freethejazz

PlatformCF - Day Two

September 10, 2013

Catching a few breaths of fresh air between PlatformCF and the upcoming SpringOne2gx conference, I'm enjoying the day of quotes we had. Angel Diaz of IBM kicked things off with the message that Cloud Foundry is fast, and "speed is the new currency." Acknowledging how incredible the technology and the current climate is, he urged us not to sit around in awe too long. He stressed three items to keep in mind moving forward: continue to push on the art of the possible, ground everything you do in use cases, and have an open cloud architecture, top to bottom. (And remember kids, "vision without execution is hallucination").

After a walkthrough of PivotalHD (Enterprise Hadoop with HAWQ, a 100% SQL compliant query language, and the "world's fastest SQL on hadoop"), a panel of speakers made their way up to the stage. The panel members represented three separate internal Cloud Foundry deployments (Warner Music, Intel, and GE). Some notable quotes from the panel:

"That's our mantra, make it possible to land an application in less than a day." -Catherine Spence, Intel, on speedy delivery.

"There needs to be some ultimate business-driving need for you to turn on a service." -Dave McCrory, Warner Music, on use-case driven architecture.

"It took one or two days to set up … and the team was productive from the second week." -Chetam Gadgil, GE, on adopting Cloud Foundry by a team with no prior experience with it.

Where did the panelists feel Cloud Foundry could improve? Auditing, logging, migration capabilities, and more attention to the Windows environment. No sooner was the request made, Jared Wray took the stage to talk about the Cloud Foundry extension for .NET, Iron Foundry. He gave an overview about how large an effort it was to support .NET in v1, and how v2 greatly diminished that work. In addition to the technical details of building Iron Foundry, he stressed the fact that enterprise customers are not only looking at newer technologies, but they’re adopting them at "hyper-scale rate." Did I mention Iron Foundry is totally open-source? Check it out here.

Dr. Nic Williams then took the mic for a "live coding" session on BOSH. I added the quotes because it was actually live commentary of a screencast he put together earlier in the day. That being said, during the screencast he ran into problems, went about solving them, and even submitted a Github issue related to his troubles. Dr. Williams is a strong proponent of BOSH, stating that, when he was at Engine Yard, "I felt like we could use it at Engine Yard. No one agreed with me, so I left."

The day's keynotes led into lightning talks, which led into the penultimate event of the conference, the unconference. The group suggested and decided on topics, and after a quick break to plan logistics, the sessions began. Topics included BOSH, the new CLI written in Go, how to engage the community, and "Multi-site PaaS scares me, what should I do." I didn't quite know what to expect when I saw an unconference in a conference, but it turned out to be perfect timing. Attendees were itching to be more involved, and some sessions were entirely open conversations.

The conference was brought to a close by a story from Rob Mee, SVP of Pivotal Labs(among other things). Rob recounted his father being with IBM and describing the competitive environment at the time. "EMC, they’re fierce competitors," he remembers his father saying. He fast-forwarded to today, where he gets to work on Cloud Foundry both with EMC and supported by IBM. He talked fondly about the openness of Cloud Foundry. It's open source, it has open infrastructure, and they have an "open dojo"(for those of you not familiar, you can literally walk through their doors and work with them). The "fierce competition" his father experienced has dissolved and been replaced with his closing words:

Fierce Collaboration

Thanks to all involved in organizing PlatformCF. It was an incredible inaugural event, and I'm eagerly looking forward to the next one. For the time being, information about PlatformCF can be found at www.platformcf.com