Pivotal Podcasts

The Greenplum Command Center (GPCC) is getting a new look. The new version of GPCC, among other improvements, is getting a completely new user interface (UI) designed to make it easier than ever for administrators to visually understand current performance metrics and identify & diagnose trouble spots. In this episode of Pivotal Insights, I'm joined by Tim McCoy, Senior Director of Design at Pivotal leading the development of the new GPCC UI, to discuss the design philosophy behind the new GPCC, the driving reasons for overhauling the user interface and, most importantly, how the new and improved GPCC is going to make life easier for Greenplum administrators.

Microservices aim to bring an unprecedented amount of agility to complex, distributed systems: each service can update at will, always getting the latest innovations and functionality into production. That said, this amount of rapidly moving parts brings a whole new set of management and operations needs to the forefront, not to mention simple acts like looking up a service to use. In this episode, we talk about the history of how Netflix solved these problems with their Netflix OSS stack. Some time ago, Spring Cloud sprouted up around this stack, making it easier to manage and consume, and, of course, this means Pivotal Cloud Foundry comes with the resilient microservices framework out of the box. Richard and Coté discuss some of the more important components in Spring Cloud like Eureka, Hystrix, and Spinnaker. We also discuss recent news, like Rackspace going private and figuring out practical applications for AI. See https://blog.pivotal.io/pivotal-conversations/ for full show notes.

Continuing our Circle of Code agenda, we talk with Ronan Dunlop of Pivotal Tracker. Tracker was developed over ten years ago as the in-house project management software used by Pivotal Labs and has since then become a product in its own right used by many teams. We discuss what Tracker's history, what it does, and most importantly the philosophy behind tracker. We also discuss some recent news about the Gartner IaaS Magic Quadrant (see free reprint and Coté's highlights), SQL Server support in the Google Cloud, and the wrap of SpringOne Platform, including just released videos of many of the talks. See https://blog.pivotal.io/pivotal-conversations/ for full show notes.

In this episode of Pivotal Insights, I speak with Vinicius Carvalho, a platform architect at Pivotal, who is at the forefront of the data microservices movement. Vinicius and I talk about just what a data microservice is, what the benefits to building applications using data microservices, and provide some examples of the types of applications that data microservices enable.

While at SpringOne Platform 2016 I, Coté talks with Marcin about one of the projects he works on, Spring Sleuth. There's plenty of technical overviews of Sleuth out there, but I wanted to talk with Marcin about the "why" of Sleuth, how he came to use, and get a high-level overview of how it works. Sleuth, based on Zipkin, is a framework for distributed tracing which turns out to be handy for the types of architectures we see in cloud native applications, particularly microservices. Monitoring a single user interaction across a mutli-service, composed application has historically been difficult: you can lose track of what code and service is participating and doing what, ending up in a lot of log salad and correlation hacks after the fact to diagnose problems and monitor for overall performance. Check out Marcin's blog at http://toomuchcoding.com/ and find him in Twitter at @MGrzejszczak. More: Visit http://pivotal.io/podcasts for show notes and other episodes. Feedback: podcast@pivotal.io

While at SpringOne Platform I talked with John Feminella about his talk on platforms and contracts. He uses the legal metaphor of contracts to describe the beneficial trade-offs between things like 12 factor coding and continuous delivery. As the abstract for his talks puts it: Platforms like Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) can be viewed as contracts between applications and the people who build, operate, and deploy them. At the root of these contracts is a core premise: if your application checks off a few boxes, the platform can provide enormous amounts of power and enable capabilities that wouldn't otherwise be possible. Check back from the video recording of the talk and find John in Twitter at @jxxf. Visit http://pivotal.io/podcasts for show notes and other episodes. Feedback: podcast@pivotal.io

This week, while at SpringOne Platform, Richard and I talk with Josh McKenty, head of the partnering engineering team. With a general purpose application stack like Pivotal Cloud Foundry there's a lot of partner applications, services, and consulting that typically gets used beyond what Pivotal provides out of the box. Josh's team does the implementation with partners around these extensions and service integrator partnerships. We discuss how the program works, why it's needed, different modes of operating with partners (from agile to Gnatt-planned out waterfall style), why an ecosystem is needed, and how service integrators fit in. Since Josh has worked on OpenControl we slip in an overview and update of that compliance automation framework. Josh in Twitter: @jmckenty. Visit http://pivotal.io/podcasts for show notes and other episodes.

When you put all of the step needed to create good software up on the board, there's a lot of them. It's a lot more than just writing code, or even writing requirements and stories. Around Pivotal, we think of this full, end-to-end process as the circle of code: Ideas → prioritization / planning → coding → deployment → runtime → monitoring → feedback, and back again. Richard and Coté discuss these steps and how organizations are starting to appreciate "the big picture." They also cover some cloud native news: Amazon buying a browser-based IDE, Cloud9; Google expanding their cloud; and Verizon's purchase of Yahoo! News AWS buys Cloud9, makers of a cloud-based IDE. Also Codenvy and the related Eclipse project. Google add West Coast cloud spot. Yahoo! And Verizon love child. Coté's collection of coverage. Main Topic "Circle of Software," Onsi’s talk where he outlines this concept: Ideas → prioritization / planning → coding → deployment → runtime → monitoring → feedback, and back again What do Coté and Richard think of this model? Lots of individually popular tools at each stage of the circle … Prioritization: Jira, Pivotal Tracker, Trello, and more Coding → Java/Spring, Node, .NET, Ruby, and more. Plus countless IDEs from IntelliJ to Visual Studio Code to Spring Tool Suite. Not to mention web IDEs. Deployment → Jenkins, Concourse, GoCD, TravisCI, and more. Platform → Pivotal Cloud Foundry, cloud IaaS, containery stuff Monitoring → Datadog, New Relic, Dynatrace, and more. Log storage in Splunk and others. Feedback → Tools like UserVoice Where does friction arise in the handoffs between those stages? Damon Edwards value-stream talk from DevOpsDays Austin 2015. Is anyone currently trying to bridge the gaps? Between which stages? The marriage of tools and culture in making this work If you aren’t committed to continuously delivery and using feedback to fuel the next iteration, don’t waste your time setting up this machinery Also: SpringOne Platform! Aug 1st to 4th. Use the code pivotal-cote-300 for $300 off registration.

In this episode of Pivotal Insights, Pivotal’s Ivan Novick and Zachary Auerbach discuss the benefits of database portability as applied to data warehousing and its impact on developer productivity.

The biggest, best cloud native conference around is just around the corner, SpringOne Platform, this August 1st to 4th. This week we talk about the sessions we're looking forward to: Richard has his top five and Coté has a longer write-up. As both a technical and "meatware" conference, there's a whole lot to like, spanning the broad category of better ways of doing software. There are some great case study talks from the likes of Home Depot, ExpressScripts, Allstate, and Dish. In the technical buckey, there's all sorts of talks going over cloud native style development and several on handling data as well. Of course there's a lot on microservices! If you haven't registered yet, use the code pivotal-cote-300 to get $300!. In addition to talking about SpringOne Platform, we cover some recent cloud native news like the prediction that Azure will overtake AWS and, of course, Pokémon Go. Full show notes: http://pivotal.io/podcast Feeds, archives, etc: https://soundcloud.com/pivotalconversations

We've seen a goodly spate of news in the container space recently which we cover in the episode. In the second half, we talk with Kevin Hoffman about the .NET world, Steel Toe, and his book, Beyond the Twelve-Factor App. A recent survey from the Cloud Foundry Foundation is widening the framing around container management, adding in the use of Platform-as-a-Service into the usual container orchestration mix. The survey also shows some interesting results around adoption, e.g., managing containers in production ends up being more difficult than people predict during evaluations. Also since our last episode, DockerCon brought a bevy of announcements in the container ecosystem which we cover briefly. And highly relevant to our guest, Kevin Hoffman, .NET Core 1.0 was officially released, as open source. In the second half we talk about the recent history of .NET and how it's being used to create microservices. We also talk about the three extra "factors" Kevin's book adds to the 12 factor app and typical experiences when migrating to 12 factor apps. Full show notes: http://pivotal.io/podcast Feeds, archives, etc: https://soundcloud.com/pivotalconversations

You've heard of "analysts," those people who cover the technology world with all sorts of quadrants, waves, and forecasts about how much money is spent on different types of software. What industry analysts do is actually a long, interesting list depending on who you are, their customer: a buyer and user of IT, financial and investment banker types, or vendors. This week, after a small section of new left over from last week - are you keeping up here? - we interview Rita Manachi, head of analyst relations at Pivotal. We ask her to go over what analysts do and her tips on working with them. Full show notes: http://pivotal.io/podcast Feeds, archives, etc: https://soundcloud.com/pivotalconversations

After all these years, what does "PaaS" mean? Most of the vendors in this space fight tooth-and-nail to avoid the term. Coté and Richard discuss a brief history of PaaS, starting in the mid-2000's to now and then discuss why "PaaS" may not be the best term to use currently. Spoiler: it's overly anemic when it comes to all the stuff a full "cloud platform" does. Plus, it has a limited view and sentiment based on the "plug-in" origins of the term. The two also cover recent interesting tech news, including "synergy" theories on why Microsoft would buy LinkedIn and the growing market in cloud migration service integrators. With a new release of the Spring Framework, we also talk about the continuing rise of Spring Boot and what it's used for: sometimes, a "governance choke-point" is actually a very, very good idea.

This week, Richard and I talk about dealing with legacy systems. Of course, defining exactly what "legacy" means is part of the trick. We settle on a loose definition that I've been using: it's the software in production that you're sort of afraid to change. Why would you be afraid? Well, it usually starts with having poor test coverage: so you're not sure if changes will break the application. The criticality of the system adds to that fear: if you make a change, and it breaks, business will be lost. We discuss some basics of re-platforming legacy applications to Pivotal Cloud Foundry, but also how to avoid getting trapped by legacy in the future. In addition to that discussion we go over recent news in the cloud native world from security, to AWS outages and how to think about uptime in the public cloud, a round-up of studies that shows small teams are better than large teams, and some interesting anecdotes from the UK GDS.

Last week’s Cloud Foundry Summit was full of large organizations talking about revamping their IT strategy to be cloud native. We heard from the likes of Comcast, Allstate, Daimler, and ExpressScripts who each have been using Pivotal Cloud Foundry as the central enabler of their cloud strategies. These companies are modernizing how they create and deliver software, well on the journey to becoming software defined businesses. As Greg Otto from Comcast said, “We placed a bet on Cloud Foundry. We get features in days, not weeks, and scale takes minutes, not months.” In this new format for Pivotal Conversations, Richard Seroter and Coté talk about these stories and other happenings from the Cloud Foundry Summit. We also cover some recent news like the Serverless Summit and the the ruling in Google/Oracle case over APIs.