Top 100 Quotes from Cloud Foundry Summit North America 2015

After having attended Day 1 and Day 2 of this year’s CF Summit, we strongly believe: the momentum looks unstoppable for Cloud Foundry. Ten Fortune 500 companies, seven new CF Foundation members, 120 user groups in 40 countries, and it’s just the beginning. All these people had a lot to share during the event. Their knowledge, wisdom, and humor were invaluable—read this selection of quotes collected during the two days.

Why Cloud Foundry?

1. “Because our stuff is complex.” —Jeroen van Rotterdam and Mike Root (EMC)
2. “If the world devolved into a single cloud provider, there would be no need for Cloud Foundry.” —Brian Gallagher, EMC
3. “Nobody has ever built cloud-native apps without a platform. They either build one themselves or they use Cloud Foundry.” —Joshua McKenty, Pivotal
4. “Cloud Foundry is trying to enable continuous innovation.” —Sam Ramji, Cloud Foundry Foundation
5. “Cloud Foundry helps the ecosystem to reduce costs and improve agility.” —The EMC and SAP panel
6. “Most organizations need super-heroic efforts to deploy apps, Cloud Foundry is a plane that helps everyone fly.” —Joshua McKenty, Pivotal
7. “With continuous deployment, our backlog reflects a business value perspective rather than code-centric releases.” —Jeroen van Rotterdam, EMC
8. “Folks are doing things that you may not have thought they would do with Cloud Foundry, because it’s open source and they can.” —Dave Nielsen, a cloud computing evangelist
9. “Cloud Foundry can help organizations to get off the ‘water-scrum-fall’ syndrome.” —Sam Ramji, Cloud Foundry Foundation
10. “Cloud Foundry is key to making a data center developer-friendly.” —Kit Colbert, VMware

Joshua McKenty, Field CTO of Cloud Foundry at Pivotal

In numbers

1. “Start your project on Monday and ship it on Friday. No longer it’s going to take nine months.” —Andy Zitney, Allstate
2. “From zero to everything in 15 minutes.” —Andy Zitney, Allstate Insurance Company
3. “100% uptime. As an Ops guy, that’s why I’m at the Cloud Foundry Summit.” —Brandon Henry, Garmin
4. “GE Aviation can generate 50 petabytes a day, and now we are able to handle data ingestion at that rate.” —Harel Kodesh, GE Software
5. “400 containers per minute.” —Dr. Ying Xiong on Cloud Foundry’s scale at Huawei Technologies
6. “Development to production in one motion is what cloud-native is all about. Else how can you go from an idea on Monday to customers on Friday?” —Joshua McKenty, Pivotal
7. “From 100 days to minutes. That’s what Pivotal Cloud Foundry gives us.” —Andy Zitney, Allstate Insurance Company
8. “Pivotal had the 360-degree solution to lead the digital transformation we wanted to do.” —Richard Leurig, CoreLogic
9. “I said to my vendors, I don’t want five years ago. I want five years from now. Where is it going?” —Richard Leurig, CoreLogic
10. “Two people built the app and got it into the App Store in five weeks.” —The Humana team

Andy Zitney, SVP of Infrastructure Services, Allstate

Open community and collaboration

1. “Combining code, community, and culture in a single platform is key. No app can be an island.” —Angel Diaz, IBM
2. “The value of community cannot be understated in enterprise technology buying decisions.” —Bala Rajaraman, IBM
3. “We’re trying to build a community of practice at Cloud Foundry.” —Andrew Clay Shafer, Pivotal
4. “Build content in a way that it can continue living after your meetup.” —Animesh Singh, IBM
5. “We had to transform our IT, processes, and people.” —The Lockheed Martin team
6. “We give power in the hands of developers.” —Andy Zitney, Allstate Insurance Company
7. “Cloud Foundry delivers on what they say it does. You need a team of people around it to [make it hum].” —Andy Zitney, Allstate Insurance Company
8. “Getting local ‘superstars’ in to speak at your meetup will build upon your attendance.” —Animesh Singh and Daniel Krook (IBM)
9. “The opposite of ‘free’ is ‘slave’.” —Cory Doctorow, an author and journalist
10. “You have no idea how much fun we are having.” —Dr. Nic Williams, Stark & Wayne

Angel Diaz, IBM

Ecosystem diversity

1. “We only gonna achieve that excellence and that acceleration, if our community is diverse and is listening to all the voices equally.” —Abby Kearns, Pivotal
2. “By 2020, there will be 1.4M computer science jobs in the US alone, and only 400,000 computer scientists graduating…Well, it turns out we’re missing half of the population.” —Robin Hauser Reynolds, CODE
3. “Greater diversity leads to greater innovation.” —Robin Hauser Reynolds, Director/Producer, CODE documentary
4. “We need to change the stereotype of a coder.” —Robin Hauser Reynolds, Director/Producer, CODE documentary
5. “Regardless of the individual IQ of people on a team, the collective IQ of the group increases when you add a woman.” —Robin Hauser Reynolds, Director/Producer, CODE
6. “Somewhere around 7th or 8th grade, girls stop raising their hands. They want to stop being the smart girl.” —The Diversity Lunch participants
7. “There are tools you can implement to deal with biases. Biases exist for all of us.” —Cornelia Davis, Pivotal
8. “You wait longer than you think, you should wait to hear the voice that won’t speak until you’re really listening.” —The Diversity Lunch panel
9. “Want to encourage women to pursue tech fields? Be a mentor, volunteer, be present and available to anyone…not just women.” —The Diversity Lunch panel
10. “Cloud Foundry is in every industry; cloud-native is everywhere.” —Josh McKenty, Pivotal

Sam Ramji (CF Foundation), Jeroen van Rotterdam (EMC), Andreas Wesselmann (SAP)

The enterprise

1. “Why is everyone surprised that SAP is committed to Cloud Foundry? We may be 43 years old, but we are alive, growing, and innovating.” —Andreas Wesselmann, SAP
2. “Huawei has long been a hardware company, but our future is in SDN, NFV, and PaaS.” —Dr. Ying Xiong, Huawei Technologies
3. “PaaS is a change in mindset for the enterprise.” —Richard Seroter, CenturyLink
4. “In our business, there’s disruption going on.” —Jeroen van Rotterdam, EMC
5. “Security and compliance are the biggest factors for our enterprise Bluemix (Cloud Foundry) customers.” —Bala Rajaraman, IBM
6. “If you take Cloud Foundry away from us, we will hurt you!” —A developer at 18F, as reported by Diego Lapiduz (18F)
7. “We know how to develop and release in 2 weeks, but it still takes us 6 to 8 months to put it in production.” —A government agency to Josh McKenty, Pivotal
8. “Looking at cost as the driver for a PaaS initiative is wrong.” —Andy Zitney, Allstate Insurance Company
9. “That excuse [we don’t have the tools we need] is now wrong. We have the [Cloud Foundry] platform.” —Andy Zitney, Allstate Insurance Company
10. “From enterprise adoption perspective, they wanna know what we care about. A roadmap is an expression of the kinds of problems we want to solve for our customers.” —Mark Interrante, SVP Engineering, HP

Mark Interrante, SVP Engineering, HP

DevOps and cloud-native

1. “No microservice is an island.” —Matt Stine, Pivotal
2. “BOSH all the things.” —Matt Stine, Pivotal
3. “Cloud-native to me means microservices, architectures, and choice of cloud deployment infrastructure.” —James Watters, Pivotal
4. “cf push wind-turbine” —Harel Kodesh, GE Software
5. “Remove single threadedness from our processes.” —The Lockheed Martin team
6. “This year, hmm…it’s complicated…There’s a plot twist, but I’ll give it away. It turns out Diego is Lattice’s father.” —Onsi Fakhouri, Pivotal
7. “Cloud Foundry is not really meant for developers to download and run. It’s meant for IT departments to set up and run.” —Dave Nielsen, a cloud computing evangelist
8. “You can do equally horrific things with a buildpack as you can with a Dockerfile.” —Colin Humphreys, CloudCredo
9. “It’s not about day 1 deployment, it’s about day 2 ongoing management.” —James Masters and Ted Tollefson, Kroger
10. “We find that the delete all script is a great incentive for immutable deployments adoption by our team.” —James Masters and Ted Tollefson, Kroger

Colin Humphreys, CloudCredo

Tips

1. “Try smaller things in a public cloud and see if it’s a right fit.” —Richard Seroter, CenturyLink
2. “Read the release notes, if you want to live.” —Alex Suraci, Pivotal
3. “Frequent deploys are faster/safer.” —Andrew Clay Shafer, Pivotal
4. “App-centric approach is customer-centric approach.” —Richard Seroter, CenturyLink
5. “Need to shift focus from infrastructure to applications.” —Kit Colbert, VMware
6. “Putting together applications on an IaaS is not a long-term strategy.” —Josh McKenty, Pivotal
7. “We can’t fix the organizational model without changing the application model.” —Josh McKenty, Pivotal
8. “When you reduce the marginal cost of new customers to zero, you’ve won over the business team.” —Jeroen van Rotterdam, EMC
9. “What you can do is to keep using your big data platform for analytics, Spark, etc. and use Cloud Foundry as visualization.” —Alexander Kagoshima, Pivotal
10. “Keep your data close to the PaaS.” —Richard Seroter, CenturyLink

Andy Zitney, SVP of Infrastructure Services, Allstate

Funny

1. “Day after the biggest drinking day of the year…Mothers Day.” —Christine McKinley, a mechanical engineer, musician, and author
2. “Bathroom-Monitoring-as-a-Service.” —Dr. Ying Xiong, Huawei Technologies
3. “Imagine what the terms on subprime leg loans are.” —Cory Doctorow, an author and journalist
4. “The plane I’m taking to London is a flying Solaris workstation.” —Cory Doctorow, an author and journalist
5. “Best part of working at Lockheed Martin is the employee discount on fighter jets.” —The Lockheed Martin team
6. “Make sure you $ cf push my-app to a good cloud!” —Brian Gallagher, EMC
7. “Here is my source code | Run it on the cloud for me | I do not care how.” —A haiku dedicated to cf push by Onsi Fakhouri, Pivotal
8. “I can buy an ERP with a credit card. That is both horrifying and amazing.” —Richard Seroter, CenturyLink
9. “The biggest threat to security is internal employees.” —Kit Colbert, VMware
10. “Most people’s iPhone is more secure than most data centers.” —Kit Colbert, VMware

Metaphors

1. “Google is like the new college.” —Joshua McKenty, Pivotal
2. “I’ve patched and updated pieces of the app and now it’s a snowflake I can’t destroy.” —Richard Seroter, CenturyLink
3. “We used to use a configuration management server and what we really had was a snowflake generator.” —A Cloud Foundry user at CF Summit
4. “Make the developer a first-class user of the data center.” —Kit Colbert, VMware
5. “Ordinary people don’t fly using a cape; they get on a plane.” —Joshua McKenty, Pivotal
6. “Maybe you think this is like cropdusters coming to an organic growers conf. Let me convince you otherwise.” —Harel Kodesh, GE Software
7. “Healthcare is on fire.” —Jason McKee, Humana
8. “Systems thinking is the new black.” —Andrew Clay Shafer, Pivotal
9. “It sounded too good to be true at first, but we left believers.” —The Lockheed Martin team
10. “You can be an open-source hippy and a money-grubbing capitalist at the same time.” —Andy Weir, Author of The Martian

Sam Ramji, CEO, Cloud Foundry Foundation

The future: predictions

1. “20%–35% of the Fortune 500 will use Cloud Foundry by this time next year.” —James Watters, Pivotal
2. “The insurance industry has not been disrupted in 80 years. Ripe for an Uber-style disruption.” —Andy Zitney, Allstate Insurance Company
3. “Cloud-native apps is not ‘hand-tooling IaaS.’ That’s not the future.” —Joshua McKenty, Pivotal
4. “Google and Netflix aren’t different from you. They’re what your future looks like. Cloud Foundry gets you there faster.” —James Watters, Pivotal
5. “If we don’t adopt Cloud Foundry first, our competitors will and out-innovate us.” —A tech lead at a large electronics manufacturer
6. “We need to address automation, scaling, and durability to develop a cloud-native data services framework in Cloud Foundry.” —Colin Humphreys, CloudCredo
7. “The concept of a release is outdated.” —Jeroen van Rotterdam, EMC
8. “Platform is less about continuous innovation, and more about building the future.” —Joshua McKenty, Pivotal
9. “In 6–7 years, everyone is going to be excited about unikernels.” —Andrew Clay Shafer, Pivotal
10. “It was pretty obvious to us that PaaS is the way of the future for enterprise DevOps.” —Diego Lapiduz, 18F of GSA

 
Feel free to add more quotes in the comments, if we’ve missed something. Or, watch the videos uploaded by the conference organizers yesterday.