third, is the second one that's just been, I think like platform because SpringOne has been a kind of more of an open source community show for years. Yeah, that's, that's right. I guess, I guess the first year I was here, we had, uh, the CF summits were the big events and then we had this one. So yeah, yeah, no, it's a good, uh, I mean, the one last year was really good and this one,

uh, sizing up to be really good content wise as well. So, you know, if you haven't bought tickets yet and arrange travel, don't listen to the dates that I just told you because I'll be wrong. But if you just go to SpringOne platform.io, you can, uh, you can sign up for it and, uh, it's, it'll probably be worth your time to check it out. If you're, uh, if you're working in a large organization and you want to improve the way you do your software, that's, uh, that's, that's what you'll get at the end of it. And then, you know, if you can't make it, just, just figure out, I'm sure we'll, we'll throw it out when we put all the videos up, but all the recordings will be out there and, uh, hopefully there'll be curation, curiosity-ation, if you will, curation going on throughout the year as, as we and other people, uh, write up and point out good tidbits that, that were in those. So then, then in addition to the talks, there's always the ancillary things going on. Like, uh, before we were recording, we were saying how there's a, uh, I guess it's the second pivotal analyst day that we're having on Monday, which that'll be fun to, uh, industry analyst day, I should say, that'll be fun to sit in on and see what goes on in there and, uh, see, see what kind of, what the analysts ask and which ones show up, what their questions are, and maybe they'll generate some ephemera as well. And then there's, you know, there's of course like the, uh, the, uh, get, get some CIO executives together and have them talk with each other sort of stuff, which is also fun. And, and then you have, um, I think on Monday, well, it is on Monday night. Uh, there's basically like a kind of like opening community thing with a bunch of lightning talks and some, uh, uh, you know, lightning talks being like, it's this five minute, uh, five minute thing where you have, uh, 20 slides that auto advance on their own at 15 seconds. And you give some talk about that. I have a talk that I'm giving there. And, uh, and then also there's, uh, for the, the bold, there's the, uh, ignite karaoke where there's, there's five slides that advance every one minute. So I'll let you do the math to figure out how long it is. And you just come up with a talk as you're seeing them for the first time. Yeah. Now that, that, that video of you doing that is still one of my favorite things I've

watched this year. It was just such, such the best. So yeah, to encourage people, even if you're terrified of doing it yourself, you should come watch other people figure out how to answer questions about a clown on a slide or things like that. Yes. And we'll, we'll see if they all get used, but I made, I made 10 of the slide decks for this ignite karaoke thing. So it'll be, did you? That's the first time I've done that. So it'll be a good learning experience for me to see if I'm especially looking forward if it gets used to the one about dealing with millennials. See how that pans out. Uh, it's going to be great. Yeah. So that, that'll be a lot of fun as well. Yeah. Yeah. Well, so that's, uh, that's, do you have any other thing that you want to, uh, sort of preview about what's going on there? I mean, I guess, I guess it, you know, it's worth pointing out, uh, despite YouTube videos being uploaded, what we can upload is all the people like hanging out with each other down there in, uh, downtown San Francisco and the aforementioned, uh, Moscone West. There's a Boca de Beppo down the street. If you want to book the Pope table, I don't know if you've been there for a while. I, I have not. Uh, but you know, it'll, it'll be really fun to hang out with people, uh, hopefully not too early in the morning, but, uh, throughout the day and just talk with them and, uh, get, get, get all sorts of input about what they're going on that they, they would talk about publicly or not otherwise, and just meet a bunch of new people to, uh, start putting on the, the roster of interesting folks to talk with. Yeah. The hallway track is always the best at shows like this, isn't it? I mean, it's the, it's that chance to, to kind of meet some folks and, you know, all the pivotal heavy hitters, or most of them are going to be there. So if you ever want to tackle Josh long and get a selfie or, you know, have that Coté time, like everyone's going to be in one place, which is awesome. So I think for a lot of folks, we are almost sold out ridiculously. We're significantly larger than last year as a conference. We've sold out sponsorships. Like this is a big, big fun thing. There is still time to buy tickets, but we were just going through in Slack today and there's, there's not much room left. So it's, uh, even like physically, like we could, we're already overflowing in the, uh, the keynote hall and stuff like that. What a great problem to have.

So you still have time to buy tickets. It's definitely worth being in person just for the, the kind of conversations. And, and let's be honest, I don't know about you Coté, but I have always promised I would go watch conference material after, and I never spend actually eight hours in my chair watching it. I ended up all tabbing to 50 other things. I'm not absorbing it at nearly the rate of sitting in a room thinking about it, kind of just fermenting this information. So, you know, in person's always beats watching replays. No, I think, I think that's definitely the case. It's hard to, uh, hard to make yourself pay attention to that, you know, and then, and then of course, as you mentioned, there will be the, uh, what do we call it? I bet we don't call it an expo or a booth floor, but what's, what's the area with the, uh, with the, with the, the, the sponsors? Yeah. So we've got this, you know, kind of crazy sponsor list again. I mean, what, I don't know about you and maybe I'm just living in hyperbole land right now, but I mean, I look, is there a conference that, you know, Google, Microsoft, VMware, Oracle, Dell, you know, virtue stream, all these companies sponsor together like that. That's a weird show. And you've got, you know, Rackspace, Solace, Solstice, you know, HCL, Capgemini, Cognizant, Accenture, all these sorts of consultancies, software companies. And a lot of them have boots. A lot of them have some really wicked demos they've put together for their boots. And there's even going to be a couple of surprises, uh, for some of the vendors who are bringing, bringing some, some pretty cool stuff on site. So it's definitely always fun to walk that floor and just get a sense for what are people building. And, you know, you still have companies like Comcast and, and others, all state who are also sponsors and you say, what in the world are they going to do there? Hey, I guess come find out why customers also set up booths at a conference like this. Yeah. Yeah. You know, maybe we should either, either with you or someone else, we should figure, I used to do this at South by Southwest for a few years and, uh, we would go around and do the, uh, the booth swag report and do some commentary on, on what the swag was, the good, the bad, things like that. And it makes for a fun little video requires a little bit of editing. But I recently been using the, uh, the iMovie, very good editing tool. So I'll have to find some

time to, and some cohort to go around and do that. Uh, that would be enjoyable. That probably won't happen, but it's a good, I like this challenge. So if you're one of these vendors with a booth, it's time to step it up and do the mesh t-shirts or, you know, whatever you think you were missing. Yeah. You need to bring it all in this time. Like I'm looking at a piece of swag I got recently. I'm sure you've seen this, uh, Richard, you get the, uh, it's this little multi-wire charger thing that has, uh, the two types of USB, I guess, AB, I don't know about C, the two types of USB on it. And it has a lightning cord. And of course, like the big USB thing. And then inexplicably, it has like that really old, uh, iPhone charger. You remember the, the, the very long one. And so I've, I've seen some of them where they don't have that, but I think that's, you know, that would be a question you would ask people is like, do you really think that people are going to use this? Like, why, why do you have this extra thing on here? And then they just kind of look at you confused and you edit that, the rest of it out. That's, that makes for good, good TV. Anyhow, this has been, uh, another Pivotal Conversations episode. If you want to get the most recent, uh, episodes, look at the back catalog and everything, you can go to soundcloud.com/pivotalconversations. Uh, we've got everything there, including a link to the RSS feed and the place we post our show notes, which is at pivotal.io/podcast. And we usually get those, uh, up every Thursday or so. You can find the links to the, um, the things that we've mentioned and the accurate date for the conference next week. Uh, there's also, I'll also put a discount code there, uh, that you can use to get $200 off. I think still, if you haven't registered yet. Um, but, uh, with that, we'll see everyone next time. Bye-bye.

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