Pivotal Insights

Turns out, Cloud Foundry isn't just for net-new applications. More and more enterprises are replatforming and modernizing existing, mission critical applications, according to Shaun Anderson, an Advisory Solutions Architect at Pivotal. They're doing so to take advantage of the flexibility Cloud Foundry gives them to quickly develop and release new features in order to reduce time to market. In this episode of Pivotal Insights, Shaun chats with Jeff and Dormain about his experience leading Pivotal's application modernization practice, shares advice on how enterprises can choose which applications are the best candidates for modernization, and discusses the human element in application modernization. There will also be some arts & crafts. Don't forget the popsicle sticks and yarn.

There's no shortage of options for developers to choose from when it comes to databases. Redis, the open source in-memory database, is an increasingly popular choice, particularly in cloud-native environments. In this episode of Pivotal Insights, Redis Labs' Cihan Biyikoglu joins Jeff and Dormain to talk about how Redis supports DevOps environments, why the database's flexible data structure is a major draw for developers, and how the Redis Lab "wolf pack" helps bring Redis to the enterprise.

MySQL is the most popular open source database ... by a mile. Several miles, actually. And no platform is complete if it doesn't offer developers easy access to MySQL instances to support their applications and microservices. In this episode of Pivotal Insights, Pivotal's Greg Chase and Morgan Fine join Jeff and Dormain to talk about why MySQL is so popular with developers, detail the latest on-demand version of MySQL for Pivotal Cloud Foundry, and how MySQL supports Agile methodology and DevOps environments. The four also debate the which is the better open source mascot: the whale or the dolphin. You'll have to listen to find out the answer.

The data warehouse market has undergone significant turmoil over the last several years. Large incumbent vendors selling expensive appliances are struggling to maintain market share as new approaches emerge. In this episode of Pivotal Insights, Cesar Rojas and Roman Shaposhnik join Jeff to talk about the emergence of the Logical Data Warehouse, it's implications for data engineers and how enterprises can take steps now to implement a truly Best of Fit approach to analytics and data science.

Cloud Foundry Foundation Executive Director Abby Kearns joins Jeff and Dormain on this episode of Pivotal Insights to provide a sneak peak of the upcoming Cloud Foundry Summit, taking place June 13-15, 2017 in Santa Clara, Calif. Abby also talks about the new Cloud Foundry Certified Developer program and the foundation's efforts to promote diversity in tech.

Obviously, you want to prevent hackers from infiltrating your corporate network in the first place. But the reality is some hackers are going to find a way in no matter how good your perimeter defenses. That means you'll need to catch hackers already inside your network before they access sensitive data and make their escape. In this episode of Pivotal Insights, Pivotal Data Scientist Scott Hajek and his colleague Bob Glithero, Director of Marketing for Data Science and Analytics at Pivotal, explain how lateral movement detection can help identify malicious network behavior before hackers make off with the corporate crown jewels.

Through events like Red Nose Day, the U.K.-based charitable organization Comic Relief has raised over a billion pounds since its founding in 1988. But a lot has changed since then, including the technology backbone supporting Comic Relief's donations platform. In this episode of Pivotal Insights, Jeff and Dormain chat with Zenon Hannick, the organization's CTO, about Comic Relief's recent migration to Pivotal Cloud Foundry, how it provides Comic Relief developers an environment for quickly experimenting with new ideas for engaging with donors, and the larger impact of technology on the world of philanthropy.

Charity Majors has been on-call in one form or another since she was 17. She knows how to get to the bottom of system performance problems. After stints at Parse and Facebook, Charity and co-founder Christine Yen started Honeycomb, whose mission is to help software engineers use event data to explore and better understand their production systems. In this episode of Pivotal Insights, Charity joins Jeff and Dormain to talk about the challenges of debugging distributed systems, why a data-driven approach is the best way to get to the bottom of performance issues, and how software engineers can get their atrophied debugging muscles back into shape.

This week's episode of Pivotal Insights was recorded on the floor of PGConf US 2017, which took place in later March 2017 in Jersey City. Jeff chats with a handful of guests at the show to get the pulse of the PostgreSQL community and to find out why the open source database is gaining traction in the enterprise. Guests include EnterpriseDB's Jason Davis, Paul Laurence and Jason O'Donnell from Crunchy Data, and Pivotal's Andreas Scherbaum and Dave Cramer.

Etsy is best known as the online marketplace where you can sell your homemade mittens and vintage ankle bracelets. But did you know it's also the place where a lot of modern application security techniques were born? The founders of Signal Sciences, a Pivotal partner and leading web application security provider, got their start managing security for Etsy's cloud-native applications. Their methods proved so effective and popular on the speaking circuit, they decided to start a company. In a world where code is pushed to production weekly or even daily and cloud infrastructure is ephemeral, old notions like weeks long security reviews and hardware-based security solutions are quickly becoming obsolete. In this episode of Pivotal Insights, Jeff and Dormain speak with Tyler Shields, Vice President of Marketing, Partnerships and Strategy at Signal Sciences, about the inherent challenges of securing cloud-native applications and the new approaches being pioneered by Signal Sciences and others.

There was a Cambrian explosion of NoSQL databases just a few short years ago. Each had its own strengths and weaknesses, and none could genuinely call themselves a general purpose enterprise database. DataStax set out to change that. DataStax Enterprise, based on Apache Cassandra, now includes robust search, graph and analytics capabilities, enabling it to support more demanding use cases. In this episode of Pivotal Insights, Jeff and Dormain are honed by Gilbert Lau, Cloud and Big Data Evangelist at DataStax, to discuss the evolution of NoSQL databases.

Data caching isn't a new concept, but it does become trickier in microservices architectures. Microservices allow developers to quickly build and iterate applications, which puts pressure on the data layer to keep up. Pivotal Cloud Cache - a distributed, highly available, high speed key/value caching service - is designed to bridge the gap. "It's not only about performance anymore," says Jag Mirani, who oversees marketing for Pivotal's in-memory products, referring to data caching. "It's about bridging these two different worlds" - modern applications and data - "that are operating on a different cadence and a different mindset." In this episode of Pivotal Insights, Jag joins hosts Jeff and Dormain to talk about the role of caching in microservices architectures. They also get a little philosophical while they're at it, and Jeff finally learns how to pronounce Dormain's last name.

2017 marks the 10th birthday of RabbitMQ, the versatile open source message broker. Rabbit has come a long way from its humble beginnings over a decade ago and today is used to support some of the most demanding cloud-native applications in the world. RabbitMQ's evolution into a truly enterprise-grade message broker is thanks in part to people like Carl Hörberg. Hörberg is the Founder and CEO of 84codes AB, a Swedish company that offers RabbitMQ as a managed service. The service, called CloudAMQP, gives developers the ease of use and flexibility of RabbitMQ but removes the burden of managing the underlying server. In this episode of Pivotal Insights, Hörberg joins me and my guest co-host, Pivotal's Greg Chase, to chat about RabbitMQ's ten year anniversary, how uses of RabbitMQ are changing in light of new and emerging application patterns such as microservices, and how CloudAMQP integrates with Pivotal Web Services to deliver a complete cloud-native platform as a service.

The NBA introduced the three point shot in 1979, but just how much has it impacted the style of play? That's the question Pivotal Data Scientist - and avid NBA fan - Chris Rawles wanted to answer. Chris applied his skills as a data scientist to years worth of NBA statistical data to illustrate just how much the game has changed since players started launching bombs from behind the three point arc nearly forty years ago. In this episode of Pivotal Insights, Chris breaks down his findings, talks to Jeff and Dormain about the tools he used to perform the analytics, and - just to keep things interesting -fills us in on some of the current uses of data analytics by NBA teams.

A recent study by researchers at Boston University and MIT found that companies that invest in, develop and leverage application programming interfaces, or APIs, enjoy significant growth in revenue and profit as a result. APIs enable companies to both extract additional value from legacy systems and expose their services to more users. But as APIs become central to a company's business model, managing and securing them likewise take on added importance. In this episode of Pivotal Insights, co-hosts Jeff Kelly and Dormain Drewitz speak with Prithpal Bhogill, a product manager for API platform provider Apigee, now a part of Google’s cloud platform group. The three discuss the evolution of what is often called the API Economy, how APIs are reshaping the way large, traditional enterprises do business and create value for their customers, and some of the challenges developers face developing, managing and securing APIs in cloud-native environments.