Hey there. This is another interview from Mark in our SpringOne Platform speaker series. It's a pretty good one. I hope you enjoy it. Why don't you check out the conference that this is pulled from, SpringOne Platform. It's over at springoneplatform.io. It's October 7th and 10th in my hometown of Austin, Texas. And if you want to get $200 off registration when you go to springoneplatform.io and register, use the code S1P200 underscore M Heckler. That's S1P200 underscore M H E C K L E R. You can also check the show notes at pivotal.io slash podcast to get that spelled out to you. So with that, enjoy the episode. We have Cora Iberkleid joining us. Cora, if you would introduce yourself to the folks and let's kick this off. Thanks so much for having me, Mark. It's a pleasure to be here. I am a platform architect at Pivotal. I've been working there for about five years. And so as a platform architect, my job is to help customers understand how our technologies can help them streamline their processes, whether it's on the development side or on the operational side, and then really be there as a partner and a guide as they use Cloud Foundry throughout their journey to make sure that they're successful and that they accomplish all the goals that the technology can help an enterprise accomplish. I've been doing that for about five years and I'm really, I'm really, I feel really privileged because Pivotal is a place with a very positive and kind spirit. And I feel like I have the privilege of working with people who are incredibly intelligent and enthusiastic and inspiring. And so I feel really lucky to be here and get to work with all of the wonderful customers that we get to work with. Yes, likewise, actually. And I was just thinking as you were saying that, that I think you might have been one of the first people I met when I came on at Pivotal almost four years ago now. And same thing, I've always really respected your breadth and depth of knowledge as well as your kindness too. So yeah,
2:01which is why I wanted to chat with you today. If you don't mind taking us back maybe a little bit further before Pivotal, maybe before a lot before Pivotal, or maybe not so much before Pivotal, but how did you get into tech? What drew you into this crazy, wonderful field that we're in? It's a great question. It's interesting because I actually, I grew up in a family where my dad is a mathematician. My mom, although she didn't work with it, she'd studied biology and plant pathology. So I always grew up with this idea of sciences and my dad worked in tech. He did have a job that focused on tech for a long time. So I kind of always was raised to follow this path of science, but not necessarily tech, even though my dad worked in tech for some time. So I went to college and I actually ended up studying chemistry because I didn't really think about it too much. It just took a class and I liked it. And as it went on, I found that I didn't really identify with the people that were studying chemistry. And so I just decided sort of randomly in my third year of college to take CS 101. And I immediately loved it. It was this, you know, instant gratification. It's this very logical way of thinking there's this, it's a, it's a job where you're very much in your head. Whereas in chemistry, like it's a combination of in your head, but then like all this lab work and just this challenge of organizing your thoughts in a very logical way. And this satisfaction from trying to organize them in the most elegant, streamlined, efficient way, and having this immediate gratification where you hit run and it works in front of you or it doesn't. And if it doesn't work, you know that there's a solution that you can get to. All of that was so fun, really, and appealing. And the, when I started to learn more about the different, I guess, just different algorithms and constructs and the way that you've been organizing, like I had, I had a really good time with it in college. And then through that, I ended up, even
4:01though, again, I graduated not with a degree in computer science, I ended up applying to all of the same jobs that by then all the engineers that I had met were applying to. And I landed, I could have actually probably ended up in some consulting company, but I just had a good fortune. I landed in a business intelligence company. And at the time, I think, because I, I am the kind of person who feels like they need to master things before they go out in the world and show, you know, some people feel more comfortable just sort of presenting things with, as they're learning. And I guess there's some other people and I, I've definitely, I've improved in this sense, but I definitely started off as a person who wanted to master it on my own before I went out in the world. So I ended up getting hired by a company that enabled you to choose the job that you wanted to do after the initial training. And so I chose technical support because I thought that'll give me a chance to really get good at this. And then I can go out in the world and do consulting or something like that. And evidently that is what ended up happening. I spent several years doing customer support, which is a wonderful job. It makes, it made me extremely resourceful and made me understand how software is built in the way that you need to troubleshoot it and how to collect all the data that you need in order to realize where a problem is and try to minimize the problem to its essence. I think that's what really, I think tech support really helps me develop some really great skills. And then I was able to take that and at a certain point say, okay, I would like to go to consulting. And through that process, I worked for different companies and each one has been very supportive in either allowing me to change locations or change roles. But I ended up spending a few years doing consulting, which gave me the opportunity then to travel to different customers and see how different customers were doing things. And, you know, even just learn basic things like things that I had learned in one context to understand that they actually applied, they were industry concepts. They weren't necessarily particular to the companies that I'd worked for before. And that just gives you this broad perspective of things that are common
6:05across all these enterprises. And from that, I was lucky enough to land in this role at Pivotal, which initially was more of a pre-sales role because I wouldn't have naturally navigated towards anything related to sales. So I feel really lucky that I got here because this is probably the most collaborative type of work that I've ever done. But yeah, it was sort of serendipitous. And I think it was influenced by the fact that at the time that I graduated, there were a lot of jobs in technology. And so a little bit is sort of kind of circumstance and some luck. But I think everything in life is like that, right? Like you think sometimes you make very deliberate choices and sometimes life chooses a path for you. And the fact that you stay means that it was right for you. And I think that's kind of how it happened to me. Like tech sort of came into my life somehow based on opportunity and circumstance. And I've stayed because I've enjoyed it so much. Yeah, that's a really great way of looking at things. I always think of it as when you're making the decisions and it's something may seem so random and it doesn't feel like it's very well planned in many cases and really wasn't necessarily planned. But when you look back, you can see this kind of natural progression. It's easier to look back at the story from the end of the book, I guess, than from the beginning of the book when you don't know how it's all going to come together. But yet somehow it always does. I mean, you've kind of covered so many things that you do enjoy about the field in general and about your position. But is there anything in particular that you kind of look at and just say, wow, this is, I'm living my best life? Well, I think one of the things that has, yeah, I guess I can mention two things. One is that in the most, in more recent years, I've become closer to what it really means to be working with open source technologies and what it means to be working with people who are really involved with open source technologies. And that's something that I think is in huge part, thanks to the fact that the Spring Team is part of Pivotal. I mean, you know, Pivotal, like all of our technologies are open
8:09sourced. But in the sense of something that really came originally from open source and functions in a broader way, the access that I've had, the insight that I've gained, and I think it's led to this culture and technology where everybody is building on everybody else's knowledge. So this happens both in my work with Spring Technologies and also Cloud Foundry and just really anything that I'm presenting to any client because of the work that other peers of mine, other platform architects or other people at Pivotal have done before me. But anything that I do, leverage is so much of what other people have done before me. And it's just this feeling of, you can feel a lot of pride and you can feel a lot of satisfaction and fulfillment from feeling that, knowing that you have contributed to a set of knowledge in a way that other people can take advantage of. It's the same way you use someone else's knowledge. You are giving something new for other people to build on. And even if you're only adding like a little slice on top of it, there's so much, by virtue of that, you have so much respect and appreciation for all of the people whose shoulders you stand on. And the beauty of it is that all of them have done the same with, you know, with others before them. And they are all so supportive of, I found, everyone has been so supportive of helping me add that little bit that I can. And so validating that it is appreciated and that it is meaningful. Even if I don't initially realize that it, that it is meaningful, I feel like I'm just, you know, trying to catch up with other people. But at the end of the day, even in that effort of catching up, when you absorb that information and can repeat it back and, and with your own perspective, you really are giving back to the community in a, in a way that, that people appreciate. And that, I think that aspect of, of it in this latest iteration of my life in the last, I think it's become more evident for me or in the last maybe
10:10three or four years. I think it ties into like how I even got to be a speaker at SpringOne. I've received so much help and support to get here. But I think that's been one of the things that I really love. It's funny you mentioned the contributions because don't you find that it's hard for us as individuals to gauge, to measure our contributions and how meaningful they might turn out to be for others? Because it seems like so many times we work on something that we consider a masterwork. This is a huge contribution and it's going to be so useful to so many people. And it just doesn't seem to catch much wind. And then some other time you, you make some almost throwaway contribution, something that you look at and you think, oh, well, you know, that might be useful for one or two people. Eh, you know, maybe not, but I'll, I'll throw it in there. And then all of a sudden you, you hear consistently how much that's helped someone or how that helped them break through, or that was a requirement they'd had sitting on the back burner for so long. And they were so glad that you did that. I mean, don't you see that happening more often than, than not? I feel like it's very, it's hard to predict sometimes where and how your contributions will be meaningful. And I do find that sometimes I do something and I, I don't even share it that widely, but somehow people find it, you know, because things are stored in such public places. Like you could put something on GitHub or you could put something on a, on a Google drive, right. And you don't even know how useful it is being to people. And then suddenly somebody will repeat back to you or you'll, you'll see something that you did pop up somewhere else. I do think it's very hard to predict. And then there are things that are, that catch more fire because they're simpler for someone to absorb. And then there's things that by their nature rely on so many other pieces being put together that they're hard for somebody else to replicate. But then I think in those cases, what I found, and this is true, for example, for, for things that I've done related to CICD in particular,
12:10because it's a combination of so many pieces, it's harder for people to take what you've done and replicate it. But then I feel like the ideas that you distill from it and the, and the recommendations, those things do tend to have more of a, an impact and they spread more easily. Does that make sense? Yeah, it makes perfect sense. Wait, you've actually kind of led very naturally slash accidentally into my next couple of questions that I wanted to ask about what you had presented in the past and where you're kind of headed like this year at SpringOne and maybe future. But last year you had presented about spring cloud gateway and the open service broker API, which, you know, you're talking about openness and open source and how the community builds and how, you know, we work with community to kind of deliver something that the community finds super useful. Your talk last year about the gateway and about the open service broker API, has your thinking evolved or changed on that any at all over the last year? Or are you still kind of in the same place? Well, I think in particular, I wouldn't say it's my thinking as much as the fact that in the context of gateway and spring cloud gateway, the spring cloud gateway team and primarily Spencer Gibb have come out with an iteration of spring cloud gateway that implements our socket. And so from my perspective, I think that what I'm, and so this coming year, I'm going to co-present with Spencer and hopefully do something interesting with a spring cloud gateway to show people. But I think it's the, the ramifications and the implications that our socket has not only for gateway, but in general are to me, they're, they're just phenomenal. I mean, I can't remember the last time that I, that every time that somebody
14:13points out what it means to the industry or to different aspects of how we do technology, what our socket can do, that I've had so many, oh, wow moments, so many moments of awe. So I think it's really exciting to see where all of this goes and like how quickly and how broadly companies can take advantage of this technology. So in the context of gateway, I think what's changed for me is this eyeopening sort of learning into what's coming and how to take advantage of that, all the ramifications. We all have our pet peeves, right? But personally, I always find the term game changer to be a little grading because I think it's used in so many contexts where it just has no business being used. But our socket really is one of those, dare I say it, pivotal technologies. But it certainly is a game changer because it does allow you to do so much more. And it's kind of interesting because with it being incorporated into gateway, I had an earlier conversation with someone about this very topic because Netflix has done amazing things for this industry in terms of what it's the capabilities it's exposed and shared in terms of open source. And of course, Spring Cloud, Netflix has done a lot of cool things. A lot of organizations have built their entire microservices based architectures around a lot of those components. But there were certainly things that Netflix obviously due to their their own self-interest, right? I mean, they have to meet their requirements. They kind of took some things in a direction, either they de-supported and moved on, they took them in a different direction. And they didn't always, you know, for obvious reasons, they didn't always support everyone's particular use case, use cases that were very critical to them that may not have been at all critical to Netflix. So gateway kind of came into being in many ways because of the lack of satisfying some of those specific use cases by Zool. And the same thing with ribbon and things like that and other
16:17comparable evolving components within the Spring Cloud portfolio. But gateway obviously does some things that Zool was never designed or may never be designed to handle. And our socket, of course, support in gateway, I think is huge. So I love that you're, you're talking about the reactive architectures with our socket and Spring Cloud gateway as well, because I think that does open up so many possibilities. So it's cool that you're bringing that out. Your other talk actually excites me as well, but for different reasons, the square pegs, square holes, CICD. Because CICD is something that it's very easy to talk about all of these concepts and how much leverage they will give you and your organization in terms of delivering more capabilities, better capabilities faster. But without a pipeline, that becomes pretty tough to do, right? It is very tough. And I think the beautiful thing about all of these technologies that are maturing and, you know, again, in the last sort of five years, right, with Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes, is that when the more complicated CICD pipelines are the ones that have to deal with lower level infrastructure. But now that we have these platforms that make everything easier, they make things easier for developers, they make things easier for operators. So by, by virtue of that, they're also making things easier for the pipelining layer of the stack. And so the pipelining layer can now become much more powerful as well. So one of the latest tools, for example, is Spinnaker. And to do a blue-green deployment, you know, six or seven years ago was hard to impossible. To do it with a technology like Cloud Foundry or Kubernetes is easier. And because of that, now you introduce Spinnaker into the stack. And as you're designing your CICD pipeline, you just choose, you know, red-black from a dropdown list. And then it's just a question of making sure that as you consider CICD more broadly, that your developers are being responsible enough so that when their applications are deployed in this blue-green fashion, they can guarantee their success. As things become simpler, the possibilities of what
18:23you can accomplish become bigger. And it's easier to accomplish better things. So it's pretty exciting there as well. Yeah, it really is. That kind of force multiplier, sometimes you hear that term thrown about. And I think that's a huge part of it, right? You can have all the right components, but if you don't have a way to effectively put them into that pipeline and feed them through those pipelines, nothing happens, right? So SpringOne Platform. This is our favorite time of the year or one of our favorite times of the year, right? And we're coming up on SpringOne Platform in Austin, Texas. So if I could ask, what's your favorite thing about SpringOne Platform? If you had to choose just one or maybe just a couple, what are you looking forward to the most? I think I really love the energy of it. I love the way that it sets the tone for all of the technologies that are presented, all of the people who are there. But when you come in and hear the keynotes and hear what the leadership, what the visionaries are thinking and where we're going, I think it helps you put a perspective on things and get really excited about the future and help put things together in a way that is more meaningful. You know, and then you can go off and meet all these great people and learn about specific technologies. But I love the way that it puts everything into context. It makes you feel like you're a part of something and you know where it's going and you can get excited about the vision. It really does. So I mean, I know there are a lot of people who kind of make SpringOne Platform their must-go-to event every year, which is wonderful. I mean, we have an amazing community that's well known and well loved. But what about for the person who's kind of on the fence? Maybe they're new to the whole environment. Maybe they're new to SpringOne Platform or they're just looking for maybe the compelling reason other than barbecue. Obviously, if you're into barbecue, that probably is enough. But
20:24if you're not, what would you say to someone who's kind of considering coming to SpringOne Platform but maybe still on the fence? I think that the opportunity to feel part of a community and to meet other like-minded folks who are doing similar things to what you might be doing or thinking of doing and who can show you other possibilities, applications, and other things that are going on around. I think that's very impactful because it's different to sit, you know, on your own or maybe with your team and try to figure things out just by reading online. I think that the opportunity to interact with people who are doing what you are is extremely powerful and sometimes you don't even foresee like where it'll take you. So I think that's probably one of the primary reasons. You just pack so much into a few days and you come out inspired and, you know, you're positioned to know that things exist and to learn things faster, I think, from then on. And some of the folks that you interact with are, you know, like the Spring Team, right? People who are the source, of what you're using and to the chance to meet them and ask them questions directly. I think that's also very special. Yeah. And you didn't really even mention one of my favorite reasons that I think people should come to SpringOne Platform, which is they will get the opportunity to meet, to chat with, to exchange information and pick the brain of Cora Iberclide. So I mean, seriously. I will be there. That is a great, great opportunity to come in and meet people who are influencing the direction of stuff that we use, rely on, and are excited about its evolution every day. So I think that this is a great opportunity. I know it's a great opportunity for folks to come and meet you and to chat with you and come to your sessions. Obviously, that makes sense.
22:26But also to catch up with you afterward and chat and just exchange horror stories or information or questions and answers and just to kind of get to know you. But in the interim, while they're out getting their tickets, while they're out booking their flights and what have you, how would they be able to get in touch with you? How would they be able to keep up with what's going on in your development cycle, so to speak, and to reach out, get in contact with you and meet up with you at SpringOne? Well, yeah, thanks for that. And I would love to hear from everyone who is at SpringOne. If I had time, I would love to talk to everyone. But yeah, in the interim, I am on Twitter and generally at C Iberclide is a handle I use for almost all social media. So if you are ever looking for me, try C Iberclide and you will probably find me. All right. Twitter is one good way. Absolutely. And I know that because I follow you on Twitter. So if you aren't following Cora, if you're listening to this and you aren't following Cora, you should be. So with that, I guess I will let you get back to your day and really appreciate your time, Cora. This was a great opportunity. Any opportunity I get to chat with you, like I said, I always love to do that because again, you're one of the sharpest, kindest people I've ever met. And this is just a great opportunity to pick your brain yet again. So with that, thanks for your time and see you at SpringOne. Thank you, Mark. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much. Well, I hope you enjoyed that interview. I sure did. Hey, and as a bonus for listening this far, if you want to register for SpringOne Platform, the wonderful conference we have coming up October 7th to 10th in my hometown, Austin, Texas, when you go to springoneplatform.io to register, you can use the code S1P200 underscore M Heckler. That's M-H-E-C-K-L-E-R. That's Mark's last name. You can find the discount code if you go to pivotal.io slash podcast as well, and that'll get you $200 off the registration fee, price, winning admission, however you want to think about it.
24:30Well, we've got several of these coming out. So if you enjoyed this one, you should check out the other ones. And otherwise, tune into the regular Pivotal Conversations each week or so, and we'll see you next time. Bye-bye.