1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:03,620 Hi there, listeners. Thanks for tuning in to another episode of Pivotal Conversations. 2 00:00:04,100 --> 00:00:09,340 This week, we talked to John Ravenscraft and Nick Kuhn, cloud engineers at Kroger, 3 00:00:09,840 --> 00:00:15,200 and hearing just what their key takeaways are from the CF summit that happened in Philadelphia 4 00:00:15,200 --> 00:00:20,240 a couple weeks ago. Now, you're going to hear a dizzying array of technologies and projects and 5 00:00:20,240 --> 00:00:25,920 efforts that are all underneath the Cloud Foundry umbrella. And so it may seem a bit 6 00:00:25,920 --> 00:00:29,980 overwhelming at points where we don't get to dive into each one of these in great detail. 7 00:00:30,340 --> 00:00:34,660 But that's sort of the nature of Cloud Foundry. We also had to redact a portion of the recording 8 00:00:34,660 --> 00:00:40,260 because some of the insights that John and Nick found from the event involved another user. And 9 00:00:40,260 --> 00:00:45,280 so we didn't want to share out their story without their permission. These are some of the things that 10 00:00:45,280 --> 00:00:50,380 are great findings at events like CF summit or SpringOne platform, where the hallway track 11 00:00:50,380 --> 00:00:53,400 is certainly a source of valuable information. 12 00:00:55,920 --> 00:01:06,020 All right, we're here at Cloud Foundry Summit 2019 in Philadelphia, and I've got with me John 13 00:01:06,020 --> 00:01:15,040 Ravenscraft and Nick Kuhn from Kroger. So what are some of your key takeaways and learnings from the 14 00:01:15,040 --> 00:01:15,700 summit this year? 15 00:01:17,080 --> 00:01:25,320 Hi, I'm Nick. So this is part of the biggest takeaway, I think, is kind of the ongoing kind of merger of 16 00:01:25,320 --> 00:01:31,240 Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry. And that's kind of, I think we're starting to see a trend where Kubernetes isn't 17 00:01:31,240 --> 00:01:39,360 so hyped as much, and it's kind of becoming mainstream, and lots of good progress with Project 18 00:01:39,360 --> 00:01:47,500 Irene. And, you know, just, everyone's kind of moving on with our lives, and we can continue to do what we do 19 00:01:47,500 --> 00:01:57,280 without constantly focusing on that. Some great stuff I saw around the ISM project, where we're 20 00:01:57,280 --> 00:02:02,880 brokering runtimes between Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes at the same time across multiple clouds. So that was a 21 00:02:02,880 --> 00:02:11,120 pretty good session I saw today, which I think could be very useful in the future. And then also good, 22 00:02:11,120 --> 00:02:19,260 another great session on K-Native this morning with the two Bryans, Brian McLean and I think Brian... 23 00:02:19,260 --> 00:02:19,560 Friedman. 24 00:02:19,620 --> 00:02:26,640 Friedman, yeah. And a funny story that Brian McLean's cousin works with us pretty closely at Kroger on the 25 00:02:26,640 --> 00:02:33,520 digital team. So some small world type connections there. But yeah, I think that's kind of the big 26 00:02:33,520 --> 00:02:40,200 takeaway is there's another session I didn't get to make it to, but the cube your enthusiasm or kind of 27 00:02:40,200 --> 00:02:46,740 what you're doing. Yeah. Good title there. Yeah. Paul Sersowski, he's a punny guy. Yeah. So you can 28 00:02:46,740 --> 00:02:51,620 always look forward to the replays. Yeah. I always respect those. Yeah. Yeah. So how about you, John? 29 00:02:51,620 --> 00:02:57,440 Yeah. I think one of the most exciting things that I saw out of this conference was the forward 30 00:02:57,440 --> 00:03:03,280 progress on the Cloud Native Build Packs. And I think the ability to help our developing team 31 00:03:03,280 --> 00:03:09,280 adopt a pattern that's more friendly than, like, managing and curating your own Docker image libraries 32 00:03:09,280 --> 00:03:14,420 is an awesome step. And it brings a lot of that build pack goodness that comes from Cloud Foundry 33 00:03:14,420 --> 00:03:18,520 that may not have been fully adopted in the past to a much more accessible layer. And it also 34 00:03:18,520 --> 00:03:24,360 encourages and creates that environment, even on your local workstation, before you deploy 35 00:03:24,360 --> 00:03:29,180 it to whatever cloud provider you're going to. And that's really exciting from my perspective. 36 00:03:29,820 --> 00:03:34,660 And then they called out the ISM and also like the multiple, multiple foundation management 37 00:03:34,660 --> 00:03:41,100 through apps manager is a really big deal for us. And also the replication of, especially 38 00:03:41,100 --> 00:03:43,900 like the MySQL services across foundations is a big deal. 39 00:03:44,700 --> 00:03:51,240 Yeah. And I think too, as we continue to talk to some of our peers, we're continuing to see 40 00:03:51,240 --> 00:03:57,620 record growth and we see other companies similar size also see growth and we're kind of sharing the 41 00:03:57,620 --> 00:04:02,560 same pains and being able to talk to them and be like, hey, you know, did you run into this or 42 00:04:02,560 --> 00:04:07,640 that type of thing? Like, oh yeah, I saw that. And similar experience that we could share. 43 00:04:08,380 --> 00:04:14,540 Yeah. I mean, you know, one of the nice things I think about this conference and the way it's 44 00:04:14,540 --> 00:04:19,620 evolved is there's a lot of end users talking and a lot of them are running at pretty significant 45 00:04:19,620 --> 00:04:27,680 scale. Others are sort of more starting out. So, you know, they're, they're operating kind of 46 00:04:27,680 --> 00:04:33,280 Cloud Foundry and Anger and kind of, you know, they're dealing with it in the real world where 47 00:04:33,280 --> 00:04:40,600 there's compliance and security and, you know, a bunch of layers that a tech startup maybe doesn't 48 00:04:40,600 --> 00:04:46,080 have to deal with. So, you know, them adopting a technology doesn't necessarily provide insight 49 00:04:46,080 --> 00:04:50,900 into how to navigate those things. Which kind of brings me to a kind of a question on like the 50 00:04:50,900 --> 00:04:56,940 process side. There's a lot of interesting kind of learnings about how folks have, you know, 51 00:04:57,240 --> 00:05:01,660 adapted the way that they're working. Anything that kind of jumped out at you from some of the 52 00:05:01,660 --> 00:05:03,580 different end users that were speaking? 53 00:05:05,040 --> 00:05:12,040 I think, I find it funny because we all kind of saw a lot of similarities of how kind of 54 00:05:12,040 --> 00:05:16,420 it evolved there where, you know, you kind of start out with a few foundations and then 55 00:05:16,420 --> 00:05:22,580 maybe kind of get overcrowded and you start kind of chunking that up and how you segment 56 00:05:22,580 --> 00:05:29,800 workload and kind of achieve like PCI or HIPAA type compliance. I think we all kind of went 57 00:05:29,800 --> 00:05:34,760 down similar paths. And then, too, you get to talk to some of the other customers like, 58 00:05:34,960 --> 00:05:39,300 you know, we're all kind of struggling with the same problems and figuring it out. I think 59 00:05:39,300 --> 00:05:44,920 there's been a lot of good work in automation to help kind of make the process go faster and 60 00:05:44,920 --> 00:05:52,180 like reduce toil on everyone. And we definitely seen that in, you know, upgrades as well. You know, 61 00:05:52,180 --> 00:06:14,720 at least once a month where, you know, repaving the world and doing that before, you know, without Bosch or Cloud Foundry was just not even, you know, tangible or feasible. So I think just the improving the process with technology and making it the least path of resistance to, you know, do the right things is a good example. 62 00:06:14,720 --> 00:06:43,720 From like a community and experiential perspective, too. The idea that you can make the right thing and the safe thing, the best and easy thing is an awesome improvement from a process perspective. Because when you're giving people that springboard into a production environment, that's stable and it's secure and it's relatively self-healing. And it provides all those tools to just dynamically provision, scale up, down, whatever you need during your high demand usage or low demand usage. 63 00:06:43,720 --> 00:07:00,720 That, that empowerment for users is just fantastic. What are you, you know, what can you share about what that's done with inside Kroger in terms of that type of empowerment and the velocity that you're seeing? 64 00:07:02,720 --> 00:07:26,980 Yeah. So I mean, I think from our growth perspective, we're probably like close to five years in this journey now. Um, four or five, my son's four and a half. So yeah, that's close enough. Um, and you know, we, we kind of started off, you know, small and then we, you know, we moved, uh, like the first real application was our store locator app. 65 00:07:26,980 --> 00:07:40,580 It's like where you go to like find a Kroger store or a Ralph's or our different banners and that worked well. And then I was like, okay, we kind of, we kind of like kind of jumped through all the security, security hurdles to get that done. 66 00:07:40,580 --> 00:07:54,300 Like we've built a framework of, you know, getting all the, you know, all the teams lined up to, to make that happen. And as soon as that kind of, we kind of like opened for business, it was just, you know, slow, but steady uptick. 67 00:07:54,300 --> 00:08:18,900 And then you kind of get the hockey stick approach, but I think we're more just in like, uh, we're still in, you know, rocket ship mode where the line just keeps going up and up and up and, uh, which is a great problem to have, but you know, that brings new challenges of, all right, well, maybe we need to kind of swing this, this, this group to their own set of foundations because, you know, they're getting pretty big and, you know, we've got to kind of start chunking up things a little bit more that we just never problems. 68 00:08:18,900 --> 00:08:24,360 So we never envisioned we'd have, you know, four or five years ago, but great problems to have. 69 00:08:24,920 --> 00:08:35,200 Well, to circle back to some of the things that, that jumped out at you, for example, like, um, you know, the K native, uh, so that's interesting to you. 70 00:08:35,500 --> 00:08:37,840 Can you tell me a little bit about why? 71 00:08:38,400 --> 00:08:48,760 Well, I think, um, in the demo today, uh, it was like a basic go app or, or some app and, you know, there's all this boilerplate code and then, but, 72 00:08:48,900 --> 00:09:11,520 really there's just your individual business logic was just one line and, you know, they were able to reduce that down to, all right, just point to this, you know, you know, project riff where, you know, you kind of pass it some variables, but then you just point it at your one line of business logic and it runs the same, same function as the, you know, an app that was previously like a dozen lines of code. 73 00:09:11,760 --> 00:09:25,840 So I think that concept of like reducing that, you know, code that's just the same over and over again and just, just going, you know, like I need, I just really just need to run this one line or this two lines to like a function or an event. 74 00:09:26,560 --> 00:09:29,080 That's, I think that's really going to be huge. 75 00:09:29,500 --> 00:09:48,960 I think today, even we have a, a lot of customers kind of do that today with, with like full, full-blown applications in Cloud Foundry and just being able to say, Hey, like you don't need to, you know, if you're just running kind of more like a function type service, you can, you know, chunk these apps down into, you know, just functions that spin up when they need to, it's been down and we can save a lot of resources that way as well. 76 00:09:48,960 --> 00:09:55,540 And that's especially more important as you go to like a per clock tick consumption model from the cloud providers, like every penny counts. 77 00:09:57,000 --> 00:09:57,140 Yeah. 78 00:09:58,320 --> 00:10:07,180 And then, you know, let's see the, the MySQL replication, for example, what, you know, what was interesting about that? 79 00:10:07,480 --> 00:10:17,040 So as a, as a company, we made some very strategic and kind of limiting decisions when we first implemented Cloud Foundry in our environment. 80 00:10:17,260 --> 00:10:24,360 And one of those things was for highly available services to be truly highly available, that means you have the scale past a single foundation. 81 00:10:24,860 --> 00:10:45,360 So all the data tiles that are currently available up to basically very recently did not have like a cross foundation approach where I can have the same apps bound to the same kind of services or a service that's in lockstep with a different foundation in a safe way that when we did like platform upgrades during the middle of the business day, we would not impact customers or lose data or have a managed window. 82 00:10:45,600 --> 00:11:03,160 So when you have a business model like ours, where your customers don't want to engage in any day, any time of day or night, and we want to give them the opportunity to do whatever they need, whenever they need it, and however method they want to do it in, all those things don't lead to like business windows of like patching cycles. 83 00:11:03,300 --> 00:11:10,280 So if you, if you can't tolerate it in place, upgrade and rolling update and paid and everything else, that just became very painful. 84 00:11:11,000 --> 00:11:18,740 So we see like that door opening to now or like a MySQL tile installation that can provide MySQL servers from our customer perspective. 85 00:11:18,980 --> 00:11:30,160 It takes that out of the hands of our data services team from having to manage and operate and just acquire resources to do it when we already have the platform infrastructure to run it on. 86 00:11:30,700 --> 00:11:32,580 So it's, it opens a lot of doors of opportunity there. 87 00:11:32,920 --> 00:11:39,360 Yeah, I mean, and that sort of speaks to kind of the, the approach that you're taking with your internal customers, right? 88 00:11:39,420 --> 00:11:46,100 Your developers who like, you know, thinking about their experience and just how to continue to make their experience that much better. 89 00:11:46,460 --> 00:11:54,620 Yeah, the growth, the growth we've seen just from like the PAS layer has been literally like they called it the hockey stick, that exponential growth. 90 00:11:56,280 --> 00:12:01,600 Again, as soon as you make the right thing, the easy thing, like people love it and it just like takes off like a rocket ship. 91 00:12:02,540 --> 00:12:03,700 We expect the same sort of thing. 92 00:12:03,700 --> 00:12:13,740 And we've already had conversations around, you know, caching and other data, data layer services that aren't readily consumable at the same scale that the pivotal applications are. 93 00:12:13,920 --> 00:12:18,580 And being able to mirror those two together and just, it's going to be a real good launchpad for us going forward. 94 00:12:19,200 --> 00:12:25,480 Yeah, I think, I think, and then take that in combination with the work that's being done with the ISM project. 95 00:12:25,580 --> 00:12:25,700 Yeah. 96 00:12:25,700 --> 00:12:35,260 We can really kind of, kind of complete the circle, so to speak, on most of our services that aren't on the platform now. 97 00:12:37,480 --> 00:12:46,660 And really help deliver value on the, kind of, where there's a lot of pain today right now with some of the other more traditional assets. 98 00:12:46,980 --> 00:12:47,860 Toil, I don't know. 99 00:12:47,880 --> 00:12:48,380 Yeah, toil. 100 00:12:49,080 --> 00:12:49,380 Yeah. 101 00:12:49,540 --> 00:12:50,140 Pain, toil. 102 00:12:50,640 --> 00:12:52,120 I always got to work down that toil. 103 00:12:52,320 --> 00:12:52,480 Yeah. 104 00:12:54,640 --> 00:12:55,080 Okay. 105 00:12:55,960 --> 00:13:02,520 So, what's on the short list when, you know, you're going to go home today or tomorrow? 106 00:13:03,800 --> 00:13:07,320 You know, what's, what's going to be different about next week? 107 00:13:09,220 --> 00:13:11,260 I kind of referred to the build pack thing earlier. 108 00:13:11,520 --> 00:13:19,960 I'm going to, like, go back and get the pack alpha code downloaded right away and start getting that exposed in our developer community. 109 00:13:19,960 --> 00:13:22,420 Because, like I said, that's going to be a significant change. 110 00:13:23,200 --> 00:13:31,160 And one of the things I love about our relationship with Pivotal and this whole ecosystem here, the Summit, is the ability to provide feedback that actually makes a difference. 111 00:13:31,360 --> 00:13:34,460 And it improves lives not only for us as customers, but other customers as well. 112 00:13:34,580 --> 00:13:43,360 Because Nick put it out before, regardless of your, your vertical business, at scale, almost everybody sees the same kind of problems, the same kind of challenges. 113 00:13:43,360 --> 00:13:49,600 So, when we can unify that voice and identify the things that we do share as priorities, it helps make the whole community better. 114 00:13:50,320 --> 00:13:51,880 So, I'm excited about that, especially. 115 00:13:53,080 --> 00:14:03,180 I think, too, digging more into PKS and K-native or PFS will probably be very interesting in the short term. 116 00:14:04,480 --> 00:14:11,000 It's just being able to expose some of these new features will be, could be huge. 117 00:14:11,440 --> 00:14:16,060 So, and then also, right now, I'm, like, I'm currently deploying PCF on Azure. 118 00:14:16,320 --> 00:14:19,360 So, I want to finish that up, but I hope I'll have that done by tomorrow. 119 00:14:19,580 --> 00:14:21,600 So, yeah. 120 00:14:22,340 --> 00:14:22,760 All right. 121 00:14:22,780 --> 00:14:26,960 Well, it sounds like you've got an action-packed week ahead. 122 00:14:27,980 --> 00:14:30,400 Any kind of final thoughts, parting thoughts? 123 00:14:30,820 --> 00:14:33,280 Was it the Redding Market in Philly? 124 00:14:33,720 --> 00:14:34,200 Oh, yeah. 125 00:14:34,300 --> 00:14:34,740 Amazing. 126 00:14:34,860 --> 00:14:36,580 It's a national treasure. 127 00:14:36,700 --> 00:14:37,000 Yes. 128 00:14:37,200 --> 00:14:37,400 Yeah. 129 00:14:38,680 --> 00:14:48,680 If you're ever in Philly, you need to check it out, because that's, you go in there, and it's just full of delicious shops of awesome food, and it's kind of mind-blowing. 130 00:14:48,780 --> 00:14:49,360 It's a gem. 131 00:14:49,560 --> 00:14:49,800 Yes. 132 00:14:49,800 --> 00:14:50,040 Yeah. 133 00:14:50,680 --> 00:14:58,440 So, I mean, and it's, you know, for folks in our audience who weren't at the conference, the conference center is right across the street from it. 134 00:14:58,660 --> 00:15:03,280 So, lots of folks have been kind of sneaking over there for, you know, especially those donuts. 135 00:15:03,760 --> 00:15:04,040 Yes. 136 00:15:05,180 --> 00:15:05,620 Beware. 137 00:15:05,940 --> 00:15:06,220 Yeah. 138 00:15:06,220 --> 00:15:06,800 Too many donuts. 139 00:15:07,240 --> 00:15:07,460 Yeah. 140 00:15:07,780 --> 00:15:19,280 It's, you know, I could see, you know, if you were working downtown, like, you could have a different lunch every day for, you know, many, many weeks before you got bored of that place. 141 00:15:19,540 --> 00:15:19,860 Definitely. 142 00:15:20,720 --> 00:15:29,960 So, well, thank you so much for joining the Pivotal Conversations podcast, and have a great time with the rest of the conference and beyond. 143 00:15:30,400 --> 00:15:30,700 Thank you. 144 00:15:30,740 --> 00:15:31,320 Thanks for having us. 145 00:15:31,460 --> 00:15:31,760 Thank you.