Pivotal Conversations

When you're moving fast, things will break more often. It's little wonder, then, that with a microservices approach you need to pay close attention to ensuring the safe, yet speedy change to APIs. The idea of "consumer-driven contracts" has been percolating for a long time. The idea is to shift the "power" in the relationship between the provider of APIs and the consumer of those APIs more to the consumers. In this episode, I talk again with Marcin Grzejszczak on this topic and we discuss how the newly GA's Spring Cloud Contract enables all this thinking. See https://blog.pivotal.io/pivotal-conversations for full show notes.

Building a high performance organization requires more than just putting good technologies and practices in place for developing and delivering product, it requires the right culture as well. In large organizations, this often means changing the culture. At the heart of that is people, so it's natural that Human Resources will get involved, hopefully sooner rather than later. To discuss these topics, we bring back Joe Militello for the second time to discuss how Pivotal thinks through HR and the consultative work our team has been doing on these topics. His framing that I really liked relates to his summary of what HR does: improving "the experience of our employees and candidates.” We go over some best practices for transforming how HR operates and give a little peek into how Pivotal manages employee's experience.

Released a few weeks ago, Pivotal Cloud Foundry 1.8 is chock full of new features and improvements. We talk with Jared Ruckle about them, delving into security, databases, and new services. These features deliver on the Pivotal Cloud Foundry goal of speeding up time to market (with faster release cycles) and, yet, still being a general purpose application platform that organizations can use to run all their customer software. We also discuss another recent piece from Jared on opinionated platforms - check out that tree house! In the news, we cover the recent data breach at Yahoo, Windows Server 2016 and Docker support, Azure's ever growing geographic foot-print, and our hopes and dreams for the rumored Twitter acquisition. See full show notes: http://pivotal.io/podcast

Backed up into a corner, developers will start coding. It's little wonder then that as large organizations have been faced with modernizing their approach to software - all that "digital transformation" - developers in years past have been focusing on building their own platforms. Our guest this week, Matt Walburn, worked on one such project. He joins us this week to talk about the lure of the DIY platform and why, now that options like Pivotal Cloud Foundry are available, it's usually a poor use of organization time. Not only do you need to build the full platform with all the features from the development phase to running in production, but you have to maintain it as well. As Matt says, this will run you several millions of dollars in staff salary alone. And then, after all that, you still have to write all those applications you originally set out to make. See full show notes at http://pivotal.io/podcast

No matter how fresh and new your company is, you're going to have some "legacy" applications to work with when you're mounting your cloud native efforts. The nature of those legacy apps and services are varied: mainframes, ESBs, batch job, and plain old J2EE and .Net apps. If you find yourself unable to make changes quickly enough without the fear of it all blowing up in your face, you're probably dealing with legacy. Pivotal's Rohit Kelapure talks with us in this episode about the type of analysis and, then, types patterns he and his team use to "break up the monolith." Before all that we discuss some recent news: HPE selling off its software group, Google buying Apigee, Richard and Abby's recent commentary on the container market, and fresh coiffure advice for listeners. Visit https://blog.pivotal.io/pivotal-conversations/ for show notes and other episodes.

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.

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.

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.