Pivotal Podcasts

Knate-ive by Pivotal Software

How's your year go? Pretty good? Well, regardless, it's almost over, so that means it's time for some predictions! Before Richard and Coté go over some hopes and dreams for 2019, they review some 2018 predictions. Some didn't work out at all, some were exactly correct, but, as always, most of them were in the ballpark. Also, the mystery of why we have a flat-head screw driver when the phillips is so clearly superior.

In this week's episode of Pivotal Conversations, Dormain and Jeff chat with Greg Meyer, a distinguished engineer at Cerner, a maker of healthcare software. Greg talks about a new specification he helped develop to achieve interoperability and easier data movement between healthcare systems. He also explains how the company is modernizing its development practices to increase the pace of innovation.

Flexible software usually means well modularized software. Instead of one big ball of code, you want to create components that work together. Dividing up your application into those components has always been a bugbear of design and it's what domain-driven design (DDD) is trying to solve. In this episode, Coté talks with Jakub Pilimon to figure out what DDD is, plus how event storming is used to find domains. Also, outside of Poland, is it "evangelist" or "advocate"?

If someone tells you they have the secret to a fast, seamless digital transformation for your enterprise, don't believe them, says Jeff Dickey. The reality, says Dickey, Chief Innovation Officer at Redapt, is that there is no Easy Button, as much as we wish there were. So should enterprises think about transitioning from legacy infrastructure and newer, modern platforms? Jeff shares his wisdom in this week's episode of Pivotal Conversations.

There's few tasks harder than refactoring a large organization, but that's exactly what we're asking management to do in all this digital transformation hoopla. Existing organizations are tremendously conflicted and tied up in competing incentives already, and then when you try to shift to a product team driven approach, things go even more haywire. Here, Richard & Coté talk with Pivotal's Carl Coryell-Martin who's been pulling apart that bureaucratic bowl of spaghetti for many years now.

In this week's episode of Pivotal Insights, Jeff and Dormain speak with Stephane El Mabrouk from Thales. Stephane helped the company build what it calls its Digital Factory, an environment for Thales engineers and others to learn modern software development. It's all part of Thales' drive to better serve its customers with software.

From all the stories at SpringOne Platform you get the feeling that every organization out there is doing a real bang-up job with improving their software capabilities. Of course, it's not actually everyone out there, but each year we hear about more enterprises and government agencies that are using their own, custom written software to improve their business and operations. In this episode, Richard and Coté go over some of their highlights from SpringOne Platform 2018, cover some of the news (PCF 2.3 and PKS 1.2), and a few other news items in the infrastructure and cloud world.

What a week! SpringOne Platform 2018, which took place September 24 to 28, has come and gone. In this episode of Pivotal Insights, Jeff and Dormain share their highlights from the event and lessons learned from customers, partners and other Pivots.

Perhaps the phrase "business transformation" is what we should say instead of "digital transformation." If the goal of IT transformation is to switch over your organization from an operations, service provider to a product-centric approach, it fits better. While at SpringOne Platform 2018, I talked with West's Thomas Squeo about how West has been making this shift from an IT-as-operators and project gnomes to end-to-end product people. We also discuss the other side of the transformation, how the product people and the executive team learn about technologies like containers and microservices and start thinking about how those innovations let them change the core business. Thomas also gives advice on the career path to becoming a CTO: build up a diverse career path instead of sticking in just one lane.

It's easy to understand what kind of IT culture you need if you're going to improve how you do software, but how do you actually change such a squishy thing? While at SpringOne Platform 2018, I talked with Kyle Campose about how he's done it. We also talk about the phrase "digital transformation" and some sandwich ontology.

Developers are excited about serverless computing, as it removes the need to manage - you guessed it - servers! But that raises a tricky problem: how do you monitor your serverless code? In this episode of Pivotal Insights, Jeff and Dormain chat with Adam Johnson, Co-Founder and CEO of IOpipe, about the challenge of and tactics for monitoring event-driven and serverless architectures.

You often hear about the "product manager," but rarely about what they actually do day-to-day. This episode we talk with Pivotal's Jonathan Sirlin about product management using several examples of applications and organizations he's worked with. He talks in-depth about one application he and team worked on, covering the process they used to find, prioritize, and then create features and software.

"More and more, we see that more traditional, enterprise-y use cases start to fall into these categories," Mark Fisher, Pivotal. Few topics are driving more interest than "serverless." Pivotal has been working on a function framework called Project Riff for awhile. At its core, it's an event driven model for building applications. Recently, the team announced that riff works on knative. We discuss riff, knative, and serverless in general. There's also a little bit of news this week, and some herring history.

"As designers, we think about the why and understanding the human experience, empathizing, and observing, and being curious, and trying to understand what are those important touch-points between a person and technology." We finally talk about design in this episode with Salomé Mortazavi. She goes in-depth into what design is for software, how it operates in a very user centric way, what it's like to pair in designing, tools Pivotal design people use, and modeling how to track the success and quality of design. Also, we talk about umbrella and rain-jacket style in Seattle. No one uses umbrellas, and you just need one rain-jacket, unless you want to match with your shoes. Full show notes: https://content.pivotal.io/podcasts

SpringOne platform is coming up quick - next month! - so Richard and Coté do their annual favorite talks review. There's talk on agile, pipelines, Pivotal Cloud Foundry, Spring, case studies, and so many more they don't have time to discuss. In recent news, Knative was recently announced which is wangling to be "the building blocks for running serverless workloads on kubernetes," as Google's DeWitt Clinton put it. Richard and Coté discuss knative, Istio, and how "serverless" seems to now mean just any old type of programming, but with containers and all that cloud native stuff. They also discuss container registries. Also, European toilet paper and beds.

There's a lot of new features in Pivotal Cloud Foundry 2.2 from kubernetes updates to security. This week, we talk with Jared Ruckle about those features, plus a new white paper on the Open Service Broker API. As always, we also talk about recent infrastructure software news and manage to throw in some house packing tips as well.

We talk databases in this episode. First, with the history of databases and why the relational database become king, for awhile at least, and then about how databases evolved, ending up talking about Greenplum. Greenplum is the world’s first fully-featured, multi-cloud, massively parallel processing (MPP) data platform based on the open source. With Ivan Novick, we go over all that and cover some use cases. Also, as always, some recent infrastructure software news.

Every successful organization is faced with a daunting task: modernizing your legacy applications and services. The benefits of cloud native are alluring, to be sure, but modernizing your existing applications can seem impossible. Sarah Ehmann & Rohit Kelapure go over Pivotal's App Transformation methodology to get you over that hump. Full show notes: http://pivotal.io/podcast

In this episode, among other topics, Richard and Coté cover some recent kubernetes news, cloud native .Net, and tips for making business travel more enjoyable.