Tanzu Talk

How do containers fit into your cloud native planning? That's a the question we start with this week, with (returning guest) John Feminella. We quickly arrive at a conversation on the larger question which is how to build a cloud platform and the allure of building it yourself. Also, we cover recent news in the infrastructure software space. Show notes: https://content.pivotal.io/podcasts/avoid-th...

One of your favorite technologies is on the death wagon, again. Gartner recently recommended avoiding JEE for new, cloud native application development. This predictably kicked up all sorts of push-back from the JEE stalwarts. In this episode we discuss the report, the responses, and all the context to figure out what to make of all this. Spoiler: JEE isn't dead, as ever, it's just a part of the o...

We don't have enough people, and the people we have don't have the right skills. That's a gasp oft heard during the machinations of digital transformation. To investigate this sentiment, the Cloud Foundry Foundation recently fielded a survey to probe into both sentiment around developer skills and how organizations are addressing it. The findings were actually optimistic, but there's still work to...

How are analysts reckoning with "cloud native"? Rita Manachi joins us again to talk about industry analysts and what they're up to. We briefly recap what analysts relations (AR) does, and then jump into how analysts are thinking about Pivotal now. There's several new reports out that are good reads for the Pivotal-minded. Having just talked with several analysts over some chafer warmed lunch, we d...

Home Depot has been using Pivotal Cloud Foundry and developing in the Pivotal way for over a year now. Thus far, they have roughly 150 applications running in Pivotal Cloud Foundry across all parts of their business. While at Gartner's Application Strategies & Solutions Summit, we talk with Tony McCulley about Home Depot's journey putting cloud native thinking and technologies in place. Tony had j...

We're seeing more adoption of agile in large organizations than ever before. More interestingly, they're really doing it, totally transforming the multiple layers of process to boil down to the the leanest bucket of parts that ensure quality, useful software. While there's a lot - a lot! - of work to be done, there's a slew of useful best practices, stories, and anecdotes emerging. In this episode...

Companies that want to get better at software are staffing and organizing themselves in new ways. The traditional "silos" approach clusters teams together into functional groups, whereas modern approaches cluster around product. We cover skills by looking at a recent Cloud Foundry Foundation survey on developer skills and then discuss some sections of Coté's upcoming cloud native journey booklet r...

Containers are as big a deal in the Cloud Foundry world as anywhere else; what was once an obscure method of process isolation is a good way to boost developer productivity. In this episode we talk with Pivotal's Onsi Fakhouri and James Bayer about containers and Pivotal Cloud Foundry. After discussing the history of containers, we talk about how containers are supported in Pivotal Cloud Foundry,...

There's no end of discussion about the Internet of Things now-a-days, but much of it is either about flashing toothbrushes or crazy-making huge numbers with abstract use cases. This week we talk with Pivotal's Saurabh Gupta about the work he's been doing in the IoT space with Pivotal customers. He has a great model illustrating how to think about IoT use cases which we cover in-depth, with several...

Distributed systems are hard. Building a microservices architecture that supports evolutionary changes without breaking “contracts” among services? Especially hard. In this podcast, we grabbed Oliver Gierke, Kenny Bastani, and Andrew Clay Shafer to talk about inter-service communication, consumer-driven contract testing, and service versioning. Listen in as we wrestle with tricky concepts, and sti...

Live to Tape from DellEMCWorld (Ep. 38) by Pivotal Software

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...

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 topi...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 abo...

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 t...

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, oper...

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 s...

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...

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 c...

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 orchestr...

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...