Ops Are Large and in Charge at Cloud Foundry Summit 2016 (Day 2)

The Ops are waking up

DevOps has been a disruptive theme in enterprise IT for the past two years, with the dev side being very enthusiastic about the joys of continuous development and integration, and the ops side less so.

However, now the ops side is waking up, at least in the world of Cloud Foundry and creating new cultures of complex, multi-cloud deployments.

This was one message that was clearly conveyed, at least to me, at Day 2 of the Cloud Foundry Summit 2016.

Examples

Allstate VP Doug Safford returned from a year earlier, updating the audience on progress at taking a classically traditional company in a clasically traditional industry fully into a world of agility—even what he called extreme agility.

Doug Safford, Allstate

While maintaining that “you don’t need to throw out the old way to embrace the new way,” he spoke of creating a new project called CompoZed Labs and imbuing it into the fabric of the company. Despite hard-headed progress, he noted that “even when top management and engineering backs your transformation, you have to fight ‘the frozen middle’”—layers of middle management who have built their feifdoms and will resist, resist, and resist.

Bill Hilf, SVP and GM of HPE, talked about how customers are routinely building multi-cloud apps. “These people have very complex environments,” he said, putting out a plea to end the use of “private and public cloud,” as the terms oversimplify and don’t properly describe the real world of enterprise customers.

Bill Hilf, Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Engineers Simon Johansson and Daniel Otte from Springer Nature presented a dry, deadpan, very funny, and very effective demonstration of the pain involved in moving to a devops culture. The result of changing time frames from months to minutes was nevertheless accomplished with a lot of metaphorical blood on the floor. This video, when released soon by the Cloud Foundry Foundation, is destined to be a classic for years to come.

Simon Johansson and Daniel Otte, Springer Nature

Use cases

A series of dedicated sessions from Cloud Foundry developers and integrators such as Pivotal, Stark & Wayne, and Altoros outlined several other large, complex use cases. Altoros CEO Renat Khasanshyn presented with Adam Chesterton from Warner Music in describing a “mature cloud” that Warner nevertheless completely rebuilt by going all in to Amazon Web Services.

“Elasticity is not guaranteed in a public cloud.” —Renat Khasanshyn, Altoros

“Reserved instances approach saved us 40-60%.” —Adam Chesterton, Warner Music Group

Industrial Internet

In their session with Shyam Varan Nath of GE Digital, Sarah Cooper from M2Mi examined the possibilities of applying the potential of IoT in smart airports.

“IoT provides a real-time shared view for the airports.” —Sarah Cooper, M2Mi

“Secure and shared aviation services? It’s possible with Cloud Foundry.” —Sarah Cooper, M2Mi

The slide above demonstrates the idea of smart airline baggage management from a high-level perspective. As one can see, the system is based on GE’s Predix and M2Mi’s IoT platform, gathering data from gateways, various devices, etc. Overall, Internet of Things is entering the Cloud Foundry arena much faster than previously. So, right before the summit, there were some calls for increasing the number of IoT and Industrial Internet offerings based on Cloud Foundry. We at Altoros believe that next year we’ll see many of these solutions in action.

APIs, service brokers, containers, etc.

There were many great technical sessions during the Day 2 of the summit. Dr. Max of IBM gave an insight into CF-Swagger—an incubation Cloud Foundry project—that allows for:

• describing all CF APIs (CF services: broker APIs, CF Cloud Controller: v3, UAA APIs)
• generating API docs
• generating API client and servers (stubs)
• generating test suites for API servers
• generating Test Compatibility Kits

Production-grade PostgreSQL, streamlining BOSH, containers, heterogeneous architectures, and internal transformation were all topics at hand today. We will be covering some of these sessions in detail as the videos and slides become available.

No, cloud does not make things simple, as many of the original public-cloud advocates were saying a few years ago. However, the good news is that Cloud Foundry is making much of these insanely complex deployments possible.

All CF Summit recaps:

• CloudCamp Attracts 150 Attendees on the Eve of the Cloud Foundry Summit
• Cloud Foundry Summit 2016, Day 1: Ecosystem Is Growing
• Cloud Foundry Summit 2016, Day 3: Blockchain and Govs Enter the Scene
• BOSH Day Concludes Cloud Foundry Summit 2016
• Top 100 Quotes from the Cloud Foundry Summit 2016
• Digital Transformation Using Cloud Foundry—What Works and What Doesn’t
• Building Scaled-down, HA, Mission-critical Architecture with Cloud Foundry