Pivotal Cloud Foundry 2.2 and Potpourri, with Jared Ruckle

Episode 94 · 47:07 · SRT · archive.org · all Tanzu Talk

As I've been saying to people, telling people, I've been packing up to leave for Amsterdam. And I wanted to ask you two, Jared and Richard, do you have any tips to give me? I'm at less than two weeks before we've got to vacate our entire house, and then we're going to fly over there. But when it comes to packing up the house, give me at least one lesson learned as far as a good thing to do and one thing to avoid doing when it comes to packing up the house. How about you can go first guest, Jared? I think a good standard to have is, does a particular item bring you joy? And if it brings you joy, then bring that along with you. If it does not bring you joy, then give it to goodwill or give it away or get rid of it. So I think you need to have a pretty rigorous standard there for what you bring, especially for a big move overseas. Okay, this is good because I wasn't sure if I should take my children or not. So I think the answer, I've got that answer figured out now. And are you going to reveal what that answer is? Well, of course, I'll take them with me. I think I can check in free bags since I'm Executive Platinum so they can fit in. Yeah, I'm not sure what the tax rules like are in the Netherlands, so you may be putting some deductions at risk if you don't bring them. That's a good point. Now, how about something that you have learned to, like, you know, not do? What's something to avoid? Yeah, don't do it rushed. I think you need a whole lot of lead time. The last time we moved was under duress and it was not a happy moment. Okay, okay, that's good. That's good. How about yourself, Richard? What are some lessons learned from moving? Yeah, gosh, I moved up from L.A. to Seattle almost three years ago exactly. And there's still some boxes in the garage marked, like, important that I don't think I've opened in three years. So, probably, you know, taking that second pass and those maybe keepsakes, sure, but, you know, moving stuff from house to house.

If you have any boxes from your last house in your current house that you have not opened, it's probably time to say goodbye. That's good. I like that one. That's because I've been getting rid of some stuff like that. And I had, now maybe I'm going to regret this, decades in the future, but I had a box full of my old G.I. Joe figures and my old Star Wars figures. I spent a couple days thinking about them, and then I just closed up the box and took it to Goodwill, and I was done with it. And I don't know. I think one of the downsides of eBay is that things have very little, collectibles have very little value nowadays. So, I'm pretty sure I only lost maybe, like, $50 or something. Well, the other thing not to do, my parents just moved, and I went to help them. And we got in all these awkward conversations, like, I don't want this, but you should take it to remember me. Like, you're, like, 60. Like, you'll be fine. Like, why am I taking life keepsakes for you? What am I going to do with this weird, you know, vase? I don't need it. So, if you're moving, do not invite your children over and then hand them all your junk that you don't feel like throwing out. Oh, man, isn't that the truth? I have, you know, I have an even deeper problem like that, where my mother, who I don't think listens to this podcast, my mother has over the years saved a box for each year of my life. And at one point, at one point, I was given maybe the first eight boxes of those things. So, it's not only her keepsakes. It's her keepsakes of my keepsakes. And, yeah, I told her that she's going to be getting those boxes back. She's making work for you. Exactly. Well, that's good advice. Why don't you introduce yourself, returning guest? Hey, yeah, I'm Jared Ruckel. I work on the product team here for all things Pivotal Cloud Foundry. Well, we're going to have you on this week to talk in more detail about the most recent Pivotal Cloud Foundry release, 2.2. Richard and I talked about it last episode or some other episode, but we'll go over it closer.

But before that, as always, a little bit of relevant infrastructure software news for those who are craving it. Now, I think we joined the consortium of fixing GPL v2 stuff. Do you want to give us an overview of that, Richard? Yeah, I mean, everyone should have moved to the edge of their seat because this is about to get pretty exciting when we talk about open source licensing. So, there is the general public license GPL. A lot of software goes under, like Linux and others. Part of the challenge with v2 was that if you were noncompliant or somebody said you were misusing it, then you could immediately sue that person, bury them under stuff. It wasn't great. It was a little bit combative. And so, with v3, I believe there was this time of you had time to correct the license. And so, this consortium said, you know, we're also going to go ahead and apply this to v2, even though we don't have to, because it's the right thing to do. So, Pivotal join and Red Hat led this up and Intel and Google and Microsoft, Cisco, a bunch of companies, VMware as well, jumped in and said, let's do the right thing around open source licensing and GPL. So, Pivotal was part of that, and anything that we either distribute that has GPL licensing or any of our own software that does, we're going to make sure we play nice and live to our core values. Yeah, you know, I think over the years, I used to, you know, I think to use an old phrase that's appropriate, I think I've forgotten more about open source licensing than most people know about Mickey Mouse or something. But, man, that stuff is complicated. So, it is always nice, you know, just as a side note, to sort of have a clarification about what all these things are. And I have also noticed over the years, there's been a consolidation of licensing that's out there, which is great. So, then also, you know, I didn't think to cover this here in this podcast, but you put in a link to the news of Broadcom buying CA, formerly known as Computer Associates.

Now, I used to work at BMC Software. And, of course, when I was an analyst, I covered what I would call IT management. So, I don't know, sure, I know CA. I'm not so familiar with the chip companies like Broadcom, but it is a, I think the general reaction was summed up by a tweet quoted by Kent Beck that Stephen O'Grady did, which was, which was, wait, period, period, period, WT, question mark. And, you know, I think it is, there's been, there's been, I forget where, maybe, I think it was 451, like Nancy Goring and a couple of other people wrote this up, but they had a more, I'm trying not to say the word level-headed, but they had a more, let's do a deeper analysis of this that was pretty good. And I think, you know, for people who don't know, CA, I can only say Computer Associates, but CA was one of the, what used to be called the big four people in management, that being BMC, IBM Tivoli, CA, and, who's the fourth one? I'm always forgetting. Anyhow, someone else. And HP was in there as well, with their, not Opsware, what do they call it, Ops something. Can you tell I used to be an analyst who covered this stuff? Yeah, deep expertise. That's right. So they have, they have, they have, I think their revenue is maybe like 40, 60 between like mainframe and what mainframe people call distributed, or what the rest of us call computers. But they have a whole bunch of software that helps you do batch job management, monitoring, log management. And they also have like a late from DevOps tool chain, which are kind of interesting. They actually have some good white papery stuff if you're interested in that from a couple years ago. But yeah, it looks like Broadcom is looking to expand into the software world. You know, not that I might have firsthand experience with that kind of thing. But it is, it is, it'll be fun to see what they do. And as people often remind you in this kind of coverage, the real sort of insider popcorn eating events are to see if they purchase anything else or acquire, I should say.

And if you're really interested in more commentary, we talked about this last week on my other podcast, Software Defined Talk, you know, and there's some links to that Nancy Goring piece and, and other things as well. And I'll link to the register in our show notes. Right. So did you, did this get your, your, your blood going, Richard and Jared? Were you, did you spend three hours reading about this? I think I just did the, the Cocker Spaniel head tilt. Like that was about it. Like, that's kind of interesting. I mean, you know, it's funny when you have kind of unconventional purchases, when Amazon does buy Whole Foods, you have some of these other ones. You're like, oh, that's kind of wacky and cool. I can see some synergy there. But sometimes when the old guards get together, it's just like, well, you're just kind of beating together these two old companies with a stick and assuming they're going to merge together. Well, I don't know. Maybe there's a benefit of the doubt in there. There must be some good strategy to spend. What was it like 19 billion or something like that there? Yeah. I think, I mean, I, I, I still, I read this multiple times and I still don't believe it, but I think it's the largest software acquisition ever, uh, which, which, uh, which must be true because people keep saying that, uh, like all things people say over and over and over again. But yeah, that is, uh, that is large, you know, speaking of, uh, I got my $10 of, of Amazon money by shopping at Whole Foods yesterday and spending $10. So, uh, it's working. Things are looking up this week. Yeah. Yeah. Have y'all been in a Whole Foods recently? They are like, they are like prime tactic in there. They just like, this prime is everywhere and they wear prime t-shirts. It really is. Uh, they're sort of taking that over. Still the same good, uh, food and everything they have. But man, they're really going to town on that. Yeah. Which probably touches on that, uh, next item you had. We'll skip over the next, next one just for a moment. Cause that whole Walmart choosing Azure thing, I think is in reaction to your, uh, your priming of, of Whole Foods. No. Oh, of course it must be. That's, this is all very planned out as always. Of course. Sort of the segues. But yeah, I, uh, I just read this this morning that, uh, Walmart, uh, chose, chose, choose, uh, Microsoft Azure as their, uh, you know, I didn't read the wording closely, but as their cloud, public cloud partner.

And, uh, which, uh, I guess makes sense if there, if you accept the premise that there are three major public cloud, uh, vendors, at least for North American companies, if not, uh, you know, the list gets a little longer if you go global. I should say, uh, I, I don't want to speak on behalf of the Canadian, uh, but if you accept that, then basically if you're in retail, you have two choices between Microsoft and Google and, uh, they, they, they chose Azure. Now, what I thought was interesting, uh, about this, I mean, as something to notice is there was much emphasis placed on, um, servicing what I would almost call internal facing stuff. Right now it seemed to be in the service. And by, by that, I mean, um, consumer facing stuff would be like, if you go to walmart.com and all the stuff we as individuals would interact with to buy things, whereas internal things would be sort of like software that Walmart uses to run their own business. And, and so, uh, there was some commentary about being able to use Microsoft machine learning and analytics stuff to get a better sense of whatever running their business better. And, and no doubt also some other stuff like, you know, targeting and stuff like that, which, which I think is, uh, now that I'm saying it is notable, uh, it's a notable little thing in the sense that I think, I think there's sort of like anecdotal agreement that Google's analytics stuff is awesome. And so, uh, and so, uh, for some reason, not that it's not, not, uh, valid, but, uh, Walmart was impressed with the jurors stuff. So, uh, that's great. They'll be, they'll be doing more public cloud stuff. And I think, and then finally one more thing, like, um, it's really not that surprising too much anymore, but I think, I think maybe the next big round of, uh, tipping pointy kind of stuff around public cloud is, is exactly the sort of using it for your internal operation. Uh, and I think hearing more and more of those stories will be, uh, fun ongoing and educational about like the, uh, the blurring, if not sort of like melting of public versus private cloud usage.

Yeah. I mean, there's obviously some commentary that Walmart's been a pretty public open stack user. And does that mean that's waning? And I think as always, this reflects that, you know, beat the multi-cloud drum, I guess, but you know, you, you do make, it does make sense to use really innovative machine learning in the public cloud and maybe doing some, some data analytics there or edge processing or fun stuff like that. That does not negate what is probably a decade or two migration, even if you started today to stop using private infrastructure for a company of that size. So this feels more like a diversification story than some sort of migration story. I think it's just, they're being smart and they're also choosing a cloud provider that probably competes with them less often than the other ones will. Yeah, I guess, I guess that's another artfully planned segue. There's a, there's a piece over and built to adapt that, uh, that, that was just published today, uh, that, that I was, uh, mostly writing. And, uh, it's all about like selecting which type of cloud and, and, and as, as, as with, uh, the brevity given to it, it doesn't, uh, it sort of like leaves you slightly more confused than knowing exactly what to do. But it, uh, it, it, it goes, it goes over like my, my usual kind of survey of what analysts are saying and also, uh, what, what organizations out there are doing and how they're sorting through, uh, cloud choices. And I think, I think, uh, you know, tragically, I'm not sure that, uh, at least, at least this part of it is a pivotal, uh, customer, but, you know, I was linking to one of my favorite stories recently, how, uh, how Chick-fil-A is actually running like tiny, relatively tiny, tiny Kubernetes instances in store. To, uh, I don't know, make sure the waffle fries are cooked crispy, but it's interesting to think about all the different Chick-fil-A locations and how they have a, um, what would you call that? Like we used to call that a federated cloud. I don't know, but, but the, how they have sort of like this, this clustery kind of, um, it's, it's sort of like a private community cloud to be silly about it. Um, but yeah, it's, it's, I think it's a model for what you would expect to see in a lot of, uh, whether it's retail stores or organizations that have tons of physical locations where they want one, one sort of multi-cloud functional way of managing all of their IT, uh, in a fun way.

So I don't think that talk's been posted yet, but it'll be fun to go see that. And, you know, I went to a Chick-fil-A recently for the first time in a long time and, uh, my nephew works there. So I got the inside track on the whole soft situation. I don't know if y'all have been to a Chick-fil-A recently, but they have, they're crazy with sauces, lots of sauces. His recommendation was the, uh, the Szechuan one, which, uh, or whatever the version they have there, which was fun. Yeah, they're, uh, yeah, I've been to their headquarters a couple of times in their cafeterias, like you just walk in and grab Chick-fil-A sandwiches, which gosh, that would be dangerous. So it's, uh, it's awesome, but, but terrifying. But yeah, that's a, that's sort of distributed edge cloud, federated cloud, whatever you call it, assuming they're connected to each other and all that sort of thing. It's neat. And again, it's just these different paradigms. It's not replacing all the stuff you did before replaces some things, of course, but I don't know. I think these are cool diversification stories, not sort of, Hey, this thing just ate this other thing. And now everyone's doing the new thing. I don't think that's what the reality is. It's the, it's the classic thing you learn in, uh, or the reoccurring pattern that you learn in, uh, I don't know, computer coverage coverage is that like nothing necessarily dies. It just gets added to, which is like, uh, what, what, one of my favorite IBM sayings is you never get a new job. You just, you just add to your existing job, uh, which is very similar to how technology works there. So then also, uh, related to that there, I was, uh, I think I failed to mention this last time, but there's a new, uh, cloud foundry foundation survey out. And I'll put, we'll put a link in the show notes. Um, there's a good, um, uh, roundup, uh, of, uh, of not only what's in the TFF survey, but in a couple other ones that kind of, it's, you know, I always enjoy the, uh, synthesizing a bunch of different little things together. And, uh, it has a good, good overview of what's in the TFF, uh, survey and other ones. And, and I, and I think, uh, and I, I think we've definitely, uh, seen this evolving over recent, maybe the year or so is there's a lot more discussion about, uh, cost savings.

In addition to what would you call it revenue growth or, or, you know, the, the sort of like optimization that, uh, shift, shifting over to a PAZ and infrastructure platform stuff like this can be, but it's a good overview of what's in that survey. And maybe we'll come back to talking about it more when I've actually sat down and read it in detail and taken notes. Yeah, that was a good report. Kurt does, uh, Kurt does good work. So definitely worth a read. He didn't, of course, I think he puts a little, you know, Hey, be careful. These are vendor sponsored surveys. Who knows if it's going to give you always the clean take, but there's some trends. It's showing you some of those things. So definitely, definitely worth reading. And then, you know, as we kept talking about multi-cloud and these other things, it's been interesting to see Google add a new Los Angeles data center, even to the cost question. They added some pretty cool forecasting tooling so that when you do migrate your stuff, you can actually figure out what you're spending based on credits and consumption. And, and things like that. So Google cloud's doing some cool stuff next week is their big show. I'll be there. A bunch of pivots will be there. There should be some fun things going on. And, uh, because we love all the clouds, Microsoft just awarded us their consumption partner of the year again for the second straight time, meaning the sort of partner that drove the most consumption on Azure, which is pretty neat. So yeah, world's multi-cloud, multi-abstraction. It seems to either this is just confirmation bias or this stuff is real. It's not just showing up in our news feeds. Hmm. As we're fond of saying, this, this cloud thing might be a thing. It might be. Do you think we'll ever get to a point where we, uh, we stopped saying cloud or what are the opposite of cloud is? I mean, I feel like, I feel like cloud will be what we'll say instead of like servers or, or, or in just our data center. And then just, we kind of already do that already, I think. Yeah, no, I think you're right. I mean, we, we often say like run it on, I think I just saw some new stuff Jared was writing and it's still about, Hey, run this thing on any cloud. And by that we mean public or private infrastructure. It's just a cloud. And that seems like that'll be the way we refer to it.

Yeah. Which, which would be kind of funny for the, the etymology of the world word. Because if I remember originally, like if you go back and read, uh, you know, your networking books, uh, there's always, there's always this cloud in the diagrams, which is, which is to say, we're not going to talk about this part. And, and then, and then nowadays, if that's sort of like people's assets, they probably know exactly what's in their cloud. So it's a delightfully, a delightfully ironic description. Well, uh, and then finally, before we get to, uh, Oh, I forgot to put that in before we get to, uh, uh, talking about PCS 2.2. Uh, I think I, I just finished publishing, uh, three little excerpts from, uh, I don't know, this sounds pompous, but the third edition of my cloud native journey book. Um, and, uh, I, I had one on compliance that I was writing up and, uh, on what the, um, I don't know what the team formation looks like or product teams that, that work on the actual software. And then today, uh, Jared helped me out a little bit with this one. I posted one on, uh, metrics. Uh, and the third one, the third one, we'll see what happens because the thing is I, if, if you pay close attention to all of my little comments is, uh, the thing about metrics is you, if you ask people to tell you about metrics, metrics, they will refuse to answer you. But I think what happens is if that you actually say, here's what I think metrics are, then they tell you a whole bunch of stuff. It's one of those things where like, no one can really like tell you the content that you need until you take the position. And then it's sort of just like extracts out all of this knowledge they had in their head, like some sort of Athena metrics popping out of their head. So hopefully people can help me out with that section because it's the, uh, most mysterious, uh, so far, but I'll put links to those in there. Or if you just go to my like medium profile, that's where I posted them. So, uh, so on that note, I think, and, and the reason I asked Jared to help out with the metrics thing is because his, uh, his mega blog post of pivotal cloud foundry 2.2 begins with, uh, with metrics, which I think, I think, I think that's, that's a good starting point for us is like, what are, what are the, uh, you start off with something that's been banging around a little bit.

And you start off with the five S's model of, uh, of, of keeping track of, I guess, how you're, you're doing your digital transformation or improving your software or whatever. And, uh, Jared, what are these five S's? It's really about these business outcomes that we like to jabber on about, you know, at pivotal with our customers. Nobody gets up in the morning and says, wow, I wish I had me a container today, or I wish I had me a container orchestrator or VM or a cloud today. They've got some kind of business problem that, you know, needs to be solved and they usually want to rub some technology on it to, you know, improve the, the, the issues that they're having. And I think that this, this five S's is just a really snazzy conversational way to talk about these things that kind of take this idea of, of metrics and, you know, level them up to the executive, you know, boardroom kind of level away from kind of these feeds and speeds kind of numbers. And into this area of outcomes that, you know, can really make a difference for these companies that are trying to, you know, software better. So we talk about, you know, speed, you know, how quickly can you, you know, release things? Um, are you able to rev your software, you know, quickly to, to keep up with, you know, the ever changing demands of these, you know, finicky customers? Uh, also this, you know, this idea of stability, you've got to have your systems online and up and running. Um, and it's really important to have them up and running during these crazy busy business events that you have going on during the year. Whether it's, you know, Black Friday or Cyber Monday or the launch of a new product when your business systems are just getting taxed with all these new customers that are, you know, signing up for your services. That's when you need your IT and software to perform the most. And kind of the flip side of that would be scalability, being able to handle the Alaska workloads that, that come and go during, you know, busy times. And on nights and weekends, when things are at a lull, you want to try and be smart about your resources and your spending there.

And then, uh, security, you know, we know that executives will get hauled in front of Congress if their patching practices aren't up to, up to snuff. So security is a, a big thing. That's a, that's another S. And then probably the, the final of the five S's is, is this idea of savings where, you know, uh, CIOs are being asked to do, to do more and being asked to do more with less money. So are you able to, you know, right size your IT investments or are you able to retire those enterprise licensing products that, you know, don't quite fit the way that you're developing software these days and go to more of a utility consumption style, uh, way of, of, uh, consuming your IT, IT services. So those are those five S's and I think it really kind of cuts right through a lot of the, you know, murkiness when it comes to all these, you know, IT, IT products out there. When you hear that, that was a good summary, Jared. I mean, I know we've tried to move away from, I don't know, not, not even us, but not talking much as much about vanity metrics. And, and Coté, I guess you too, are there metrics that you hear that you might go, that's really cool. And then when you stop and think for a second, like, I don't know if that told me anything. And I know for me, I've started to get less impressed with even the sort of like how many deployments we do a month only because, I mean, what's a deployment? I could have, you know, changed the name of a variable or, you know, I could have made something smaller. I could have updated the database. So that number alone is interesting. Or even the Spring Boot downloads, we don't talk about as much now because that's cool. But what, is that showing usage? Is that showing momentum as much as how many projects created at start.spring.io? That seems like a legit number. I'm starting a new project. That's not just a download in a CI pipeline. So are there numbers, I guess, I'm flipping the interview around, I mean, Coté or Jared, that you've kind of gotten more lukewarm on over time that you feel like might just be a vanity metric? Well, I agree. I mean, the framing I would use is like, because I agree, I agree with what you're saying is I think, I don't know what the time period is. So I'm just going to throw something out. But I think there's a subset of metrics that are important for the first year, let's say, to sort of like track your improvement.

And like you're saying early on, like tracking the number of deploys you do during a period. I mean, I don't know. I always use a week as like the period of releasing. And I think it's important to like track, I guess you would have one release for a week, but tracking the rate or velocity, not to get all wrapped up in strong velocity terms. But tracking the velocity of your releases is important just to like see if you're improving, just like, you know, when I'm constantly trying to live longer by losing weight, I have to depress myself early in the morning each day. So it's important to track that metric. And I think it's good to him to that. And similarly, like download stuff would be for that. Like once you reach ubiquity, you only really want to monitor if it goes down, so to speak. That's a great point. I mean, I think there's probably different metrics in year one than years, you know, two through seven or something like that. Yeah. And I think, I mean, to answer your question slightly differently, I think one that like, that maybe is to use the Tyler Cohen way of thinking about it, or Cowan, like underrated is, is tracking stuff you've learned, which is really difficult to figure out. But the whole point, but the whole point, not the whole point, not the whole point, one of the main points of improving the way that you do your software is that you should experiment and try things out. And, and, and as, as, as, as people will say, fail a lot. And I think, I think realizing that with software, learning something, which is to say failing, and then eventually succeeding is incredibly valuable. Like, like, it would be helpful, I think, to start tracking, like, we finally got this right. And it took this amount of learning to figure it out. Because I think, in my experience, like, I don't think this is just IT organizations, but I think every single human endeavor, especially in business, like, is really bad at calibrating on how much effort goes into doing something, especially when it comes to how much learning is required. So, that would be a nice metric that I don't think people track very much to sort of get in people's space a lot more to kind of, like, what's the word, acculturate, or to get people used to this idea that, like, we're failing.

And just, I guess, one more thing, and then I'll stop talking. Apparently, I had a lot of coffee today. But I think you hear a lot about, like, in the DevOps, the SRE world, about, like, celebrating failure and having blameless postmortems and things like that. And I think what I'm suggesting is another version of this, like, it's not really like a blameless postmortem. It's sort of like a realistic, you know, how we failed the success sort of report that would be nice for people to select on. So, hopefully, I bought Jared enough time to think of an answer. For me, I think the context is what's really important. You know, as you said, Richard, the vanity metrics about number of deployments, you know, per day can be kind of misleading. What I think is really compelling is when organizations are really honest with themselves and take a look at their broader portfolio of applications. You know, these organizations are dealing with, you know, hundreds, thousands of applications. Have they done sort of the hard work to do an audit for what their most important, say, 30 or 50 applications are? And do they have this, you know, sort of 5S scoreboard for each of those 30 applications? It's one thing to have some kind of your billing service update or some kind of activation service update. That's all well and good, but how are you going about this, you know, massive modernization effort across all of your applications? To me, I think that that, you know, portfolio and this idea of taking these very powerful, but sometimes difficult to implement ideas and doing the hard work to bring those to more places is what's really impressive. So, I like that more holistic view rather than sort of the numbers that can be eye-popping, but you're not really quite sure what they mean. So, then getting back to the Pivotal Cloud Foundry 2.2 release, tell us, you know, tell us what I'm sure everyone is interested in. What are the PKS updates? What can people look forward to there? Yeah, I think with PKS, we've done a lot of talking to customers about all this Kubernetes business, and it turns out the killer feature, the thing that people really want, is that they want Kubernetes to work.

And it turns out that that's a lot more difficult than it sounds. So, you know, we've really put a focus on this, you know, operability of Kubernetes, and we have this distributed tool chain called Bosch that, you know, works really well. For, you know, distributed systems like Kubernetes, and so this is really, you know, taking the magic of Bosch and continuing to, you know, let Kubernetes, you know, kind of take advantage of these different capabilities. So, if you think back to these S's, you know, being able to have, you know, some multi-master kind of, you know, capabilities, some multi-AZ kind of deployments, you know, keeping your Kubernetes clusters online and available is really key. So, there's now a fourth layer of high availability that's in, you know, PKS, and that's something that users of our app platform have come to know and love over the last, you know, several years. So, I think that's probably the main thing. And then there's also the notion of, you know, keeping up with what the Kubernetes project is doing, and, you know, they release every quarter. And so, PKS 1.1, rather, includes Kubernetes 1.10, which is the latest, you know, stable version of that project that's running on the Google Kubernetes service, GKE. So, we want to give customers that vanilla Kubernetes experience using the latest stable version, and we want it to be up and running for customers. Those are probably the two big highlights I'd flog there. That makes sense. I like your take on the highest priority story for Kubernetes instances. That's good. Well, then another one, I mean, one of the primary S's, what are the highlights you would have about the security features that are in this release? Security, yeah. There's always a lot of stuff that we're doing with security. And what I've noticed is, as you kind of go through these releases, is that there's, you know, two really important security features that seem to take on more and more responsibilities in the platform over time.

And you all have talked about this idea of CredHub, this secure way to manage secrets in Cloud Foundry, how to, you know, manage them and keep them out of, you know, clear text and configuration files and manifest and so on. And so, you know, CredHub, you know, has started to do a whole lot in Cloud Foundry over the last year or so. And each successive release, it just takes on that much more credential management, your responsibilities. So there's more CredHub goodness in 2.2. There's even a CredHub service broker. So you can use CredHub with your so-called off-platform services. So if you want your ERP or some other system to work with your application platform, you can now have CredHub in the mix of how credentials are managed and all of that stuff. And then the other really important security feature that continues to be additive with each release is TLS. So being able to have, you know, data encrypted in transit between more and more components. And, you know, Cloud Foundry is a pretty complicated entity. And so there's, you know, dozens or hundreds of different communications pathways throughout all the different services that run inside the guts of the platform. And being able to have TLS on those routes is really important to give customers just that much more security that the client and server in each of those, you know, transactions is who they say they are. And that you're going to have a lot less risk of a breach or sort of a bad actor getting in between those pathways that can siphon off your data. So CredHub and TLS kind of continue to be really interesting themes that we roll out, you know, more and more of over time. You know, a couple other things that jumped out to me, Jared, were, you know, we just started talking the whole podcast about infrastructure and public cloud, private cloud. And I don't know, at some point, if you do automation right, the private, at least from the outside looking in, isn't dramatically different than the public. And there were at least three things that stood out to me. There was the multi-data center on vSphere and multi-site deployment.

There's the pivotal-ready architecture, kind of drop all this thing in there. And the Azure Stack support. Mind kind of digging into those three real quick and what you see the implications are? Yeah, I think with what you're seeing is that there's a lot of customers that are seeing the benefits of these, you know, five S's on top of an app platform. And so, when they have that success, they want to try and deploy this in more ways, in more places. And so, the vSphere thing is really a neat way to expand capacity when you've got, you know, maybe some data sovereignty requirements to try and contend with, where it's easier to, you know, make things work in more on-premises, you know, sites. So, you've got a single instance of the application platform running into vSphere locations. So, it's a nice, easy way to scale that out without adding operational complexity. And then, on the Azure Stack stuff, I think that opens up a whole new kind of series of use cases where, you know, Azure Stack, it looks just like public cloud, you know, Azure with a few configuration differences. So, now you can get, you know, Azure Stack, you know, on a cruise ship or a Chick-fil-A or any other kind of location that doesn't quite make sense for a whole enterprise data center or doesn't make sense for a public cloud. So, if you've got this nice, you know, tweener place, you can run your compute and run your applications. And then, I think the last one you mentioned is Pivot-Ready Architecture, which uses hyperconverged infrastructure from Dell. And so, if you really want to get PCF up and going, you know, quickly, you certainly can do that with vSphere and your private cloud. You've got to go through the usual infrastructure mechanics there to add capacity to your private cloud. But with PRA, you just drop in an appliance, you know, plug it in, and you're good to go. So, it's a really no-muss-no-fuss kind of way to get PCF up and going, you know, very quickly and have it be tested and validated by our friends at Dell EMC.

Yeah, that's cool. I know for a lot of people, if they want to play with some of these, Pivotal Web Services is a great place to try out, you know, the new auto-scaling stuff and some of those non-opsy features since you don't have access to an ops manager. But all the dev features are there, people should try out. I wanted to switch gears with you real quick. And, you know, one thing now that PKS is hitting this kind of regular rhythm and what you're doing with PAS, and I guess I wanted to peek behind the curtain just a little bit. And maybe you can quick explain, how in the world are you wrangling dozens of teams at this point to help message a release? You know, I think maybe for teams that are starting to grow or even within enterprise, this idea of actually having marketing and engineering, I don't know, actually like each other and work well together might be weird. You and I have some experience there. So what's kind of worked here for teams that are maybe thinking about how do you do more agile marketing on top of a very distributed set of engineering teams? That's an interesting question. And I think that there's really a lot that, you know, agile development and software has a lot to teach a number of different disciplines. I think I heard some folks on Twitter saying they wish they could use, you know, GitHub for their presentation, your source control. So all of these really useful development tools are having broad applicability in just how you manage information, how you manage your content. And so if you think about what makes for a high-velocity, you know, engineering or development team, those are things that also make for, you know, high-velocity, you know, content teams or high-velocity, you know, content marketing teams. And so I think that, you know, certainly the good tools is really important. So there's kind of the usual ways that you can, you know, collaborate with, you know, GitHub and things along those lines. What's also really important is giving people a frictionless way to see their content, you know, get out there into the wild. So making it as easy as possible for, you know, product owners, product managers to see the fruits of their labor. So for a lot of us on the product side, that means a lot of editorial work to spruce up the content and get it out there so that the product folks really see the impact that their content has.

That's probably one thing. And then you're getting out in front of each of the releases that you're doing. We do releases every quarter here. So being able to probably do a lot of the heavy lifting and do a lot of the work on the product side before you go to product owners is really important. So you're educating, you're involved with documentation, you're on the stand-ups, you have a really good sense of what's happening in the product so that when you go to product owners, there's a more, I guess, multiple piece of clay for them to work with, if you will, as far as the text and content that they have to work with. Yeah, I think I've noticed that a lot with what you've done. I mean, it's about showing up in a lot of cases, building some trust. You're not just airlifting the week before release when everyone's packed going, hey, what did you ship? And then, of course, the trust isn't there. So it seems like actually being there throughout all the time and the team knows to go to our team and talk to them. I don't know, I guess that's the piece of advice I would share from a lot of the stuff I watch you do is be in the conversations. And then it isn't this one massive lift at the end. It's really just kind of an incremental delivery. I don't know, maybe just like software. Yeah, I think that's really the thing. There's a repeatable cadence. And I think the first release I did was PCF 1.8. And that was a little rough. And it's gotten a little bit better with each successive time. And there's still lots more to do. But you learn a little bit more about each thing as it comes up. And you just refine and iterate and get better. You've got to think about the metrics that you want to have to try and manage that whole process so you can improve things over time. Well, speaking of generating lots of content and doing that, I always think of it as like internal journalism that you have to do. You have a beat of covering the release. So you have to just track it. And eventually, you'll publish something, do some reporting and analysis as a word. But, yeah, I mean, I think it's evident in the series of release note posts you've done and other people that they get longer in a good way.

So y'all are able to collect more details, right? Which is, as I think I was saying when we talked about this briefly last time, right? Like, that's what I want from release notes. I want to know, like, all the stuff. And then in a blog post of it, it's good to summarize the things that are important instead of just having, like, every single stuff that's changed, essentially. But in addition to that, like, you know, since you work on this stuff, are there any white papers we have out that you would highlight or point people towards? Yeah, I think there's one that's been pretty interesting to see the reception to. One of the big things that we've talked about is, you know, Cloud Foundry as the standard for your app platform. And Kubernetes is the standard for your, you know, how you want to run containers. And then there's a third standard that folks should really be taking a look at for how you attach backing services to Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes. And that's the Open Service Broker API. And it's gotten a little bit of, you know, attention on Twitter, you know, recently. But it's a really slick piece of tech that's been around for a few years. And as people are realizing that they're going to have an app platform, they're going to have containers, and there's going to be some serverless and function stuff in there. They want to figure out ways they can, you know, add services to all those different things, whether it's an API gateway or messaging queues or databases or data stores or what have you. And this Open Service Broker has been, you know, picked up by a lot of the communities out there. And it's been a really a godsend, I think, for a lot of, you know, developers and operators that they have one mechanism, one set of APIs to know about services. So if you want to attach anything to Cloud Foundry or Kubernetes, the Open Service Broker API is a great way to do that. So Matt McNinney, Pivotal Product Manager and co-chair of the Open Service Broker API project, and I sat down and cranked out a paper that goes through, I think, a lot of the anatomy of a service broker, what it is, how you should use it, best practices, use cases, and so on, and really explores, you know, why it's become this de facto pattern.

So as we take a look at this, you know, see if things that are happening in distributed systems, it's changing constantly, but Cloud Foundry, Kubernetes, and the Open Service Broker are three really bedrock abstractions that, you know, enterprises should, you know, spend some time getting to know to help them, you know, navigate this world of digital business. Well, before we wrap up, so first of all, thanks for being on to go over that with us. I'll put a link to the thrilling blog post that we've been talking about, and it's definitely worth a read. And also, you know, one other thing that I think is nice about it is it collects together, like, videos and other resources to dig further into it, which is good. But just as a little bit of follow-up, so last week, Richard, you were in town here in Austin, and I got to – I think I missed the first eight to ten minutes because apparently I have an always-late syndrome, so sorry about that. I'm sure there was a great introduction to yourself and other things, but I saw your – I don't know. It's basically like the .NET version of Josh Long's talk, where you're sort of like, here's how you can do .NET stuff and run it on Pivotal Cloud Foundry and get all the benefits that you would expect from a microservices framework. And it was a good talk. People seem to be paying attention, which is the criteria that I use often. And then also there were several questions afterwards, which was nice to see. But in case anyone's listening, you should definitely ask Richard to come tell you about doing modern .NET development in a cloud-native way. Because there's actually – I think maybe there was three demos, which is pretty impressive for a marketing guy. So good job on that. Yeah, so you've given me the nicest compliment you've ever given me, a backhanded compliment, which was also good. So thank you. I was touched that you showed up. That meant a lot to me. That's right. And you also recommended – hopefully this is not another inadvertent backhanded compliment.

I might have just only one – I think I only have one side to my hand, unfortunately. I was born with that defect. But also I think you've had one of the best little jokes possible that I've heard recently, which was there's a bunch of pickles out there, so maybe you can stuff those in your pockets and take them home. And I was actually kind of – I was missed because the catering had been from Schlottsky's, which is actually an Austin-based company that I think is owned by a private equity firm and combined with Cinnabon now, so it has more of a national presence. But their pickles are delicious. They're like those classic crispy dill pickles that are really hard to find. And I would have totally swiped a bowl of those pickles, but someone was faster than me. So next time, I'm going to be fast. Yeah, those pickles are my jam. They're good stuff. I was really hoping someone would take a thing of pickles while I was talking and just plow through like a plate of them. That would have really distracted me for two hours. That would have been good. Well, next time I'm at one of your talks, I know what I'm going to do. That'll be great. Lock it in. We'll just – we'll pass the pickles around like a reverse collection plate and people can punch through it. Well, as always, this has been Pivotal Conversations. Before – and then the other thing before we wrap up is to remind you that we have SpringOne Platform coming up soon. I'm going to be leaving for Amsterdam and then coming back to Maryland on September 24th to 27th. And it's going to be a great conference. There's lots of sort of summaries of last year, lots of great videos you can look at. But I'm sure there'll be lots of conversation about Pivotal Container Services, PKS, using Kubernetes in production, and then also using the Pivotal Application Service in production, and Spring Boot. So there might even be some .NET talks if we've done our job correctly. But also what I find interesting is there'll be lots of talks about how organizations are improving the way that they're doing software.

Lessons learned all the way from making build pipelines to setting up sort of management-level metrics and pair programming, testing, and everything in between. So you got your software, your tools, and your technologies, and your meatware, your sort of management and process methodology. So if you're really interested in that, which you should be, you can go to the show notes at pivotal.io slash podcast. And there's a little $200 off discount code that you can use that has my name in it. But you should definitely check that out. And as always, this has been Pivotal Conversation. If you want to get the back episode or this current one, you can go to soundcloud.com slash pivotalconversation. And more or less every Thursday, these show notes I keep mentioning, we post them at pivotal.io slash podcast. So you can click around at all the exciting news items that we mentioned and check out some other relevant things, including more information about SpringOne Platform and all that stuff. So we'll see everyone next time. Bye-bye.

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