Top 100 Quotes from the Cloud Foundry Summit Europe 2016

The Cloud Foundry Summit 2016 brought in 31,000+ commits, 2,400+ contributors, 130+ core committers, 65 member companies, 195 user groups, and 53,050+ individual members in 132 cities across 56 countries. The Cloud Foundry Foundation welcomed five new members: Bosch, Acetti Software, Comcast, Hexad, and QiO.

The topics covered ranged from the Cloud Foundry platform itself to the individual Cloud Foundry user. We listed 100 of the most memorable quotes.

Why Cloud Foundry?

1. “With the exception of Linux, this is arguably the largest adopted open source initiative in the world right now.” —John Roese, EMC Corporation
2. “Cloud Foundry is the best platform for custom applications.” —Sam Ramji, Cloud Foundry Foundation
3. “We know that Cloud Foundry is going to be looking after things for us while we are away.” —Emma Hammond, Fidelity International
4. “We can trust Cloud Foundry to scale up, to auto-heal, and alert when something goes wrong.” —Emma Hammond, Fidelity International
5. “We can upgrade our Cloud Foundry platforms during the business day without impact. This we can even do without asking any of the application owners for approval.” —Emma Hammond, Fidelity International
6. “Cloud Foundry is not only for giants.” —Juan Pablo Genovese, Altoros
7. “We talk a lot about how platforms make promises and the good platforms are able to keep them. Cloud Foundry is an outstanding platform.” —Chip Childers, Cloud Foundry Foundation
8. “Cloud Foundry allows us a smaller problem space requiring less broad and deep knowledge so we can have product teams with a shared identity. We can then colocate them to get these extra benefits of face-to-face human interaction.” —Daniel Jones, EngineerBetter
9. “We can now deploy apps into production in minutes with Cloud Foundry.” —Dr. Daniel Poelchau, Allianz Germany
10. “Cloud technology is driving the digital workplace.” —Ursula Morgenstern, Atos

Sam Ramji, Cloud Foundry Foundation

Digital transformation

1. “Rome wasn’t built in a day and transformational change is very challenging.” —Emma Hammond, Fidelity International
2. “In banks, you can already see a large degree of disruption. This is not yet the case with insurance companies.” —Dr. Daniel Poelchau, Allianz Germany
3. “Right now, organizations are deciding what the platform looks like to run their cloud-native apps for the next 15 years.” —Ian Andrews, Pivotal
4. “This is an ecosystem game. Digital transformation cannot be done by one vendor.” —Marc Geall, SAP
5. “Digital transformation is about rethinking those legacy business processes and doing stuff in a new way. You cannot do that if your product development cycle is 3 to 5 years and you have 10 years ROI.” —Marc Geall, SAP
6. “If digital transformation is ultimately an extensibility game, you need to connect to the business data.” —Marc Geall, SAP
7. “Cloud technology is changing the way we prepare, test, monitor, and deliver the Olympic games.” —Ursula Morgenstern, Atos
8. “Change is happening everywhere.” —Marc Geall, SAP
9. “Building a complex system like Cloud Foundry isn’t a joke.” —Chip Childers, Cloud Foundry Foundation
10. “Change is easy, safe, and cheap through simple steps of using Cloud Foundry and pipelines.” —Emma Hammond, Fidelity International

Marc Geall (SAP), Steffen Stang (SIEMENS), and Bernd Issler (Atos)

Governments disrupted

1. “We should be able to share what we do and share the components of what we do because as governments we don’t compete.” —Liam Maxwell, UK Government
2. “We now find ourselves with a growth market that is GovTech.” —Liam Maxwell, UK Government
3. “With Cloud Foundry we can save money and allocate personnel and resources better.” —Bas van Essen, Dutch Government
4. “We would design services that were based around user need.” —Liam Maxwell, UK Government
5. “It’s amazing how much you can do with funding and not get it right.” —Liam Maxwell, UK Government
6. “We tried to procure our way out of trouble and this wasn’t going to work.” —Liam Maxwell, UK Government
7. “Culturally we were facing what we call the ‘square of despair’.” —Liam Maxwell, UK Government
8. “Technology was moving faster than the government. We had to be free to keep up.” —Liam Maxwell, UK Government
9. “The UK is now a center of digital excellence.” —Liam Maxwell, UK Government
10. “We shouldn’t try to do everything ourselves, we can’t. Community and collaboration is the way forward.” —Liam Maxwell, UK Government

Bas van Essen, Dutch Government

Diversity

1. “Diversity matters from a business perspective. A diverse workforce should give every company a competitive advantage, should give you better access to diverse global consumer base.” —Ursula Morgenstern, Atos
2. “For a long time tech has been about tech, not the people. We need to have a sense of shared values.” —Tracy Miranda, Kichwa Coders
3. “40% of our senior management team are female, running the most high profile technology projects in the world.” —Ursula Morgenstern, Atos
4. “The pace of industry is changing too quickly that one vendor can’t do this on their own. They need to leverage the power and diversity of the ecosystem.” —Marc Geall, SAP
5. “Top quartile of gender diverse companies outperform their peers by 15%.” —Ursula Morgenstern, Atos
6. “It’s up to you to decide. Do you want universal soldiers or a team of specialists?” —Andrei Yurkevich, Altoros
7. “If you look at the technology industry in comparison to other industries, our biggest problem is attracting women. The average for entry level roles across all industries is 45%, we attract 37%.” —Ursula Morgenstern, Atos
8. “Top quartile of ethnic diverse companies are outperforming their peers by 35%.” —Ursula Morgenstern, Atos
9. “The unconscious bias is preventing us from spotting when inequality occurs.” —Ursula Morgenstern, Atos
10. “True cloud companies have about 30% women in their business.” —Ursula Morgenstern, Atos

Ursula Morgenstern, Atos

Community and collaboration

1. “We see a human community that is pragmatic, diverse, and respectful.” —Sam Ramji, Cloud Foundry Foundation
2. “The more people we can support, the greater the platform.” —Sam Ramji, Cloud Foundry Foundation
3. “People care less about out-groups.” —Daniel Jones, EngineerBetter
4. “We can’t do this on our own. Working with companies like Pivotal and EngineerBetter, we’ve been able to show our colleagues that through common sense and practical use of simple tooling we can challenge everything.” —Emma Hammond, Fidelity International
5. “We see a world of cloud computing that is ubiquitous and flexible, portable and interoperable, and vibrant and growing.” —Sam Ramji, Cloud Foundry Foundation
6. “The more people we can include, the greater the network effects.” —Sam Ramji, Cloud Foundry Foundation
7. “As a community, we are open and inclusive.” —Sam Ramji, Cloud Foundry Foundation
8. “We are very happy to be part of the open source communities.” —Dr. Roy Sauer, Volkswagen
9. “This ecosystem only works if we have a community.” —John Roese, EMC Corporation
10. “One of the things we try to make an emphasis on in the Cloud Foundry community is human centricity and empathy.” —Sam Ramji, Cloud Foundry Foundation

Sam Ramji (Cloud Foundry Foundation) and John Roese (EMC Corporation)

Open source strategy

1. “We introduced Open because it made things better.” —Liam Maxwell, UK Government
2. “Open source collaboration works.” —Simon Moser, IBM
3. “We used Open to unlock change and the dynamic force behind that is competition.” —Liam Maxwell, UK Government
4. “We open sourced our first service broker for Google Cloud Services. A lot of the things we’ve been using internally are now available to you as a Cloud Foundry user through the servier broker.” —Eric Johnson, Google
5. “We used Open as the main tool of disruption. It’s fundamental to everything we’ve done.” —Liam Maxwell, UK Government
6. “If you’re going to use a common resource, make sure you have Open standard.” —Liam Maxwell, UK Government
7. “We agreed a code of practice and design principles. We committed to open document formats. We cut out a lot of friction and made technology governance much simpler.” —Liam Maxwell, UK Government
8. “If you have true competition in the market, it drives the adoption of open source.” —Liam Maxwell, UK Government
9. “Cloud Foundry isn’t fast enough to provision containers within a fraction of a second. OpenWhisk can help address that.” —Andrei Yurkevich, Altoros
10. “We’re actually looking much more into cooperation and collaboration. We have open sourced all our code.” —Liam Maxwell, UK Government

Simon Moser and Dr. Max, IBM

BOSH 2.0 and multi-cloud

1. “BOSH is the platform underneath platforms.” —Sam Ramji, Cloud Foundry Foundation
2. “A killer combo: AWS + MicroBOSH + Cloud Foundry.” —Juan Pablo Genovese, Altoros
3. “Like other other world leaders, we want to create the same thing—we want to build a government that’s based on the Internet.” —Liam Maxwell, UK Government
4. “We have defined a strategy—Cloud First—which means that each and every new application has to be designed as a cloud-native application.” —Dr. Roy Sauer, Volkswagen
5. “Companies rely solely on BOSH to solve all their problems. They don’t do proper testing.” —Andrei Yurkevich, Altoros
6. “There is no single architecture for IoT. It is all about piecing things together.” —Scott Taggart, QiO
7. “The main goal of BOSH 2.0 is to make the operator’s experience as better as possible.” —Alexander Lomov, Altoros
8. “BOSH is not a technology that covers you from everything.” —Andrei Yurkevich, Altoros
9. “BOSH is the Cloud Foundry multi-cloud story.” —Chip Childers, Cloud Foundry Foundation
10. “Because of the speed with which BOSH is developed, I like to compare BOSH with a good book. You can read the same code now and a month later and every time you’ll find something new and clever there and you can learn from it a lot.” —Alexander Lomov, Altoros

Andrei Yurkevich, Altoros

Cloud Foundry internals

1. “Any cycle that a software developer is spending doing something that isn’t about the creation of something useful is something we need to automate in the platform.” —John Roese, EMC Corporation
2. “Cloud Foundry’s self-service makes it economical for us to work on features instead of aspects which allows us to exploit the present bias rather than fall victim to it.” —Daniel Jones, EngineerBetter
3. “Cloud Foundry’s control over environments and automation and the simplicity of cf push enables continuous delivery which can make our engineers feel more rewarded and reduce the amount of technical debt that they incur.” —Daniel Jones, EngineerBetter
4. “As of v242 of Cloud Foundry release, Volume Services are included. You can work with any company who wants to create a Volume Services service broker and have persistence in your applications.” —Chip Childers, Cloud Foundry Foundation
5. “There are business processes and development methodologies unlike software but they’re running on the wetware that’s in our heads.” —Daniel Jones, EngineerBetter
6. “Without DevOps, things get thrown over the wall between teams including blame.” —Matt Jeffries, Pivotal
7. “The idea of Route Services is that in the data path from the browser or the end-device, we come into the network and Cloud Foundry knows how to route you to the various applications.” —Chip Childers, Cloud Foundry Foundation
8. “The biggest challenge for us as a team that run the platform is not just the platform itself but to encourage our developers to do the right thing—to write good quality cloud applications that make the most of what the platform offers.” —Emma Hammond, Fidelity International
9. “When you’re buying Cloud Foundry from someone, I hope you’re getting Diego and if you aren’t, ask for it.” —Chip Childers, Cloud Foundry Foundation
10. “Small changes done frequently and safely at low cost is where all the action is.” —Emma Hammond, Fidelity International

Chip Childers, Cloud Foundry Foundation

Tips

1. “Don’t try to make everything fit it. Sometimes applications have unique requirements.” —Orest Onuszko, Rakuten
2. “If you want to outperform your peers, simply get yourself a diverse workforce.” —Ursula Morgenstern, Atos
3. “Assuming that your system is going to work flawlessly all the time without any errors is a mistake at any level.” —Orest Onuszko, Rakuten
4. “As engineers, we have to be prepared to be disrupted.” —Emma Hammond, Fidelity International
5. “Once you actually drive down the cycle time and are able to deploy applications many times a week, then you can learn faster what you customers want and you can move faster.” —Omri Gazitt, HPE
6. “You need to monitor, automate, analyze, and repeat because the operational things are the most critical part.” —Simon Moser, IBM
7. “You have to be prepared for the ‘weirdness’.” —Simon Moser, IBM
8. “Many small deployments are much better than having one big deployment.” —Simon Moser, IBM
9. “Cloud Foundry engineers need to have soft skills.” —Andrei Yurkevich, Altoros
10. “Original software development is absolutely critical to every enterprise in the world.” —John Roese, EMC Corporation

Omri Gazitt, HPE

Funny and profound

1. “Until now, I only knew Diego as a Brazilian football star.” —Dr. Roy Sauer, Volkswagen
2. “I’m a member of a tax collection and public service delivery startup. We’re in our 400th round of funding.” —Liam Maxwell, UK Government
3. “We set up garages where they were close enough to send people there but far enough so that the line manager cannot influence the daily work of the team member.” —Dr. Andreas Nolte, Allianz
4. “Two years ago push code only, never talk about containers—it’s like Fight Club.” —Sam Ramji, Cloud Foundry Foundation
5. “Forking is a very bad idea.” —Orest Onuszko, Rakuten
6. “One has a moral responsibility to change unfit processes.” —Daniel Jones, EngineerBetter
7. “What failures do you think you’ll handle with two deployments? Thermonuclear war?” —Colin Humphreys, Pivotal
8. “The reality of disbelieving is that change is expensive.” —Emma Hammond, Fidelity International
9. “It’s okay to get things wrong and it’s okay to change our minds. If we’re strong enough to admit that we got it wrong, we can learn and adapt. If we accept that it’s okay to change our minds, we end up delivering something quicker as we made a decision based on the information at that time.” —Emma Hammond, Fidelity International
10. “Some of us spend more time at work than with our families, so we really ought to make it count. If you’re not having fun, you’re probably in the wrong job.” —Emma Hammond, Fidelity International

Emma Hammond, Fidelity International

As the months pass, Cloud Foundry continues to build up steam. EMC’s John Roese placed its widespread adoption second only to Linux in the open source world and it has only been five years since its inception. Given the rate of growth, 2017 should be an exciting year for Cloud Foundry.

Other CF Summit recaps:

• Cloud Foundry Summit Europe 2016 Begins with Special Interest Groups
• Community and Ecosystem at Cloud Foundry Summit Europe (Day 1)
• Cloud Foundry Summit Europe Focuses on Multi-Cloud and IoT (Day 2)
• Developing a Perfect Cloud Foundry Engineer (session notes)