Pivotal Conversations

This week I've got a discussion about DevOps I had with Nate and Paul. I've been curious about the changing nature of DevOps as SRE and platform operations comes into vogue. It seems like the idea of "full stack" DevOps is being dimension...and maybe DevOps itself? Maybe now it's just OpsOps. We also talk about enterprise architecture and governance in the age of decoupled, event-driven, microservices. And somewhere in there, we talk about how culture gets changed and who needs to do it.

Nobody likes to be uncomfortable, by definition. And experienced software developers and architects, like all of us, want all the answers. "But if you are really trying to achieve the agility that transformation promises, you have to let go of some of that," says Bob Cunningham, Senior Manager, Enterprise Application Architecture at TD Ameritrade. In this episode of Pivotal Conversations, recorded on the floor of Cloud Foundry Summit 2019 in Philadelphia, Bob chats about his experience leading digital transformation efforts at the online brokerage, including the importance of being comfortable with being uncomfortable.

Microsoft Build brought a bevy of Windows news this week, plus, there's some more Windows support in Pivotal land and an overview of Pivotal Cloud Foundry's road-map. Our guest is Derrick Harris who's recently joined Pivotal and runs the CIO crib-notes news site Intersect. Additional topics: Coté might have a tape-worm. In Europe, pizzas are sandwiches. Images in RT's. Coffee and chicken AI/ML. "Will robots come for our jobs, Derrick?" GoGrid, Joyent. "Application first." Boring AI. Edge computing.

Enterprises across industries are modernizing legacy applications to improve performance and provide great customer experiences. But it doesn't how snappy your application is or how pretty the user interface if the data supporting the application can't keep up. In this episode of Pivotal Conversations, Redis Labs' Adi Foulger and Cassie Zimmerman talk about the challenges of modernizing your data architecture.

Five years into their journey with Pivotal Cloud Foundry, Liberty Mutual is not standing still. Talking with Jai Schniepp, Senior Product Owner of Secure DevOps Platforms at Liberty Mutual, Dormain learns how the team keeps iterating. Not resting on their laurels from their initial foray into pipeline generators, Jai's team have iterated to solve more of the developer experience in a secure way.

Dick's Sporting Goods has been on an accelerated journey to "own their own destiny" when it comes to digital. But this isn't just e-commerce: this transformation includes melting the barriers between brick-and-mortar and e-commerce teams, as well as literally bringing down the walls between groups working on digital at DSG.

There's a lot of "backing services" in Cloud Foundry: not only middleware like databases, but also operations services like auto-scaling. This week, Richard & Coté talk with Laurel Gray, the product manager for those services at Pivotal. We discuss the services themselves, the open service broker, how to product manage APIs and services, and product management in general. Also, we hop-scotch through the news: a new version of Pivotal Cloud Foundry, Google's recently cloud announcements, and a new version of kubernetes.

We've touched on the mindset shift of treating your internal application platform as a product (or offering) for your developers. In this episode, Dormain talks to James Urquhart about defining the go-to-market strategy of that offering. Have you built the right service? What does my MVP look like? How do we educate, broadcast, and onboard developers? This conversation builds upon previous episodes on the topic of "platform as product." We refer to the episode with Paula Kennedy, as well as Dormain's post on "How to Get Developers to Start Using Your Application Platform." https://content.pivotal.io/podcasts/for-platform-teams-the-developers-are-the-customer-with-pivotals-paula-kennedy https://content.pivotal.io/blog/how-to-get-developers-to-start-using-your-application-platform

Most enterprises start their cloud-native journeys with lots of enthusiasm and big plans. But reality often sets in when they try to scale transformations by modernizing hundreds, sometimes thousands of legacy apps. The biggest digital transformation roadblock? It's a lack of cloud-native skills, says HCL's Alan Flower. In this episode of Pivotal Conversations, Alan shares tips and strategies for overcoming the cloud-native skills gap.

Demonstrating the value of software, how it contributes to revenue, is no easy feat. Staffing can be difficult, especially with an eye to sustaining teams over the years. Jon Osborn returns as a guest to discuss these and other transformation hurdles, plus successes they've had at the Great American Insurance Group.

There are a number of changes to process and culture needed to be good at software development, and one of the most challenging for many enterprises is creating a team dedicated to the platform and treating it as a product. But that, says Pivotal's Paula Kennedy, is a major predictor of success. "The [Pivotal] customers that are the most successful are those that have their own dedicated team with its own dedicated product manager," says Kennedy. "Those are the ones that are able to prioritize, able to meet users needs, able to release features quickly." Listen on for this and other insights from Paula, a member of Pivotal's PCF Solutions team, on best practices for platform teams to successfully adopt platform-as-product.

Each year, the CF Summit brings together users, customers, and other community members. Dormain gives us a tour of the conference with some highlights. Plus, we cover some recent news and talk about open source foundations.

In this episode of Pivotal Insights, Stark & Wayne's Dr. Nic Williams discusses why it's important to treat your platform-as-product. The short answer: It results in a more customer-oriented mindset. Listen to the full episode to learn more, including how putting some constraints on developers plays an important role.

This week, we talk with James Urquhart who joined Pivotal recently in the CTO group. We talk about some architectural ideas for converting the enterprise over to an event-driven flow, discuss the reasons for doing multi-cloud, and also what kinds of conversations "executives" find helpful. Coté does a great job mangling Pivotal product names. Also, hot takes on "on-premises" vs. "on-premise."

In this episode of Pivotal Insights, Helpful.com's Farhan Thawar* talks about the challenges of building a company from scratch, why it's important to apply smart architectural principals to empower development teams, and why he strives for boring infrastructure. *Editor's note: Helpful.com was acquired by Shopify following the recording of this episode but before its publication. Farhan and the entire Helpful.com team joined Shopify where they continue to pursue their mission of making communication and collaboration more seamless and effective.