Well, as always, I like to start with a little weather update because as I get older, my understanding is that the way that you become a distinguished older person is you basically talk about the weather all the time and who has cancer. Or maybe that was just my grandparents' generation. I don't know. We'll see what we talk about. Maybe we'll talk about like, you know, crazy internet things or when RDF was a big deal and how no one can deal with that. But here's my question for both of you. So I don't know how it is over there on the West Coast. But it was like 87 yesterday. And I feel like maybe it's time to dust off my shorts. Do you think this is an appropriate time to start wearing shorts? Where do you cut the line over there in the Bay Area and up in Seattle? When do you pull the shorts out of the mothballs? I mean, I'm still in sweaters right now. So I don't even understand what's going on with the short thing. Yeah. Well, maybe do you have this? Chris, do you have a crossover where you do, I don't know why I call it this, but I feel like the San Diego style where you got shorts on the bottom and long, warm sleeves on top. Is there some time during the year where you do that? Sure. Yeah. I mean, I'm more curious. Like, in 87, you're not pulling out shorts. Like, what is your threshold there? Like, 104? I mean, 87 seems like clearly shorts weather. Like, that's not even fuzzy, is it? Like, 70? Eh, maybe. 62? It was 50 up here in Seattle this week and lots of shorts out, given that for up here, that's warm. Yeah. I think maybe when it's in the 90s, that's when you start wearing shorts full-time. I see. Because it's still kind of cool inside. And maybe you wear some, like, thinner pants. Like, the... Not like... They used to be called khakis, but I don't know what you call them now. They're, like, jean style. They're, like, five-pocket pants, I think they call them. But they've got a nice, thin fabric to them. And I think five-pocket's a little overblown. One of them is just, like, a coin pocket. I mean, really. Like, that's some marketing gone wrong. Yeah. That would be good. Yeah, yeah. I mean, just your full linen jumpsuit, I see, probably comes out now.
2:00Maybe a jumper. Lots of things you can pull off right now. Yeah. Yeah. A linen onesie. Yeah. I'm just... You know, Richard, now that you've said that, I'm just immediately... I'm envisioning Coté in a linen seersucker suit. I'm just, like, yeah. Every day. Yeah. If he wears a jumper at the CF Summit, that's getting him on stage. Ooh, a jumper. Oh, yes. I actually have two... I think I have... If you wear a jumper, Coté, you're on stage. Done. Lock it in. Gotta find one. Well, you know, I was over in France last week. And it reminded me that all of the, I don't know, the workers, people work on roads and carpentry, they all wear those onesie outfits. Have you known that? Have you noticed that? Like, over here, we don't have, like, a uniform. You just, like, show up, build a highway or whatever you want. But over there, they've always got, like, the big suits with the reflective gear. It's a very distinct look they have. I wonder if that's some sort of EU standard. Yeah, little known fact, that's actually the lab's uniform as well, that we don't really tell people that. That's right. That's right. There's some strong Velcro on the side, so when you pair, you have to stay together until someone comes and peels you apart. Just drape them in velvet. Yeah. Well, you know, before we get to the news, I do, you know, little news. I think I actually have three seersucker suits, but one of them hasn't been hemmed yet. But I always feel, I mean, I know what y'all are going to say, it's inevitable, but I always feel a little, like, over the top if I wear one of those. You know, it just seems like a little, like, hey, look at me. But, man, they are kind of comfortable. You do have a strong sense of self-awareness, so that's... That's right. That's right. A strong sense of self-awareness. Exactly. Or a strong sense of self-fashion. That's right. Well, hopefully you can go endorse me for that on LinkedIn. Self-awareness, plus one. That's good. Seersucker suits. Yeah. Well, why don't you introduce yourself briefly, guest, and then, you know, you can do an extended biography if you want to later on.
4:03Well, so I guess I am the only guest, Abby Kearns. I am the executive director for Cloud Foundry Foundation, the home of the open source Cloud Foundry. That's right. Now, and then see if Summit is coming up in, is it two or three weeks? Sometime soon, right? Three weeks, April 18th through 20th in fantastic Boston, Massachusetts. Yeah. I haven't been there in a long time. That's a nice place. But so we'll come back and talk about some stuff happening in the Cloud Foundry world and some of the things interesting at CF Summit to look forward to. But first, as always, we have a few little news items. Why don't you pick from the, how do you say it, menagerie that we have there, Richard? Which one do you want to lead off with? Triple word score. Yeah, let's start off with the, we'll start with the top. So I listed out the Salesforce buys MuleSoft. I think you talked about one of your other 14 podcasts, but I thought we could cover it here. Yeah, it was a big buy in our space. Obviously, MuleSoft, a partner in the Cloud Foundry space. So good for them. That's awesome. Interesting buy for Salesforce themselves. I mean, it seems like the hello world for every iPads is, can you talk to Salesforce? So it'll be interesting in the integration space. Does that kind of indicate playing favorites or is that them just doubling down? Because look, a competitor like Microsoft has already a strong native integration story. And for Salesforce, that hasn't been something they've had in-house. So I don't know what your hot take on that purchase was. Man, I don't know. I'm trying to warm my take up. I think they bought it for like $6.5 billion, which... Yeah, that was not found in the couch money. Yeah, that's a lot of clams, as they say. You know, yeah, I mean, I guess nominally, if that's a word, yeah, you got the Salesforce in the cloud. And they got to pump the data up there to drain out the on-premise CRM tool or pool there, which I guess makes sense. But I don't know. You know, Salesforce also owns Heroku and a few other things.
6:05And so they always have more ambitions to be more than just, you know, having salespeople fill out how their work is going in sales reports. So maybe there's something there as well. But, yeah, you know, you got your data integration. You know, but really what it reminded me of is that back when they were called MuleSource, I think I went to several of their conferences. And they once gave me some cufflinks with, I was going to say a donkey, but I guess it's a mule with a little mule on it. And I don't know if I still have those. I should find those. You know, for all of my French cuff events that I attend, the galas and everything. Clearly go with the suits you have in your closet. That's right. I mean, lock it in. Those would go well with a seersucker suit. Yeah, I think they would. You just sort it out. What do they call it? You can shoot out your cuffs or whatever and just constantly be adjusting them, get people to ask. Stop in traffic, my friend. Stop in traffic. Yeah. MuleSoft is an interesting company. I mean, do they still have like an ESB that they do or do they shift over from that? They do. Yeah, they've been around for a long time. Yeah, kind of the API management piece. Again, still playing in integration, not as much the connector suite that I'm aware of as some of the other like cloud integration vendors. So, again, probably a good buy, an expensive buy. And one from, you know, this was a company that went public, what, a year ago. So it probably was cheaper 12 months ago than they are today. But nonetheless, if you've got the cash and you think that's going to help your ecosystem or it's going to help, as you said, accelerate the data migration to public cloud, then go for it. Yeah. Now that makes sense. So we'll see what pans out with that. Yeah. So what else, what else do we have this week? I see one of our things, it has the word omnibus in front of it. Yeah. I always like a good omnibus. The second one I'll point out is, I like that Google did a lot of good security things last week. They, you know, it's not uncommon for people to point out that Google Cloud still seems to struggle a little bit with the enterprise story as it's more kind of big data and cloud processing.
8:09It's kind of the kind of forward looking cloud, not as friendly to maybe traditional enterprise, but they shipped a number of cool security things last week around securing things in virtual private clouds, actually having better audit control for who's doing what, even preventing denial of service. And even that I really like their data loss prevention API, which can actually mask out sensitive data as it moves between systems, which is actually really important. So I thought they did a number of really good things last week, including even some FedRAMP authorization and some other things they're taking advantage of with partnership. So as usual, don't sleep on Google, especially as they're able to do some cool things with security. Yeah, well, that makes sense. And then, you know, I haven't read this cloud act yet. I like that they have it in all capital letters, which makes me think it must stand for something. Hopefully the C in cloud stands for cloud itself, all capitalized. No, of course not. Do you think our lawmakers would be that funny in naming things? No, I can't believe they got it right. But yeah, it's clarifying lawful overseas use of data, which it stands for cloud. I mean, I'll be darned. They got the acronym right. Oh, right, right. Do you think that means is that the data going overseas or if you get data from overseas? Does it clarify that? Well, I think this all has to do with, yeah, this all has to do with trying to make it simpler, I think, for treaties between companies to request data from computers outside of each other's borders is the point. How are you having maybe less sketchy ways for people to actually as part of legal requests or law enforcement or whatever? And there is something in front of the Supreme Court right now in the U.S. around actually forcing companies to pull data from overseas servers. So I think this was trying to actually do a legal piece of that. The only reason I included that, not because of our strong law audience to the podcast, but mainly because this also plays into people's concerns sometimes with when I put things in public cloud, what am I signing up for? And sometimes it's way overblown, the concern. But there are logistical considerations when this is now on someone else's server. It's not always up to you then how that gets treated as part of a request or an audit. So, you know, this isn't saying, oh, my gosh, run terrified and put everything in your private cloud because you can have your own challenges with doing that.
10:13But you should be aware of even the policy implications of putting things in public cloud. Right, right. Well, it seems like it seems like everyone who uses the modern Internet could have used that like five years or so ago. I'll make sure there was some clarification. But, you know, that reminds me of one I didn't put in there. Did you all see that like Toys R Us is shutting down? That's kind of crazy, huh? Did both of you shop at Toys R Us a lot? Or I shouldn't say shop. You would want your parents to shop a lot more at Toys R Us when you were a kid? I will admit some of it. Abby? I, as a parent, I can say that I have never actually been in a Toys R Us as a parent. Well, I think that's the problem right there. Right. So I'm like, I was not surprised when they went under because I've actually, as a parent of a child, never walked in there. Yeah. Nice. I have been there as a parent. And while I haven't walked out with one of those giant or those mini BMWs that a kid sits in and goes one mile an hour, they do seem to have a lot of those there. Yeah. Yeah, I remember going there a lot as a kid. And, man, it was almost like Costco for a kid, the one I used to go to. It used to have like really high, maybe it's just because I was small so everything seemed big, but it had really high shelves that were just like packed with toys. You know, it was a whole row with like G.I. Joe toys on it, which, of course, that's what I like to play with. And I remember as an adult, I was disappointed that they went with that kind of like low shelf thing and then they had this clothed nonsense. It just seemed like they de-cost-coded it. But that probably has nothing to do with them going out of business. But I was in Paris for like a week, last week for work, you know, my glorious life. And I think I even saw a Toys R Us there somewhere. So, who knows? Yeah, I know they get lumped into. Toys R Us in Paris? Yeah, I know. I think it was. That's strikingly bizarre. Must be pronounced differently. Maybe I just was like I was getting over jet lag and I had some weird dreams that I confused with reality.
12:14I've seen them get lumped into the whole, hey, disruption blockbuster sort of camp. But it seems like, again, they had some of their own financial – it's not just a digital disruption story. It was also, I think, a public company that got kind of bought in to go private. So, I think it's a massive debt and they didn't figure out the online channel correctly. So, this isn't just a, hey, brick and mortar is always dead. So, probably that's an easy, lazy story to write. But it seems like there's more to it than that. Yeah, yeah. We'll have to check that out. Definitely seemed more complicated than that, Richard, in terms of – I hope so. Just a lot of the business side of what's been reported seemed a lot more complicated than just e-retail hits again. Right. I mean, it's just the cutthroat business of toys. It was really my takeaway. That's right. As illustrated – You thought cloud was bad. Yeah. Apparently, toys are really bad. Yeah. Do not get into sharp-edged plastics. That's all the toys. As well-documented in the – was this in the late 90s, the documentary, Toys? It is a crazy business. You got to – you remember – no one ever noticed my favorite line there. Was it LL Cool J who was in there, and he goes into the cafeteria, and he gets all upset that, as he says, his food is touching? It's like a military man needs a military meal. I think of that often because my dad was like that. He would have to have his salad in a whole separate bowl, or he would just get all out of joint that the food was touching. I'm going to say it, but that's a pretty deep pull. So, good pull from that movie. Yeah. Well done. Food's touching. Well, the last news item, it looks like there's more database support in Azure. What's going on over there? Yeah, I called that one out as well. It's Microsoft's general availability release of their Azure database service, not just for SQL Server, which they've had for years, but also for MySQL and Postgres. Again, I pointed that out as people look for sometimes non-proprietary options. There's some really cool cloud databases available both in Microsoft and Google and Amazon and others, but then you are saying, like, I'm just using that because I'm not going to put DynamoDB anywhere else for NoSQL or Cosmos DB. And so, these sort of relational database options that are just using kind of standard databases you could run on premises, but here's a hosted version, can be pretty compelling.
14:22So, if you're looking at the public cloud and trying to store some data in there, you don't have to go with a proprietary choice. I think that seems like a good deal for customers. So, I think we've got a coherent story around all the news items. One, so if you're selling toys, you can move online, and you're going to need some good security around it. And if you're international, like selling in Paris, you might need some controls over where the data is going back and forth. And, of course, you're going to have to integrate your stuff from on-premise, and then you're going to need a database in the cloud. So, that's just all, you know, it's all set up there for some toy company to take care of. And, you know, Jeffrey, hopefully, is in there. It's a Jeffrey startup, if someone needs to do, or transition. Jeffrey's unemployed, yeah. Oh, good old Jeffrey. Man, I used to go there all the time, a lot more than Blockbuster and Circuit City, but we'll see what happens with them. Well, so, Abby, how long have you been at the Cloud Foundry Foundation now? Is it like two or three years? I have no sense of time. You know, it's been, I think, a little over two years. But it does seem like a mix of decades and just yesterday. So, somewhere in between those two. That's right. Decades and just yesterday. Somewhere in between those two, the range. But it's been a couple of years, and it's been a thrilling couple of years with Cloud Foundry. Because, as you know, Cloud Foundry is getting quite a bit of momentum in the enterprise space. Yeah, yeah. How many members do you all have? Well, first of all, I mean, I don't know. People probably know. But give a brief overview of what the CFF, as we like to say. What do you all do? What do we do? We are the holding company of the Open Source Cloud Foundry. And what that really means is we are, one, responsible for the holding and maintaining of the IP and the trademark. So, we're constantly checking who's got it, making sure controls are in place, and also validating trademark and, you know, guaranteeing trademark controls with making sure that no one is using it improperly.
16:31We also are responsible for the community and the ecosystem around Cloud Foundry and continuing to foster that and make sure that it's sustainable. And then we're responsible for really the guiding central vision of Cloud Foundry with, you know, really one goal to make sure that Cloud Foundry continues to remain here and sustainable for the foreseeable future. How do you look at that, then, and say things are good or bad? Like, how do you measure health of something like that? Is it, you know, when you're looking at the landscape, are you looking at members, are you looking at committers? Like, how do you sit back at the beginning of the year or the end of the year and go, things are going well? Well, it's a mixture of all those things. There's general health data points, right? Membership is growing. We're up to 65 members. The ecosystem of capabilities around Cloud Foundry continue to grow because, as a platform, we need all of those things. We don't just need apps and users. We need apps, users, services, and a larger ecosystem around Cloud Foundry that makes sure that it continues to remain viable. And then velocity, looking at the contributions as well as the diversity of the committers and the contributors to make sure that we're continuing to bring a wide variety of people to contribute to the project. And making sure that that velocity continues to go to make sure it's a healthy project and a healthy tech. So I was looking this morning at the membership list, and by my completely unofficial count, because I didn't know there would be math, was, you know, maybe 70% or so of the members in CFF are consumers, not the creators of software, like not committers. Maybe it's even higher than that. So is that higher than other? I mean, when I looked at some of the other foundations, I couldn't tell if it was wildly different. Am I wrong? Is it mostly kind of consumers versus creators, kind of the customers, if you will? And what do you think of that? Like, is that something that you've actually tried to foster, which is more people who are kind of stakeholders in the software versus creators of the software?
18:37Well, actually, yeah, 40% of our membership are end users. And that is very unique in the open source projects. And what's so fascinating about what Cloud Foundry has been able to do is bring those, particularly enterprise end users, it's to the table and get them involved and get them excited about not just being part of an open source community, but contributing back. And that is absolutely something I'm trying to foster more so in 2018, is to really encourage more companies like Comcast and Home Depot and American Airlines, who are new to open source and are trying to figure out how to contribute back and be part of the community at large and be really active members in that. And that's been really exciting for me as an open source leader, but then also looking across at other open source projects and how we can really set the stage for, to show how other enterprises can continue to be involved in open source projects. And so what do you, what are some things you see those end users, end user members doing? Like what, what kind of, what kind of activity do they have and what do they contribute to? Or what do they do? What do they do? Well, it's early days yet. As you know, it's, it's a challenge for many of these companies that have never participated in open source to, to really finagle the process with legal and their general counsel, you know, their general counsel, as well as how do they contribute back. But a couple of them are starting to, to break through. But where they are able to participate right now is we have what's known is a user advisory council. That's just a collection of the end users of Cloud Foundry. And it gives them a chance to come together and share ideas and lessons learned. And that's been really exciting to see them participate in these events and sit down and share their lessons learned with other users.
20:42And I feel like that, if nothing else, does such a massive, a massive amount of good for other end users that are new to this, to figure out how they can, you know, where to get started or how to get over the hump that they're in, or what are other people experiencing along the digital transformation journey? Yeah, that is one of the more fascinating things in this Cloud Foundry community is you actually have very chatty non-vendors, end users. And it is somehow they've all gotten encouraged to, well, not all, an amount greater than, let's say, zero to five have been encouraged to talk a lot, which I think is a huge difference from, I don't know, the last 20 years of open source or something. The end users never really used to talk about anything. It was just vendors and the, you know, independent people who would discuss things. So that's exciting. But yeah, I imagine there's a lot of sorting out with lawyers what to do. Because I remember in the mid-2000s, that's what vendors would spend a lot of time with. And somehow it miraculously all worked out. Everyone was cool with it. But hopefully that'll happen in big organizations as well. So then another, I don't know, maybe over the past year or so, I don't know, as you say, if it was, what was it, yesterday or a decade? But, like, Kubernetes became a big deal in the Cloud Foundry world. And, like, what's your version of how that came about? Like, what's kind of the timeline of that and where we are nowadays? Well, it's a really long story. So the short version is, ta-da, it's here. No, Kubernetes has been around for a few years, originally incubated in Google and then donated to what became the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. And, you know, over the past, particularly over the past year and a half, we've really seen Kubernetes, which, for those of you that don't know what it is, it's a container orchestrator.
22:46And we've really seen that mature and grow and become a really amazing and mature technology. And so, you know, within the open source Cloud Foundry, we started looking at it about a year and a half ago to figure out, you know, kind of keeping an eye on it, watching it as it matured. And then it was really exciting to see Pivotal and Google a, what was it, like almost eight months, actually almost a year ago, I guess, at this point. That's right. Yeah. We worked together on Kubo, which was Kubernetes on Bosch. And then the end of last year, so in June of last year, Kubo was formally donated to the Cloud Foundry Foundation. And then in October of 2017, we rebranded it to be known as Container Runtime to really draw this distinction between what was formerly Elastic Runtime, which we rebranded to be Application Runtime. And then we have Container Runtime so that we can see how this all fits together in the Cloud Foundry ecosystem and how we can bridge both the containerized workload solutions with Container Runtime with the Application Runtime experience for those that are looking to run and deploy 12-factor apps. And so, really, how do we bridge those things together? And so, Kubernetes has been a really important part of that story. And I think we'll continue to see that story grow. One of our key guiding principles for 2018 is interoperability. And for us, that means building bridges to other technologies and other projects, like Kubernetes. But that also means projects like Open Container Initiative, where we pulled in Run-C, or the work around CNI, the container networking interface. And we're also working on projects like CSI, the container storage interface, and Istio, and Envoy, and Open Tracing, and many others, to look at these technologies as they mature and figure out how they fit in Cloud Foundry.
24:49So, I mean, that's a great summary. So, given kind of Cloud Foundry, I guess the umbrella is a little different than it was, let's say, two or three years ago. How do you, you know, what is your Cloud Foundry elevator story? Now, let's say this is the, like, I just want to understand it, right? To the uninitiated, now that this does more things and there's more projects involved. Like, what is your having a barbecue with your friends or riding an elevator? Like, how would you describe what Cloud Foundry is now? My narrative for this year is really Cloud Foundry is the tool that helps companies shape their future. Oftentimes, I refer to it simplistically as an operating system of the data center. But it's really what's helping companies, particularly companies that want to be software companies, help them shape the future of that company, help shape the future of their company, and do it so effectively. Allow them to really give their developers the freedom to create, but also giving them the opportunity to make those leaps in becoming a software company. It's significant gains. If you are, you know, becoming a software company, what does that mean? That means you're actually either hiring or elevating the role the developer plays in how your company does business. And so, we're seeing Cloud Foundry be an enablement for companies that are looking to develop and deploy applications into production faster. And so, you know, we've seen production, you know, we've seen gains from companies like Home Depot, for example, that were able to move from deploying code every six weeks or every six months to now they're doing it every day. Or companies like HSBC or not, no, HCSC, the healthcare company, that went from nine months for a mobile app to be deployed in production to now they're doing it in four weeks. And so, those type of gains, which we're seeing reinforced by our user survey, is significant.
26:49And if you're able to shave off that amount of time and that amount of effort to get applications out the door into production, the impact on your business is also significant. And it's fundamentally changing the way they think about their business and also how they shape what they're doing and how they're engaging with their customers. And then so, on a slightly different topic, but, you know, since you have, you know, I sit here in Pivotal, very myopic. I just pay attention to if I can wear shorts or not and then also, like, sort of, like, what Pivotal is up to. But, like, what are all the – I mean, maybe some of our listeners should not listen to this part. But what are, like, the other distros that are out there and people who embed Cloud Foundry in their system? Like, what's the – on the – whatever the opposite of end user is, like, on the vendor side, what are people up to there with Cloud Foundry? We have a lot of distributions. So, Pivotal Cloud Foundry is one. For the listeners that aren't familiar with the other distributions, we have SAP Cloud, SAP Cloud Platform. So, SAP Cloud runs on Cloud Foundry. You also have IBM's Bluemix, which runs on Cloud Foundry. There's also a distribution with Fujitsu, their K5, Huawei's Fusion Stage, Atos, Cloud Foundry. And then what we'll be announcing soon will be a certified distribution, but was announced last year. Asuse Cloud Foundry has also joined the mix. Oh, yeah. And so, we're seeing a lot of different distributions and different solutions that are built on top of Cloud Foundry that are going to market in very different ways. And I think that really, to me, highlights the power of Cloud Foundry. It is the underpinnings of this massive shift in enabling code application services to be run on a singular platform and scaled out and run at cloud scale.
29:00And I think that's really where we're going to see a lot more momentum in the future. And so, as we mentioned, the Cloud Foundry Summit's coming up, CF Summit. There's like two of these a year, right? A Europe one and a U.S. one? Yes, there's a North America and a Europe one every year. So, this one's coming up April 18th through 20th in Boston. Yeah. This will be our first one on the East Coast. It's always been in Santa Clara historically for North America. So, we're branching out to the East Coast. I'm really excited about that. And then, to your point, there's one in Europe, October 11th and 12th in Basel, Switzerland. Mm, Basel. Yeah, so you're not going to be in the San Jose Conference Center with the Hyatt attached to it? You're going to miss it. I know. It's been there forever. But I can't. No, actually, I'm not going to miss Santa Clara at all. I'm just not. Yeah. You know, it is a nice place. But if you've been there like 10 to 30 times in your career, you know, they had that sushi bar. I remember the last time I was there, they had like an interesting exhibition in the lobby about Alcatraz. And they had those. Remember in museums, they used to have these like all-white casts of like to scale humans that don't have faces on them? And they were kind of hanging out in there. It was an interesting and odd display. But I'll miss out on that. I'm sure you will. Well, that's so the complete shift in gears there. The theme you listed for CF Summit's running at scale, right? I'm just curious as to kind of how do you choose that? And why do you or how do you think that's reflected in the content for someone coming to attend? Like, why is that a theme that should get them excited? Well, we started brain survey themes. And the one in Boston is actually going to be a couple of days after the Boston Marathon. So, for those of you coming to Summit, come a couple of days early, you can participate in the Boston Marathon or at least watch it.
31:03So, we thought about the running. But then we really thought about what does 2018 represent in Cloud Foundry, particularly for our end users? And we're starting to see all of these end users that started on the platform, you know, a year ago or two years ago, really starting to grow their deployments. And so, we really thought running at scale. And that's what a lot of the conversations are going to represent in terms of content is how users are using Cloud Foundry. But more importantly, how are they using it to run their applications at scale? I think that is a powerful story for our users to tell. But I think it's also an important story to talk about when we talk about the maturity and the breadth and the growth of Cloud Foundry and how it's really been able to enable enterprises to move more and more workloads to the cloud. What do you hope someone walks away with? You know, on Friday night, because there's a Wednesday through Friday, right? I think Wednesday is some keynotes and then Thursday, Friday are the full days. Someone flies home on Friday night, what should they be chewing on in their mind as they're on the plane? Well, a couple of things. One is this is a great opportunity, you know, if I'm an end user, it's a good opportunity for me to learn from other end users what they've done, how they've made the transformation in their organizations, and how they've really adopted Cloud Foundry. Because, you know, I love Cloud Foundry and I think the technology is amazing, but I also realized that most of the work, most of that when we talk about this transformation work, is really more of a cultural and business change. And so, I'd love for end users to look at that and say, oh, I can do that. And, you know, I've learned from other users how they managed to cross that chasm and really make that change in their organizations. And then if you are part of our ecosystem, really get a good look at what enterprises are doing and what are the services and capabilities that we still need to add to our ecosystem. And how do we continue to expand that and grow that and make sure that it's continuing to involve and meet the needs of our end users?
33:11Yeah, I'll say I love time and time again this show and, of course, our own SpringOne platform and others as well. I love this focus on customer stories because sometimes tech for tech's sake is really exciting, but you almost leave a little empty because it still may feel just disconnected from reality. You're like, hey, I can't implement that. So, hearing how real people do stuff, I don't know, that always gets me pumped up at these shows, so I'm glad to see such a good schedule this year for that. I guess, speaking of the schedule, Mr. Coté, I was asking you for some of your top talks for this show. Since you'll be there trolling around, I will be as well. Do you want to list some of your top talks that you're interested in? And then Abby can't play favorites, so maybe she can call out some of the keynotes she's at least looking forward to. That's right. Just a good preview there. One has to like all of them. All of the children are great. Some of them just greater than others, maybe. Right. Well, to that end, right? I'm always attracted to the stories of people using things good and bad. Well, not good and bad. Good and bad lessons learned that people have had. And so the ones I was looking through, there's one that's on, I think it's from, is it, I forget which royal bank, but one of the banks. And it's called Transforming a Bank with Highly Opinionated Automated Release Pipelines. There's an A in there. I skipped an article. But I think that one will be interesting. Like, it looks like a lot more than how to configure your pipeline sort of thing. But as I was looking over it, I was thinking like, you know, it's almost sort of like everyone sort of takes for granted that you should have a build pipeline in place. And I never see people talking about it very much. Like, here's how you get a build pipeline set up. But it's sort of critical to have that. It's sort of like the first thing you need to have. And it's probably not like super easy to get upset at a large scale because I always imagine part of the problem would be, you know, you don't want to have everyone using their own build pipeline. And so it would be interesting to see what the story there is.
35:14Like, there's a good Gary Groover book with like an elephant on the cover that's dancing. And it's all about sort of like DevOps and transformation. But I think the main point of the book is like you better get a build pipeline in place or none of this is going to work. So it does seem like an underreported or talked about topic. Probably very underreported. I can't remember the last time I read about build pipelines from a tech journalist. I'm sure that really gets their hearts throbbing, right, about a build pipeline. So then there's another one that's basically – it looks like the main session from some U.S. military people or the DOD, as I like saying. And they're interesting because there's been a lot of stuff about how the Air Force and other people have been using Cloud Foundry. Which, you know, saying something like this always seems insulting. But I never would have thought the military would be like that quick to do things. And also, you know, because of the way they describe it, that usually it would take them like five years to get a release or software out. And instead they can do it in 120 days or so. And so I think on the – I think as you would say, I think this is how the modern economist intellectuals say. On the margin, it's always interesting to see what people are up to because the extreme cases are very instructive about things. And so there's the case that probably a lot of people are familiar with where there was – they, like, improved the way that they had air tankers refueling jets. And they used to use a whiteboard and have someone named a gonk and all this business. And then they wrote some software that let them do it in minutes instead of, I don't know, all day long to process it. So I think there's probably a lot of cases of literal digital transformation where they went from – they were in a very analog way of doing things and they transformed over to do it. And then also, like, I'm always interested in government stuff because one of the – as organizations scale their change, I think one of the things they often encounter is, like, budgeting and oversight and project planning,
37:18which are all, for better or worse, core competencies of big government projects. So there's probably a lot of interesting lessons learned that we could extract from there. So government work is always interesting. And then finally, just as I was sort of asking about, there's two sessions from an SAP person and another one from an IBM person. And I think the title of the first one sums it all up. Why do I need Kubernetes when I already have Cloud Foundry? And so I think that'll be interesting to see what the explanation is there. And then the other one is kind of in the same area, how you compare the two of them together. And so I think that's of interest to all sorts of people, how those two relate to each other and play around with each other or integrate, as I think the professionals would say. So those are, like, the – I guess those are four, if I remember how to count. And I think those ones will be interesting. Nice. Yeah, we had so many government talks. We actually added a government track this year. So this is the first summit we've had a government track at. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, so let's see. What did I list out? So there were five I listed because I do count, not just the four, but the bonus five. The first one I was looking at was operating PCF via concourse, kind of how do you sleep more, worry less. Scotiabank folks are doing some good stuff with concourse and running platforms. And, again, I just – I'm fascinated with this sort of platform as product, which is another one I listed that our folks in CSAA and Liberty Mutual, we're all going to have, I think, a conversation about, which is how do you run these platforms as products? Which I think a lot of people starts to feel like that's what DevOps really looks like at an enterprise. You don't just have ops people embedded in every team. Instead, you have teams that work down to the platform. And then the platform is run as a product by people with ops skills and people who will set up networking and storage and update OSs and things like that. So those two talks jumped out at me. Then there was a good one, deep dive into modernization patterns, which I thought looked pretty good given, you know, that's what a lot of people care about.
39:22That's not just greenfield development. So this was using some experience from, what, 45 modernization projects and pulling these patterns in so you could actually learn things about decomposition and the like. So I like those sort of things when it's based on real life. There was another one I liked that looked interesting, accelerating adoption at Ultimate Software. And I listed that because, Abby, correct me if I'm wrong, but a lot of the people we talk about using Cloud Foundry are often kind of enterprises who are trying to get good at software. So it's different when an actual software company who will sell products as a SaaS provider and the like, and Ultimate's a huge one, actually runs then their platform on Cloud Foundry. I thought that was interesting. I haven't heard a ton of their story, so I wanted to get into that a little more. Am I right, Abby, that a lot of the Cloud Foundry customers we talk about are the Home Depots, All States, Comcast? I mean, these great companies who are still now powered by software, but they don't, their core business isn't necessarily selling software. Well, according to our last user survey, which we're going to announce a lot of the data on stage at Keynote, at the Keynote at Boston, 74% are large enterprises now. So it's gone up a little bit since the last user survey, but yeah, so by and large, the core user of Cloud Foundry are large multinational enterprise organizations. So yeah, I do think that is a bit of a different story to talk about it from a software provider standpoint. Yeah, and potentially an interesting one, given sometimes software teams, and I've been part of those, sometimes these become just like, hey, let's use just whatever tech we can use open source and just run it. And that's awesome. And Cloud Foundry, obviously, open source as well. But sometimes you almost end up compiling your own poor man's paths. And in some cases, maybe this is a pattern moving forward for some of these shops who, why reinvent the wheel when you should be building actually your platform on a good platform? So I just want to hear more from what they're up to. And then the last one I listed was enabling .NET applications with performance monitoring and management with Cloud Foundry, mainly just because I admire Abby and team for having a .NET track at a Cloud Foundry summit that's been probably an unnatural thing as of a few years ago.
41:29But now this is a legitimate show with some really good case studies in that track from a lot of interesting customers and these sort of tech talks about how do I take in Java, .NET, Node.js, Ruby, Go, all these sort of Cloud Foundry languages. How are we actually optimizing those for one platform? I think this should be a really interesting look at that. I'm glad to see this being something that shows up at a Cloud Foundry show. Always a booster for the .NET. We're trying to bring more and more of those. Yes, I am. I love it. We've been trying to get more .NET talks in since last year. So I'm really excited to be able to offer quite a few talks, a track on it. We're going to have Microsoft on the main stage on Thursday. So that's going to be awesome to hear, not just talk about .NET, but Azure and the deep integration across all of that. Awesome. Good. So those are my five. Abby, were there things that you at least are looking forward to? Not saying those are your favorites. Well, to your point, they're all my favorites. My talk should be exceptional, so you are allowed to point that out. But other than that, are there other talks that you're taking? Well, clearly, any talk that Richard gives, we should all attend. Clearly. No, to me, summits at a very high level represent an amazing opportunity to see what people are actually doing with Cloud Foundry. And that's really something that's hard to grok when you're not at summit and you're not seeing the breadth of the conversations and hearing from users and providers and integrators the breadth of the work. Every summit, every summit, I always hear from a new user that I didn't know was a user. Usually, it's an open source user. It's like, hey, yeah, I've been using you for years. And I'm like, I had no idea. I always find one new one at every summit. And so, it's always an opportunity to hear from a new user what they're using, how they're using it, the work they're doing with it.
43:29In fact, this year on the keynote stage, we're going to have a couple of interesting talks about some of the other providers, but also some of the other users are doing that we haven't really talked to before. One of them is Zipcar. And I'm looking forward to hearing their talk on how they're using Cloud Foundry. But, you know, to your point about some of the other not typical users, it'll be great to hear from some of the providers and some of the other software service providers like Mindex and Dynatrace to hear how they're using Cloud Foundry and how they're working with their customers. Yeah, and I'm biased, Abby, but, you know, I think we have some press and analysts showing up at the event as well. Am I right? We have an amazing list of press and analysts coming to the event. Yeah, I mean, I guess, you know, you and I both talk, I think, to a fair number of analysts folks. And sometimes I suspect they try to box Cloud Foundry into just like, hey, here's some enabling tech and let's move on and categorize it with some sort of quadrant or wave or geometric shape. But there's a focus on outcomes, I think, comes out of this show that's different to some extent than others. Like, to your point, these stories are sometimes this is what this has directly enabled me to do, not seven layers of indirection. But because of this, my business has changed this way. I personally think these shows are beneficial to that set, who sometimes just drive by technology and they actually can sit in here. Yeah, this was more than just an orchestrator. This was more than just this. This is what actually helped me create this new user experience with my customer. And now I know them better. And that's changed our business. Like, those are good stories. I think they come out at places like Summit that you might not get just by following people like you and me on Twitter. Yeah, I mean, it's just, it's so phenomenal. In fact, I, I am, I'm obviously anyone I talk to, I tell come to Summit. And, but, you know, I think that's a true story, not just for end users of Cloud Foundry, which, you know, I highly encourage every single one of them. But hey, hey, if you're interested in digitally transforming your organization, you should go to Summit.
45:32If you are a startup that's targeting the enterprise infrastructure business, go to Summit. You can hear directly from enterprise end users what they actually care about and what they're doing. If you're an integrator or an SI, go to Summit and learn what people are doing and what they're struggling with. You know, it's, it's a huge opportunity to really be thoughtful to your point about business outcomes. What are, what are enterprise organizations using? Why are they using it? And what are they solving with that? And I think that gets lost oftentimes when we start talking about technology, just for technology's sake, when actually technology should solve an outcome. It should solve a problem. And here's the, you know, Summit really represents a great opportunity to hear what it solves and why that's important. So then you mentioned this briefly, but what's, I mean, y'all, y'all put out a lot of surveys. Like what's, what's the survey you'll, you'll be coming or you'll be publishing at Summit? We're going to have two. So we just closed the last user survey, which one we did before that, we closed in October. So it's been nearly six months since the last user survey. I'll be excited to present some data on that, which is really, really interesting to give you a little hint. And it's, it's exciting to see how Cloud Foundry continues to progress with the end users. And then we'll also be presenting our latest round of our global perception survey, which we work with a third party. And twice a year, we do qualitative and quantitative research across eight different countries to see technology trends, how different enterprises are using tech, the role it plays in their organization, their awareness of tech and their understanding. And so it's, it's a good barometer on how the technology is evolving, where organizations are in that journey. And, you know, where, where do we see trends going? And so all of that data will be producing white papers, but we'll also be presenting a lot of that at Summit.
47:33Yeah, that's great. Yeah, those surveys are always nice. I like, I like any, any survey, especially if, if it's, you know, available only for an email address. And, and then as always, you know, y'all, y'all can provide some more raw fodder for Lawrence over at the new stack. He's always coming up with some wacky charts. And I think, I think he pulls from you, you all a lot. Well, that's great. Well, is there anything else you want people to look forward to at CF Summit? How's the food going to be? I'm sure you played a very large role in selecting that, right? That comes up all the time. Well, I love food. You know that. And I like, I will show up at events where there's food. In fact, I'm always worried about where the next food is going to come from. As I think most of humanity is. But I feel like everyone looks at me, like me more than most, because I'm like, well, is food going to be there? If not, I can't come. I'm sorry. I don't. But we, there will be lots of snacks. There will, but we'll be in Boston and we will be downtown Boston. So there is a lot of great food that is around the conference center. So everyone can partake and enjoy in all of the amazing food that Boston has to offer as well, which I'm really excited about. That's true. Just like chowder during the breaks, like whatever sits there outside the booths and all that will be great. Now, I'll get all my New England friends, I guess I have at least one, all riled up. But Boston is where they've got the lobster rolls, right? Is that their big deal? Or am I confusing it with one of the other states up there? Yeah. Lobster, chowder to Richard's point. I think a lot of seafood, which I'm excited about all of that. But I don't know about the availability of barbecue, so you might have to bring your own. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Yeah. You know, we do have, I think, a $70 per diem here at Pivotal. And when you leave the Austin airport, you can get a whole brisket for, I think, $65.
49:35So I've always wondered if I should bring some brisket for friends and basically torment the whole plane with the smell of barbecue. Although they must seal it together. But I feel like if you bought a whole brisket for a flight that long, you should probably just open it on the plane and eat some of it. You should, totally. But I think you should get two, and you could put one in your bag for later and then one on the plane. Oh, that's a good idea. Eat the whole, that would be impressive. I would impress myself doing that. Yeah. Yeah, I remember the first time I was actually with this, I forget what she was doing at the time. I think she's at SAP now, like Maggie Fox. And we were in Boston at one of the, this is back when every conference ended in 2.0. So we were at the Enterprise 2.0 conference. And we were going to go get lobster rolls at some classic place. And so we get there, and it's, and it was totally fine. But it's actually a, what we, in my parts, we would call a submarine sandwich with lobster and cream sauce. And I had been thinking it would be sort of like, you know, dumplings, like rolls that you would get. So you've got to figure out your, your regional expectation. I guess they call that, you know, you've got your hoagies and your rolls and your submarine sandwiches. You've got your burritos, your mission burritos. Very complicated chart. So, you know, if anyone hasn't had a lobster roll, it's not going to be a roll. Just prepare yourself for that. But it is delicious. So that's, that's my food preparation mentality there. But anyhow, well, thanks for being on. This has been, you know, in addition to figuring out food. I think there was some other interesting stuff we talked about. So that's, that's, of course, nice. So if, if people wanted to see, see what you and the Cloud Foundry Foundation are up to, what would you point them to on the old internet? Well, Cloud Foundry.org, we overhauled the website last year and are constantly adding content and, and iterate on that. So if you're ever curious, Cloud Foundry.org, we have everything on how to get started, what we're doing, what we're up to, and, or you can go and check out user stories and the blog, where it's a ton of great content from across all of our distributions and all of our end users.
51:49And, and y'all, y'all, you record and put the videos up for these sessions, right? Not to discourage people from attending in person, but if you can't make it, you can catch up with it sometime later. Yes, we, we, we, we live stream the keynotes and we also record every session. And those will be, those are usually posted within seven days of the end of Summit. Oh, that's so quick. I'm used to having to wait for a long time, but seven days is amazing. That's fun. That is good. And then you can live tweet the keynotes, like you're saying, of course, look forward to that. Well, I, I fully expect both of you to live tweet everything. Now go use a story five. Is that still a thing? I just want to make sure I get the hashtag right. I know we all seem to use 16 different hashtags at the summit. So I'm going to get the right one this year. Well, I think we've gone back to CF, hashtag CF summit. We were, there was a lot of debate over what that looked like over the past few years. Yeah. But hashtag CF summit tends to be the, uh, the regular one. That's right. There we go. Yeah. There's some people in the DevOps days world and I always want to use like, uh, DD or something or DO, I don't know, DOD. That's what they want to use. But that, that just seems ridiculous. I don't like that very much. Just to be on the record there. Department of defense. Yeah. Something like that. Hashtag department of defense. You're going to confuse your, uh, your streams. You have like, you know, blameless postmortems and then like missile strikes. Mix those together. It'd be, be odd, odd streams of content to have in one. Anything can happen. That's right. CF summit. Well, as always, this has been Pivotal Conversations. If you want to get the most recent episodes or peruse our backlog of exciting episodes, uh, you can go to soundcloud.com slash Pivotal Conversations and, uh, you know, more or less every Thursday we post the full show notes and we'll put some links to those, um, uh, those sessions we're looking forward to and the news stories and things like that over there at pivotal.io slash podcast. And with that, we'll see everyone next time. Bye-bye.