Tag: pivotal

#newjob

Andy Piper31 Comments

In late 2011, I was contacted by a very charming, smart and persuasive French gentleman who spoke of clouds, platform-as-a-service, and polyglot programming. It took him and his team a couple of months to get me thinking seriously about a career change, after 10 great years at IBM. I’d spent that period with “Big Blue” coding in Java and C, and primarily focused on enterprise application servers, message queueing, and integration – and yet the lure of how easy vmc push[1] made it for me to deploy and scale an app was astounding! Should I make the transition to a crazy new world? Over Christmas that year, I decided it would be a good thing to get in on this hot new technology and join VMware as Developer Advocate on the Cloud Foundry team. I joined the team early in 2012.

The Cloud Foundry adventure has been amazing. The day after I joined the team, the project celebrated its first anniversary, and we announced the BOSH continuous deployment tool; I spent much of that first year with the team on a whirlwind of events and speaking engagements, growing the community. The Developer Relations team that Patrick Chanezon and Adam Fitzgerald put together was super talented, and it was brilliant to be part of that group. Peter, Chris, Josh, Monica, Raja, Rajdeep, Alvaro, Eric, Frank, Tamao, Danny, Chloe, D, Giorgio, friends in that extended team… it was an honour.

A year after I joined, VMware spun out Cloud Foundry, SpringSource and other technologies into a new company, Pivotal – headed up by Paul Maritz. I’ve been privileged to work under him, Rob Mee at Pivotal Labs, and most closely, my good friend James Watters on the Cloud Foundry team. I’ve seen the opening of our new London offices on Old Street, welcomed our partners and customers into that unique collaborative and pairing environment, and observed an explosion of activity and innovation in this space. We launched an amazing product. James Bayer heads up a remarkable group of technologists working full-time on Cloud Foundry, and it has been a pleasure to get to know him and his team. Most recently, I’ve loved every minute working with Cornelia, Ferdy, Matt, Sabha and Scott (aka the Platform Engineering team), another talented group of individuals from whom I’ve learned much.

Over the course of the last two years I’ve seen the Platform-as-a-Service space grow, establish itself, and develop – most recently resulting in my recent talk at bcs Oxfordshire:

Last week, we announced the forthcoming Cloud Foundry Foundation – and one could argue that as a community and Open Source kinda guy, this was the direction I’ve helped to move things in the past two years, although I can claim no credit at all for the Foundation announcement itself. I’ve certainly enjoyed hosting occasional London Cloud Foundry Community meetups and drinks events (note, next London PaaS User Group event has 2 CF talks!), and I’ve made some great friends locally and internationally through the ongoing growth of the project. I’m proud of the Platform event we put on last year, I think the upcoming Cloud Foundry Summit will be just as exciting, and I’m happy to have been a part of establishing and growing the CF community here in Europe.

Cloud Foundry is THE de facto Open Source PaaS standard, the ecosystem is strong and innovative, and that has been achieved in a transparent and collaborative way, respectful to the community, in a good-natured way in the face of competition. Rest assured that I’ll continue to watch the project and use PaaSes which implement it (I upgraded to a paid Pivotal Web Services account just this past week, I tried BlueMix, and I’m an ongoing fan of the Anynines team).

There are many missing shout-outs here… you folks know who you are, and should also know that I’ve deeply enjoyed learning from you and working with you. Thank you, Pivotal team! I do not intend to be a stranger to the Bay Area! In my opinion, Pivotal is positioned brilliantly in offering an end-to-end mobile, agile development, cloud platform and big data story for the enterprise. I look forward to continuing the conversations around that in the next couple of weeks.

[…]

What happens after “the next couple of weeks”? Well, this is as good time as any (!) to close that chapter, difficult though it is to leave behind a team I’ve loved working with, on a product and project that is undoubtedly going to continue to be fantastically successful this year and beyond. So, it is time to announce my next steps, which may or may not be clear from the title of this post… 🙂

Joining Twitter!

I joined Twitter as a user on Feb 21 2007. On the same day, seven years later, I accepted a job offer to go and work with the Twitter team as a Developer Advocate, based in London.

If you’ve been a long-term follower of mine either here on this blog, or on Twitter, or elsewhere, you’ll know that Twitter is one of my favourite tools online. It has been transformational in my life and career, and it changed many of my interactions. True story: between leaving IBM and joining VMware I presented at Digital Bristol about social technologies, and I was asked, which one I would miss the most if it went away tomorrow; the answer was simple: Twitter. As an Open Source guy, too, I’ve always been impressed with Twitter’s contributions to the broader community.

I couldn’t be more #excited to get started with the Twitter Developer Relations team in April!

Follow me on Twitter – @andypiper – to learn more about my next adventure…

[1] vmc is dead, long live cf!

Pivotal CF – the enterprise platform for software development

Andy Piper2 Comments

My boss and mentor, James Watters, just blogged about the launch of what we’ve been working on since before Pivotal was formed earlier this year – Pivotal One, powered by Pivotal CF (based on Cloud Foundry).

As I wrote back in April…

Pivotal is bringing together a number of key technology assets – our Open Source cloud platform (Cloud Foundry), agile development frameworks like Spring, Groovy and Grails, a messaging fabric (RabbitMQ), and big, fast data assets like Pivotal HD.

What we’re announcing today delivers on that promise and our vision – the consumer-grade enterprise, enabling organisations to create new applications with unprecedented speed. The cloud – infrastructure clouds, IaaS like Amazon EC2, VMware vSphere, OpenStack, CloudStack, etc – can be thought of as the new hardware. It’s like buying a beige server box back in the 90s – the IaaS layer gives you a bunch of CPU, network, and storage resources, and for your application to use them, you need a layer in between – an operating system, if you like. We’ve spoken of our ambition for Cloud Foundry as “the Linux of the Cloud”, and it already runs on all of those infrastructures I’ve listed above – in the future, hopefully more.

Why is that important? Why should developers care about this Platform (PaaS) layer? A development team shouldn’t have to go through an 18 month delivery cycle to deliver an app! We’re putting an end to the whole cycle of calling up the infrastructure team, having new servers commissioned, operating systems installed, databases configured etc etc just to get an application deployed and running. When you first push an application to Cloud Foundry, and can then bind data services and scale out with simple individual commands, it really is a liberating experience compared to what traditionally has been required to get your application running. We’re making it quicker and easier to get going – a friction-free, turnkey experience. You should just be able to write your code and make something amazing.

We’re also delivering choice – of runtimes and languages, data services, and also importantly, a choice of “virtual hardware”. When Comic Relief ran in the UK this year, in order to avoid any risk of hardware failure (we all know there’s a risk that Amazon might go down), the applications were deployed on Cloud Foundry running on both Amazon EC2 with geographical redundancy, and on VMware vSphere – no lock-in to any cloud provider, and the developers didn’t have to learn all of the differences of operating different infrastructures, they just pushed their code. We’re happy to know that it was a very successful year for the Comic Relief charity, and that Cloud Foundry helped.

Pivotal One also includes some amazing data technologies – Pivotal HD (a simple to manage Hadoop distribution) and Pivotal AX (analytics for the enterprise). We recognise that as well as building applications, you need to store and analyse the data, so rather than just shipping a Cloud Foundry product, we roll up both the elastic scalable runtime, cutting-edge technologies like Spring.io, and and our big data offerings. That’s different from many of the others in the same market. We’ve been running our own hosted cloud, now available at run.pivotal.io, on AWS for over a year now, so we’ve learned a lot about running systems at scale and Pivotal One can do just that.

Above all, I wanted to say just how excited I am to be part of this amazing team. It is an honour to work with some incredibly talented engineers and leaders. I’m also personally excited that our commercial and our open source ecosystems continue to grow, including large organisations like IBM, SAP, Piston … it’s a long list. We took out an ad in the Wall Street Journal to thank them. I also want to thank our community of individual contributors (the Colins, Matts, Davids, Dr Nics, Yudais… etc etc!) many of whom, coincidentally for me, are in the UK – check out the very cool Github community where some of their projects are shared.

I’m convinced that this Platform is the way forward. It’s going to be an even more exciting year ahead.

A small selection of other coverage, plenty more to read around the web:

Busy times, but let’s talk Cloud Foundry!

Andy PiperLeave a comment

Users of the existing beta Cloud Foundry hosted service cloudfoundry.com were sent emails this week explaining that we are almost ready to launch version 2 of the service. If you’re a current user, or if you have signed up in the past, dig through your inbox filters for the email (mine ended up under the “Promotions” label thanks to Gmail’s auto-filing magic).

Cloud Foundry v2, sometimes known as “next-gen” or ng, is a big set of updates. I wrote about some of them in my last blog post, and also noted there that we are going to run the new version on AWS.

Some of the things worth getting excited about are:

  • custom domains (the number one thing I’ve been asked for after every talk!)
  • buildpacks – the ability to use “any” language, framework or runtime that has a buildpack, not just Java, Ruby, or node.js (Matt and Brian seem to be competing to find interesting ones!). By the way, you should totally be trying your Spring and Groovy apps on v2! 🙂
  • organisations and spaces – the ability to share apps with a team and collaborate
  • a web management console for your apps
  • a Marketplace, which we will be expanding over time, allowing you to bind third-party services in to your applications.

These are all big changes, and there are many more under the hood (Warden, a new staging process, a new router… it’s a very long list).

My colleague Nima posted a nice slide deck giving a more technical overview of some of the internal changes:

In addition, our demo ninja Dekel has shared a great video of some of the things you can expect from version 2:

Over the past 24 hours or so I’ve been doing my best to respond to questions on Twitter and elsewhere. The existing v1 version will go away on June 30th, so if you are using it now you’ll want to look at migrating apps in the next couple of weeks, and we’ll share more on that soon. The new version will have pricing attached, with a free trial period too. Of course, the code is always available on Github and you’re free to spin up your own CF instance running on AWS, OpenStack or vSphere.

I know folks will have many more questions about the specifics over the next week or so, and we will be looking out for them.

Supercharging the community

As we have grown closer to v2 release, there has been ever-increasing activity in the vcap-dev mailing list and around the community. We’ve had more and more code contributions (so much so that I recently wrote a blog post about how you can contribute to the CF core projects). Projects like the cf-vagrant-installer and cf-nise-installer are helping people get local environments running very quickly. Our friends from PistonCloud released their turtles project. Best of all, the super Dr Nic Williams recently set up a cloudfoundry-community organisation on Github to act as an umbrella for many of these community contributions (info on how to join is here).

Let’s talk! (in London)

Over the past year or so I’ve spent a lot of time out in the developer community in London, and it has become apparent that a lot of folks are interested, already contributing to the community, or in some cases, already running their own CF instances in production 🙂

So, I thought it would be a good idea to do some bridge building and bring folks together to get to know one another. A brief unscientific Twitter poll suggested that other people liked the idea, so we’ve stuck a stake in the ground (evening of July 3rd) and I set up an Eventbrite page for a meet up. If you’d like to chat with people about Cloud Foundry over a drink, do sign up and come along. I’ll sort out a venue in the next couple of weeks, but I imagine it will be “around Shoreditch” or possibly over towards Waterloo, for purely selfish reasons! Totally informal, this is just a community meet up, so I’m not planning to do slides and talks and stuff – just come and share ideas or ask questions!

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Cloud Foundry has gone Pivotal – so what’s new?

Andy Piper3 Comments

A few weeks ago I was privileged to be at the launch of Pivotal – a new organisation formed by VMware, EMC, and with investment from GE. You can read all about our new company at GoPivotal.com.

I am Pivotal
I am Pivotal

What does that mean for me, and for my role on the Cloud Foundry team? What is happening with Cloud Foundry right now? What about the Cloud Foundry community?

Well, as my über-boss James Watters recently wrote – we are a central part of the Pivotal business.

Our mission is to become the most popular platform for new applications and the services used to build them across public and private clouds.

That’s a pretty compelling mission statement, and I’d personally even add that we want to be the “best” platform, as much as “most popular”. One of the main reasons I wanted to spend a couple of weeks at the Pivotal office in San Francisco was really to immerse myself in the team and in the culture of Pivotal Labs, as well as to be at the launch event, and to get a strong handle on what is happening with Cloud Foundry, version 2…

Wait, what? Version 2?

In the middle of last year, the Cloud Foundry team started some major work to improve many of the features offered by the platform. Back then, it was written about on the Cloud Foundry blog. We initially started to refer to “ng” components like the Cloud Controller (“cc-ng”), and that’s what we now mean when we refer to “v2”. At the start of the year we published a roadmap which laid out a lot more detail in terms of what is coming. There’s some really great stuff in there – many bugs squashed; a new, high performance router; support for developers to collaborate on apps, via concepts of organisations and spaces; new containerisation via Warden; custom domains (yes, finally!); and most importantly, support for buildpacks. Buildpacks will bring a major change to our platform, replacing the former concepts of runtimes and frameworks (say, Java with Spring) with the ability to drop in whatever runtime or container you may choose, instantly making the platform more customisable. We’re pleased that the folks over at Heroku have allowed us to inherit the buildpack concept and having played with the new platform, I believe this gives us a really cool and solid way to support apps.

Deploying #cloudfoundry v2 on Amazon
Deploying Cloud Foundry v2 on Amazon

While I was in San Francisco, I used BOSH to deploy my own new Cloud Foundry v2 instance to Amazon EC2 (and also attended the AWS Summit, which was a bonus!). Right now the team is working on migrating our  hosted cloudfoundry.com platform to EC2, and when we officially boot up v2 for the public, it will be running right there. This is not new news – both James, and our CEO Paul Maritz, have repeatedly spoken about AWS.  The point of Cloud Foundry has always been that it is a platform that is Infrastructure-as-a-Service agnostic, even when it was started by VMware, and I’m seeing increasing interest from folks want to run it on OpenStack, AWS, and other infrastructures as well as vSphere (by the way, did you read about how Comic Relief 2013 ran on Cloud Foundry on vSphere and AWS? so cool!). There is no lock-in here – write once, deploy to cloudfoundry.com, to a partner running a compatible Cloud Foundry-based instance, or to your own private cloud on your on infrastructure, as you wish. The Open Source nature of the project is exactly why I jumped on board with the team a little over a year ago.

Talking of the update to cloudfoundry.com: it is also worth mentioning that when the beta period comes to a close we will have pricing plans, a nice web console for user, organisation and application management, and the start of a marketplace for partners to plug-in their own services for developers. I can’t give more details in this post, watch the official channels for news!

I felt very strongly that I wanted to write about version 2. It is a very big step in evolving the Cloud Foundry architecture, and I believe that it is important for the broader  community to understand that it is a significant change. If you are running an app on cloudfoundry.com today, we’ll shortly contact you with information about migration to the new platform, as some changes will be needed to adapt to the fact that runtimes and frameworks are now buildpacks, there will be some changes to the way services work, and you will need our new ‘cf’ gem to deploy to the new service. We have already “paused” new signups on the current platform. If you look at the new documentation, you will find that it now focuses on version 2 – we apologise for any confusion during the transition process.

We’ve been talking with ecosystem partners about version 2 as well. For instance, our friends at Tier 3 recently blogged about Iron Foundry plans, and I had the pleasure of meeting with Stackato folks in person in San Francisco recently. If you are working with your own Cloud Foundry instance privately (we know that many organisations are!) I strongly urge you to talk to us via the vcap-dev mailing list to learn how you can start to take advantage of what the new platform brings.

What else does Pivotal mean for Cloud Foundry? Well – we are more open than ever, and keen to work with the community on pull requests to add features via Github. I’ve just written a  post for the Cloud Foundry blog about how to participate in the Open Source project. In fact, I’ll be talking more about this at the Cloud East conference in Cambridge next Friday May 24. We’re always happy to talk more about how to collaborate.

These are exciting times!

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Go Pivotal!

Andy Piper3 Comments

I’m in San Francisco today for the launch of a new company – Pivotal.

IMG_0116.jpg

Pivotal is bringing together a number of key technology assets – our Open Source cloud platform (Cloud Foundry), agile development frameworks like Spring, Groovy and Grails, a messaging fabric (RabbitMQ), and big, fast data assets like PivotalHD.

I’ll be live tweeting from the event, where Paul Maritz our CEO will be introducing the company and vision. You can also follow the @gopivotal Twitter ID, and check out the new website.