HP Launches Helion Development Platform Based on Cloud Foundry

by Renat KhasanshynOctober 24, 2014

Simultaneously with the lively event at the Temple SF nightclub, the #HPPaaS crowd chat was held online.

On October 23, 2014, HP launched Helion Development Platform—the company’s PaaS based on Cloud Foundry and integrated with HP Helion OpenStack. Below is a brief recap from the event dedicated to this.

Table of Contents

Developers are at the core

6:00 Nice vibe, cool people, and good music outside at the HP Helion event.

6:10 Paul Maritz, CEO of Pivotal (which ships Pivotal CF, another Cloud Foundry–based PaaS): “Developers are at the core of the HP Helion Platform.”

6:20 Host Donnie Berkholz (Analyst at RedMonk) is calling the industry panel “Game Changers: Cloud-native apps, open platforms, containers; what’s next?”

Key take-away: The role of DevOps in modern enterprises sky-rocketed. The software has fundamentally changed.

6:33 Open-source vs. Open API. The question of whether the code behind is available is certainly of great importance.

6:35 Panel on microservices: “If you look at Netflix, it is incredibly rare that the entire service is down.”

Ben Golub CEO of Docker:

6:37 Lew Cirne, CEO and Founder of New Relic: “How would you move to the containerized approach? A lot of organizations already fully introduced the microservices approach. The most productive development teams are 5–6 developers. The APIs are well defined. New Relic’s biggest customer MercadoLibre has 4,000 services.”

6:39 Max Schireson, Vice Chairman of MongoDB: “Are you going to build a house with a screwdriver or a hammer? The answer is you are going to build one part of the house with a hammer and the other part with a screwdriver. You want to break down everything in small tasks.”

6:42 A panel on microservices: “In the cloud world, you design for failure. That’s very difficult for large enterprises to shift in understanding this.”

6:45 Max Schireson, Vice Chairman of MongoDB, on databases: “You want your developers to be as fast as possible and your operators as efficient as possible.”

Marten Mickos, SVP & GM, HP Cloud: “MySQL is still going strong.”

6:51 A panel on CI/CD: “It affects the whole stack and the whole process. On a database layer, the flexibility around the schema and having an ability to change things on the fly are certainly important.”

6:55 The panel ends.

7:02 Meg Whitman, CEO of HP, addresses the attendees via webcast: “Developers cannot wait years for IT departments to provision tools they need. Let’s see what HP Helion Development Platform can do for you.”

7:05 Bill Hilf, SVP of HP Cloud, on Helion Development Platform: “Most of people that we talk are traditional enterprises. Many of them adopted cloud computing, but that doesn’t give them all the tools they need to succeed. For an enterprise to be successful, you can’t ignore IT. If you have a new project, the time to provision the systems, infrastructure, and databases can be painfully long.”

Bill Hilf, SVP of HP Cloud, on Helion Development Platform:

7:10 “I need to go fast, I need flexibility. I can be in a heavily regulated industry. You need to be flexible to come in my environment”.

7:13 “People try to make a jump in a public cloud, but it is not the end state. You want to become faster. Continuous integration / continuous delivery make a lot of sense. That’s where PaaS comes into place.”

7:16 “Enterprises are not looking for new vendors, but they are looking for technologies that can help them control the IaaS layer. They want choice of hypervisors, they want to have their own gear.”

7:17 “We have to build the platform that can have open-source at the core.”

The platform in action

7:20 What’s under the hood of HP Helion? Manav Mishra, Director at HP Cloud: “Built on Cloud Foundry v2. Application life cycle management is built into it. The scale, high availability, and durability of OpenStack.”

Manav Mishra, Director at HP Cloud, on what is under the hood of Helion Development Platform:

7:22 “We achieved deep binding between Cloud Foundry and OpenStack.”

7:24 “You don’t have a platform if there are no apps, ecosystem. HP has a marketplace—a place for developers to consume services like MongoDB as a Service, etc.”

7:25 A live demo of HP Helion Development Platform by Omri Gazitt has just started. He seems to be a really cool guy.

7:27 “Everyone is talking about CI/CD. I want to show you CI/CD system that we built here. A little app, Helion CI.” —Omri Gazitt, VP at HP Cloud

7:35 “.NET is huge in the enterprise. Let me show you something interesting that the team is working on now.”

7:40 Jesus Rodriguez, CEO of Kidozen, joins with a demo of KidoZen, an enterprise mobile app platform (MBaaS) working together with HP Helion Development Platform:

7:40 The live demo of HP Helion Development Platform is over.

Everyone is heading outside to the lounge area to sip wine, enjoy tasty appetizers, and have interesting conversations on how HP Helion Dev Platform can change the way enterprises build applications for the cloud.

The #HPPaaS crowd chat

Simultaneously with the main event at Temple SF, HP and Altoros sponsored a real-time crowd chat on the topic. The discussion addressed the following questions:

Market readiness to adopt PaaS. What’s the biggest barrier for enterprise adoption of Cloud Foundry–based commercial products like Helion Development Platform? What are some lessons learned from successful enterprise implementations?
What is the quality a Platform as a Service should have to be widely adopted?
Industrial Internet and the API economy pushed many enterprises off the cliff and right into uncharted waters. What might be the “PaaS killer apps” carrying significant advantages compared to using out-of-the-box IaaS infrastructures?
What role will containers play for PaaS, application delivery, and development?
What application services are critical for developing cloud-native applications?
What are some challenges for developing and deploying cloud-native applications that a PaaS can help to solve?
What’s the one thing that would make your life easier as a developer?
What does the launch of Helion Development Platform mean for the PaaS end users?
What does it mean for the HP ecosystem and members of the Cloud Foundry Foundation? Competitors?

The chat was moderated by Judith Hurwitz (Hurwitz & Associates), Roger Strukhoff (Cloud Expo, IoT Journal), Haley Carriere (HP Cloud), and Renat Khasanshyn (Altoros). Visit this page for the full discussion.