Tanzu Talk

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.

Episodes from before the new format switch (where Coté & Richard MC each episode).

These are episodes that come from libsyn. Their download numbers aren't total, just since being in SoundCloud.

Episodes from before the new format switch (where Coté & Richard MC each episode).

These are episodes that come from libsyn. Their download numbers aren't total, just since being in SoundCloud.

Episodes from before the new format switch (where Coté & Richard MC each episode).

These are episodes that come from libsyn. Their download numbers aren't total, just since being in SoundCloud.

Episodes from before the new format switch (where Coté & Richard MC each episode).

These are episodes that come from libsyn. Their download numbers aren't total, just since being in SoundCloud.

A short while ago, I wrote up how to approach doing ROI cases for DevOps. The catch, of course, was that doing ROI for DevOps is often the wrong “question.” That said, we all live in the real world, so you need to tell the finance people, let alone your management chain, something if they’re asking you to justify a decision.

To follow-up on the piece, I called up my old friend Ed Goodwin, a programmer friend of mine who went and got an MBA and entered a whole new career in finance. I asked him to walk me through how you’d think about doing the ROI for something like DevOps and, more broadly, how to work with finance people who are curious about new IT processes like DevOps and cloud native. He gives some excellent, pragmatic advice. As always, it always helps to just talk with people, even if they’re from finance.

Episodes from before the new format switch (where Coté & Richard MC each episode).

These are episodes that come from libsyn. Their download numbers aren't total, just since being in SoundCloud.

Andrew is back for a discussion of what cloud native means, and wood-paneling. We discuss what we see as "cloud native," the full stack:

Cloud Native Application Frameworks

Cloud Native Runtime Platform

Cloud Native Operations

Cloud Native Empowered Culture

Episodes from before the new format switch (where Coté & Richard MC each episode).

These are episodes that come from libsyn. Their download numbers aren't total, just since being in SoundCloud.

From sleepy storage admin jobs to MongoDB, there's no end of jobs operations people can be doing now-a-days. Fresh of many years being an operations person, Bridget Kromhout (@bridgetkromhout), now at Pivotal, talks with me in this episode about DevOps and operations. We discuss the opportunities operations people have in a cloud native world, moving to and from management, organization change management, being "promoted" to management, and, of course, USENET.

Episodes from before the new format switch (where Coté & Richard MC each episode).

These are episodes that come from libsyn. Their download numbers aren't total, just since being in SoundCloud.